"the more posts the students wrote, the better the grade was"

Well, sort of. What I've told students is that completing the bare minimum, going through the motions of completing the assignments--writing to the word count each time, not striving to write *good* posts (I think I'll stay away from defining "good," other than saying that it ends up being a combination of my impression of their effort and the quality of the writing), posting only the minimum number of times--would guarantee them a C. To make a better grade, they need to do more.

"I consider my using weblogs in class this summer to be, for the most part, a failure. I'm glad I tried it, but my students didn't enjoy blogging."

Perhaps it would be easier to offer suggestions if you would explain what your criteria for success would be? What were your expectations that were not met?

I used weblogs in my Intro to Writing class last year and am going to repeat the experience this fall. The class is pass/ no pass, making "grade" increments a nonissue, which I like. I measured blog success in the following ways:
Individually (short term): 2-3 posts a week, half page minimum
Individually (long term)]: consistency in use

Whole class: spontaneous blogging syndrome when at a loss for what to do (beginning, end of class, stuck for a topic, and so on). Longer term, number of students who make the blog their own by continuing it beyond the semester.

I see the habit of writing as the goal rather than a specific level of academic sophistication. Many of the more successful ( read as successful consistently used and with increasing reflectivity) blogs act as first-year student chronicles, connecting the personal with the academic. I know others will have different goals, especially depending on the class taught, but I find these small things good ways to assess progress in an ungraded (no points! yea!) environment.

It's not that my expectations weren't met; the posts were okay, and they used their blogs as research tools, blogging about the topics they had selected. The reason I consider it a failure is the attitude toward blogging. They saw no value in it whatsoever, and my best efforts to get them excited about blogging failed. They even blogged about how much they hated blogging. :-) / :-( It was definitely the thing you described, Charlie--"completing the bare minimum, going through the motions of completing the assignments."

CultureCat

Hi Clancy!




Try it again in the fall! I don't know how your summer term runs, but ours was six weeks. I didn't even push my students this summer to do extra blogging. A few of them did -- but it was mostly a comment here and there responding to someone else's clever in-class writing blog (mine start class each day with an in-class writing blog) or posting a comment thanking someone for the feedback on a draft...




Regarding your worry about quantity rather than quality: I think I can speak for both Charlie and I when I say we didn't run into that problem. Here are my speculations about why:

• We had assignments scattered throughout the semester where our students had to go read each other's blogsites and post blogs to their own blogsites about what they read. Because they knew they had a relatively large audience of classmates (not to mention the WWW), they really didn't post crap. This was especially true when they started to see their names/blogsites referenced on other people's blogsites. They wanted other people to blog about them, so they didn't just post something to get something up there. (This assignment about visiting their classmates' blogsites was Charlie's brainchild, by the way. But I used it again this summer and lots of my students commented that knowing everyone in class was reading their blogsites at any given time made them want to write more engaging stuff.
• At the midterm last year when I gave lots of students B's instead of A's because they were doing only the required blogging, I pointed the B students to the A students' blogsites and said something to the effect of, "These are the kinds of blogging that will get you the A you want..." Some of the A bloggers wrote about what was going on in their lives (in a way that wasn't "I had two pieces of toast for breakfast this morning, blah, blah, blah) and some surfed the Net for articles and stuff relevant to class to blog about. And some found stuff on the Net that they thought was relevant to our class community simply because is was stuff lots of people were interested in, anyway. The examples I can think of were Michael Jordan's last...er...appearance in the all star game (I think) and who got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. All of this is to say that they sort of policed themselves not to just blog for the sake of blogging.
• While our students were learning to blog, they visited plenty of blogsites... Some were more engaging than others and we had a big discussion about boring blogsites where people just wrote stuff for the sake of writing -- but it really wasn't all that interesting. So I think our students had a pretty good sense of "what I don't want my blogsite to look like."

As for assessment... This summer, lots of the "write a blog" assignments I gave were responding to various readings and drafts. I pushed for blogs that created conversations (since they often had to respond to each other's blog posts), blogs that brought new ideas to bear on the stuff they were reading, blogs that showed how the students could use what they read in their own writing... I stressed that we were all reading the same stuff and I didn't want any summary. And when I went to assess, that's the kind of thing I was looking for. My students caught onto making the teaser thing work to their advantage and tried to make catchy teasers for their blogs -- so this is also something that contributed to my assessment. Too -- in class my students referenced the blogs in class that they really liked and mentioned that they liked them because the blogs had voice and personality as well as fulfilled the assignment. So that's something else I was looking for -- how well students developed their voices as the term moved along. This summer, too, I had a couple of days where we read through all the blogs written for that day in class and nominated the best two and talked about why they were good ones...and those students got prizes (M&M's). That was also an incentive for my students to write good blogs. I'm totally rambling. Hopefully some of this is helping.




Last spring...assessment-wise...I looked for a lot of the same things I just mentioned. Too -- creating hyperlinks within blogs was something Charlie and I stressed (I didn't push that this summer but a couple of my students picked up on it anyway). So something else I looked for was effective use of the hyperlink within their text...




Charlie and I both posts weblogs surveys for our students this summer. You're welcome to look at my students' responses. I don't know of that'll help you or not...




T

you can read the survey responses from my class as well if you like.

Some thoughts:

• It's often quite difficult to get students excited about doing any research writing; a different course, a different context, could make a difference.
• I remember now that your class was a major requirement; you may have a better reaction from first year students for many reasons
• K-logging is only one form of blogging. It seems that my students become more invested in personal blogging where they can write about whatever they want. Send them to weblogs.com as part of an introduction to blogging and have them read through some sites and comment about them. Give them opportunities/make a course requirement which includes low risk assignments where students have a good degree of latitude for posting what they want. Perhaps restrict it to the general topic of the course, but tell them it's a weekly post(s) where they should throw out their ideas.
• Comment boards attached to blog posts do a lot for building community interaction, and thus, I think, end up persuading students that blogging is a fun way to interact online. You might try seeing if Elijah will install a Drupal site on one of your other domains.
• I think it's working well for Terra and I (at least we think so) because the course is heavily invested in blogging as a way of sharing writing and the means to meaning making. It's such a major part of the course that the course would not be the same at all without it. In other words, you may not be able to just "try" it (you used "try" multiple times in your first post). So assessment of blogging may be much less important than how and to what extent students use it in the course.

Thanks a lot for all these comments!

CultureCat