Would it help if you made a statement that students could agree with or disagree with? I have a colleague who's designing a whole course around the premise that Hunter Thopmson was murdered because he uncovered a conspiracy between the Democrats and the Republicans to hijack the government from the people. He's planning to introduce some facts, some wild speculation, and some tinfoil-hat conspiracy. On a more practial note, what's the URL? At the bloging SIG, we suggested that a community of people who teach with blogs could occasionally stop by other teachers's class blogs, and leave comments so that the students know someone's reading.

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I love that structure...And it'd fit well with his persona. However, my theory is that he was depressed that his article in Rolling Stone predicting the presidential election turned out completely wrong. He was supposedly well-known for his "infallible" ability to predict elections, so this one was a real debacle, I'm sure. :-)

The URL is mattbarton.net. The blogs are a little messy (I still have students who just don't understand the concept of creating new posts instead of creating a whole new blog every time). The blogging assignments are interspersed with other assignments here

Overall, I'm happy with the majority of the blogs themselves. I'm just a little unhappy with the lack of cross-blog discussion and intelligent commenting. I like the idea of setting up an agree/disagree situation. Ultimately, I think I need to find ways to bring in more "personal" or first-person stuff in these blogs--that way, students can discuss their experiences as well as important texts.

I'm not sure that I have any answers, and I've had mixed results with my students along the lines you've described. Also, I have much better engagement in my online classes than I do in my classroom classes when we blog, but I'll share what wisdom I have anyway.

One thing I do is have them reply to three blogs as opposed to the one you are calling for, and I tell them that the response should be something that is likely to engage the original writer in a discussion, that it should be a thoughtful response that provokes some more thoughtful response. At this point, you may well be thinking, "easier said than done." And it is. Mu cudgel is that I tell them I am the sole arbiter of whether a response is thoughtful or not, and whether it receives credit or not. If they don't receive credit, I tell them so in my comment, that they are not engaging the original or whatever in a way that is worthy so they better give it another go.

I also get in there and mix it up with them. I model the sort of responses I want. Sometimes I go overboard and get a little long-winded, but I want to give them a model ot shoot for. When I get the lame "nice job!" responses, I get in there and say "What was it you found nice about it? What can you point to that makes this nice?" or somethign along those line.

The final thing I do is tell them that my responses should be considered part of an extended lecture and that there are going to me many important points touched upon in my responses and comments and if they want to get the full grasp of what is going in, as if they were listening to my response in class, they better read, and when appropriate, respond to as many blogs as they can, that the three is a minimum that will get them the credit for the blog, but may not provide them the access to all the information they need to do well in the class. Reading all the responses and comments is the best way to get that coverage, because I'll get into extended conversations with those who are willing, and that's where the information gets covered in the greatest depth.

And like Dennis said, in the SIG we talked about visiting folks' class blogs and making our presence known. I'm going to give that a go this upcoming term and see how it works.

Bradley

www.bleckblog.org

Matt-

You might already do this, but: I get better comments on student work when I provide criteria they can use to evaluate each other's material (clarity, persuasiveness, effectiveness, logic, etc.). Requiring them to provide examples to defend their critique results in meatier responses.

Establishing criteria for the evaluation of the writing may help you direct students away from responses based on *content,* which seems (from your brief post) to be where you are encountering a problem.

Of course, you'll want to establish criteria that elicit the kind of responses you hoped to see . . . my examples above may be useless for your purposes.

Hope this helps.

Duane Bidwell
d.bidwell@tcu.edu
www.brite.tcu.edu/pastoralcare
www.spondizo.net

I used a network of linked blogs in one of my writing classes and, somehow anticipating some of the problems you describe, gave writers no prompts. They were required "to blog" (as we defined it through a genre analysis of blogging as writing technology), but not to blog on any topic or in any way that I required.

My thinking at the time was that no blog entry I'd ever read (this was "way back" in early 2004; mandated blogging is now quite common, of course) was prompted by an authority figure, so why should my student's blog entries be? My reasoning was also informed by the fact that I wanted to thwart and then have students reflect on the typified exchange pattern of

1. teacher prompts students
2. students respond
3. teacher responds
4. students throw away or otherwise disregard said writing

to permeate what I saw as a very different field of engaged public-sphere writing.

As you might imagine, some students took up blogging in this way without much trouble or delay, crafting engaging, themed, habitually updated blogs. Others struggled to compose in this unprompted way with much regularity.

Which leads me to a suggestion: Would it be conceivable for you to offer more options for your student writers? Prompted and unprompted blog entries? Visual and alphabetic "writing" in their entries? Entries that involve "mere" lists of links, not expository prose? And as for your critique of their comments, I'm not at all surprised that their comments are sometimes of the terse "Right on!" variety, as pithy affirmations seem to me quite typical of blogs. They keep us blogging without trying to overtake a text created by another author. On two or three of my different blogs, I think it's safe to say that most of the comments I receive are brief, often humorous.

Hey Matt.

You might want to try adding a couple of student blogger suggestions per assignment for peers to comment on. A Featured Bloggers section of sorts. This eliminates a little of the decision-making work of surfing around for a post to comment on. And, if everyone is commenting on the same 2-3-4 blogs, then you'll generate a more lively discussion. And each assignment, you can change the Featured Bloggers... This also increases the stakes since there's a built-in "everyone in the class is going to be looking at you" factor.

Good luck.

T

There's some great ideas here. I have a "Most Active Blogs" module...Could add a "Most Visited" pretty easily. I may switch things around next time so that I have one assigned blog and forum post and one "free" blog and forum post each time...And perhaps one comment on any blog or the "featured blogger" you mentioned. That's an interesting concept.

I have no problem getting good discussion going in the discussion board. I just wish I could generate a similar enthusiasm with the blogs. I still think the problem is that students see their blog as a less important document that only the teacher will read (and perhaps a random peer), whereas the forums are very active and regularly viewed by the entire class.

I realize that many people have luck with jumping in themselves to stimulate discussion, but not me. I notice that threads where I participate quickly die. I think students are afraid to disagree or engage with me. Topics that I leave alone and merely read seem to do much better. I kinda think of it as a fish tank. If I keep putting my hand in the tank, the fish are going to run away and hide behind the coral and castle.

I definitely agree with Duane about the importance of criteria. I want to be much more explicit in the next go-round about what I expect from bloggers. I still feel compelled to try my best to generate blogging assignments that will be more conducive to the sort of "blogging networks" we see on other blog sites. I'd love, for example, to see little pockets of "team bloggers" form and blog about their favorite topics that show up in the news every week. I could see groups of politcal bloggers, tech bloggers, fashion bloggers, and so on. Could be lots of fun, but hard to setup..

You know, come to think of it...Tikiwiki makes it really easy to setup a shared blog. I'll have to do some more research into this and consider letting students share a blog rather than create their own.

IMHO, it's difficult to stimulate a sense of community in more than one discussion/virtual space within a class site. In this instance, it sounds like the discussion forum is the true community locus, and the blogs are "that thing that they have to do." In conducting workshops, I typically encourage teachers to do one or the other--blogs or discussion forums--but not both. Or at the very least, to themselves see that one is going to be the location of community interaction.

Note this is not a blog vs discussion forum particular problem. I saw the same thing when using discussion forums and listservs. The community would only form around one, not both.

Hi Matt,

In a similar situation, I asked students to blog about what they had learned from reading their peers' blogs each week and requested that they mention at least one blog entry in detail, and additional highlights from other writers' blogs. This seemed to work well, and avoided the agree/disagree paradigm, and generated some buzz in class about "Did you see what x wrote?" and "I never thought of this but y said in his blog..." and so on. Also, it seemed to give more purpose to the whole process - not just to participate in discussion because it was required, but to learn from each other.

I pretty much agree with Charlie on this, that there needs to a primary place for interaction. I had some luck with my online class where the primary communication for the class took place in the blog (using drupal) and they had forums for each of the project groups, as well as for posting and responding to draft essays. It seemed to work pretty well from a teacher's perspective. I didn't ask them what they thought.

In the classes where I have been successful with Blogging I have used group Blogging. All class members are are owners of the Blog and have full privleges on the Blog. I guess it makes it a sort of Wiki:). The students and I confer with each other about where the assignments are going and what we expect of each other in the learning enviornment.

Blogger.com makes it very easy to set up a group blog. Just establish a blog and email everyone in the class an invitation to join. It gets a bit chaotic but that is real life in the soup!

Just my thoughts on the subject.........

Matt, I too go along with Charlie's and others' comments that you might need a primary space -- I use a Yahoo group for my class: there's a folder where they post their blog links, then we can have a big group discussion about particular ones that I want to focus on. I run an unmoderated group with approved membership, and they surprise me by posting comments to the group, adding calendar items, and creating polls on their own.
I'm interested in the expectations of "the blog comment" and how you might be undermining your assignment by asking your students to use a blog comment in a way that they don't yet feel comfortable using one.
Have you had them visit Kairosnews to see how academic blog comments can work?

I can see the wisdom in not throwing a bunch of spaces at students--it's easy to get lost or disoriented. However, I'm using a program called Tikiwiki which features integrated blogs and forums and not asking students to travel to different websites to access different types of writing environments. That said, I still think there is a tendency for them to focus on the forums (where they get near-instant responses) rather than the blogs, which, as was mentioned, seem more like "that thing they have to do" than anything really engaging.

On the other hand, one of our goals here in this writing program is to introduce and give students experience in multiple writing environments. What I'm trying to do is find a way to make the blogging experience as equally fulfilling as the forums. That's where I'm encountering that roadblock, though the suggestions here have certainly given me a plethora of ideas to try next semester!

For those interested, I've created a wiki and asked the students to collaborate on blogging assignments. Sadly, none of them have stepped up to the plate yet...But if anyone here feels motivated, feel free to edit the wiki. :-) Maybe someone can put in a really boring and intensive-sounding assignment so that the students will actually feel compelled to get involved!!

I think many of us are wrestling with the same issues here. I've had some success with the "extended lecture" discusssion, but that success has been confined to the students who are willing to engage in an extended lecture to begin with.

I've tried to model the blog assignments after some admittedly artificial "steps" in the research process and ask the students to use the blog as a research repository of sorts. Once again, I would say I've had limited succcess; I still get the "thing we have to do" responses from many students.

Interestingly (or not), one student has a blog community of friends who keep and comment on each other's blogs outside of class. As such, he posts relatively often about shopping, driving, etc. and receives comments from those friends. When he is posting in response to a blog assignment for class, however, he is very careful to point out to everyone that I am making him do so. Another student seemed genuinely excited about blogging when the semester began, but, once I began assigning blogs, he stopped blogging altogether. I guess I'm not so sure some of the difficulties I've had attempting to create a blogging community have as much to do with blogs as a genre or more to do with students' compartmentalizing their educations.

That's why, although I wasn't able to get to San Francisco to participate in the SIG, I would love to hear more about the "visiting blogsters" discussion.