Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

i have mixed feelings about the blog…

1. one thing we talked about in class this term is the neoliberal transformation of higher education and the ways in which distance learning and online courses are problematic - or less desireable than personal contact between teachers and students and students and students.  My students definitely made this connnection - and we all felt like that was part of the blog experience thats potentially troublesome — does it pave the way for the further commodification of our education system?

2. even so - many students were supportive of the blog - for the ones that used it they felt it was a good place to see different opinions and to argue with one another and to challenge some of the ideas that I would present even. (I was pretty restrained in my own comments - enough to let them know I was interested but I tried really hard not to always disagree or to correct students)

3. I ended up being pretty lax about the requirement to blog - it was clear that for some students it was just not something they were interested in - and personally I’m not interested in forcing anyone to be more ‘techie’ than they want to be (see #1).  So blog participation did count towards course participation and everyone was required to have posted twice - but otherwise I didnt really give grades on the blog participation and kept to a minimal role in the class.

4. in the end I would use a blog again - and make at least one or two posts per person mandatory - but beyond that I will leave it very flexible - those who want to participate on the blog can, and will get participation credit for it, those that don’t want to won’t be made to feel bad about that.  Same way that I dont force quiet students to speak in class if they really dont want to.

5. For my globalisation class I might actually try to get them all to use a blog reader thing next year - that way I can share with them articles that i find on other blogs more easily.  but thats a year away.

6. those are mythought –i’m glad I participated in this!

Overall, I think  for all of my kvetching about student involvement I would definitely do it again. I think for my students I needed to kinda get over myself and take more initiative once I saw that the students weren’t that amped about it. If I had only taken my own advice: Positive approach=Postive results! However by the end of the semester, the students that were blogging were having pretty interesting discussions that finally transferred into an entire class discussion and it was great. Students who weren’t interested or felt intimidated by blogging actually  got into it because they were waiting to see other people’s reactions. By and large my students were too lazy or didn’t feel comfortable coming up with their own posts because they still saw me as the expert, and were hesitant about formulating questions on their own and posting it on the web. So I think when I do this in the fall I will have them work on some exercises that are just focused on asking questions, so that they can feel comfortable just developing critically engaging questions.

I think that I was so focused on trying to get through some of the class material that I wasn’t working on incorporating the Blog enough into class discusssions but by the end I think I was more successful because there were students who would actually take the initiative and begin class discussion. So I would definitely do this again and I left this semester actually tearing up a bit, because I learned a lot in terms of my own teaching style and I learned a lot from them too. Plus my students gave me kimchee!  It was a great semester and the blogging will get better with time once I finally get over my technophobia and hopefully it won’t transfer into the classroom next year.   

Overall, I’m really happy with the use of the blog this term and with wordpress. I think that it’s more interesting to use than blackboard and less problems with students logging in, however I did have one student who consistently couldn’t log in, even after Luke or I changed his username and password. Other than this one student there weren’t really any problems. I do have a couple of suggestions and questions for next time though.

First, I was never really satisfied with the layout of the blog and couldn’t quite ever figure out how to organize it better. I’d blogged on this before, but I feel I should have organized the blog into topical sections from the beginning so that it was more navigable. I think having an individualized design consultation, or one in a group where everyone was actually designing their blogs at the meeting, would have been useful and would be a good practice in the future. Although it was really helpful to have people to consult with over the term, I think it would have been better to start off with some design help.

Second, I feel that I could have done more to encourage students to not just summarize the material, but to actively question, analyze, and make connections from it. I think next time I’ll really want to employ the strategy of highlighting excellent posts to give students both a clear idea of what I’m looking for as well as giving them incentive to use write more analytic blogs.

Third, and related to the second, while I found it really useful in preparing class and lectures to look over the blogs and see what students were getting from the readings I think I could have integrated them more into the class discussion. While I did this often, many of the posts stayed at the level of summarizing the articles or making opinion-based reflections, which I had a harder time integrating into class discussions. I’m looking forward to hearing how other people integrated the blogs into their class discussions.

They definitely helped in encouraging people to read more.

Hi everyone,

I have to say that the Wordpress experience has been quite pleasant, after some opening jitters and anxieties. At least the glass appears well past half-full in my reckoning now at the end of the term. I have some tinkering around to do with how what the students do on-line gets integrated into classroom time, but overall I think the technology has been a useful tool. Even better, I like that the students can look back at the website and realize they’ve produced a quite impressive archive of knowledge. I try to remind them that they can use what they write week-to-week to inform their more major essay assignments, that what they publish on the website should be regarded as dead material. Some of them have done this in their recent papers, so I’m glad.

I do have problems with getting my chosen ‘discussants,’ who are to lead the conversations in class, to realize that they are responsible for digesting their classmates’ ideas and presenting issues as based on those responses. Too often they will try to open discussion with the hackneyed question. “So what did you think about this article?” Obviously everyone’s already shared what they think on the website prior to class, so it’s a lame entree. Anyway, some students have become more casual, too casual, in discussions as they get more acquainted with each other. I try to remind them gently that they are being evaluated for their participation grade…

Aren’t we meeting next week or something to wrap up our experiment in blogging? If so, I look forward to sharing experiences then.

There are certainly many productive uses for blogs and I don’t deny the value they offer as a venue for exchanging information or for voicing our frustrations while avoiding the unpleasant consequences of face to face interaction. My concern here is not an overall criticism of blogs but on making sense of the apparent time lag between postings, replies, and commentaries. Do blogs make us lazy? When I compare the issues raised or the discussions made on blogs with verbal conversations I don’t necessarily find any greater depth in the former. One would imagine that the time lag would produce greater quality than a verbal discussion. If I’m in any way representative of how people blog then I know the answer to my question.  When I encounter a posting that calls for a reply do I say “mmm I’m going to ponder on this for a couple of days, gather information, debate myself and then give the best answer possible”? I do nothing of a sort. Rather, I sign in, sign out, sing in at a later date only to find the same posting as if I read it for the first time. Finally, I just stop my procrastination and write something. Turn taking in conversations is something that socio-linguists have examined a great deal.  There is a great deal of cultural variation shaping the taking of the turn, not to mention a host of conditions from the nature of the relationship of the speakers to the social context that go into defining when a speaker should follow with a reply. In a friendly exchange we generally avoid excessive gaps in the conversation. In short, in verbal conversations there are certain pressures that compel us to reply in a timely fashion. Blogs do not compel me to reply in the same way, and I get lazy. If there is to be a conversation however, the blogging game works only when we throw our hands out at the same time. In part I believe one gets lazy with the blog because the blog conversation is never clearly marked by an ending. The verbal conversation flows and then stops and we take leave. Even when a verbal discussion is not fully resolved, when the conversation is over there is a feeling that something has come to an end. Blogs just leave one hanging and waiting for more. When you wake up in the morning it’s still there, waiting and waiting for a reply. It’s tempting to just pull the covers over your head on go back to sleep.

So, my students mid-term feedback included a lot of anxiety about grades. In response I’m going to give them a grade on their blog contributions so far, but I’m curious how others are handling grading. At first I was going to wait until the end of the course and give a grade for overall blog participation, but as the blog is so much a part of the grade of the class I decided this isn’t really fair.

How are others grading? My thoughts are to grade mostly based on participation,  on completion of required number of blogs, and then dividing up ‘a’ and ‘b’ blogs based on commenting, analyzing, and connecting versus summarizing.

Would love to hear how others are dealing with this-

Though I started my blog a bit later than the others, once I got things rolling I found the students willing to participate. I have not encountered resistence to participation but I have had to enourage students with small rewards such as holding “cyberclasses” instead of meeting in our room in physical space.  One issue that I notice emerging is the way students take ownership of their blog space. Students tend to divide between those that are too informal and those that are extremely cautious about what they write often sending me emails to get my opinion prior to making a posting. I believe the problem may have been my fault in giving students mixed messages about the goals of the blog. On the one hand I informed them that it was low stakes writing and they should feel comfortable with a relaxed form of writing. On the other hand I informed the class that the blog is a way of developing their final paper topics, hence there is something really at stake in the writing. I’m not sure I can back peddle without adding to the confusion but it does get a bit annoying having students email me to get my opinion each time they want to post. What I would like is to get students to be informal but professional, and take responsibility for their own ideas without feeling I have to approve.  I’m just having a little difficulty finding the right balance.

I’m fairly happy with how the blog is going in my course, though I have a couple of issues that I’d like to work out. First, my students are saying they’re spending a long time writing posts and some seem frustrated by this. I feel that at the beginning of the semester I should have stressed more the reason for the blogs is to provoke discussion of the readings. I did talk about this a bit, mentioning that there are different reasons for writing and that blogs here were to be used to further the conversation. But, I think I could have continued these reminders as I have some students still doing summaries and some writing long expositions. I also want to find a way to encourage more people to include links in their posts, when students do this they’ve included really great links. So, I’m trying to do some coaching now on the direction people should take their blogs in, but I think I could have been more consistent throughout on giving direction. I told my students last week (as suggested by Luke I think) that I will give extra credit to any post which generates at least three comments, will see how this goes.

Second, as I mentioned in the mtg, I’m finding that my students are posting a lot, which is great, but I’m not sure how much they’re reading each other’s posts. They haven’t been making many comments. And I think part of this may be due to the blog feeling a little unwieldy, it’s not very organized. For next time I think I’d like to figure out how to divide it up into smaller sections from the beginning to make it a bit more user-friendly in terms of commenting and reading posts.

Third, I think some of my students are getting anxious about how they’ll be graded in the blog. I’ve told them if they’d like specific feedback on how they’re blogs are doing that they can email me to ask, but I’m wondering if there is a better way to give them some feedback throughout. I think Alessandro’s idea of labeling exemplary posts  could be a good way to give some feedback on which posts are excellent, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

Overall, I think the blog’s doing great at increasing our discussion in class, will see how the rest of the term goes!

Hi everyone, sorry to miss the meeting last Friday, especially because it sounded like a useful and productive chat.

Let me just report on some technical and other more ‘cultural,’ if you will, aspects of the course blogs I’ve been running. On the technical side, my students brought to my attention that they were receiving emails notifying them of others’ comments on their posts, which they seemed to appreciate. I don’t know what I did, but these automatic emails have stopped going out.

For my 1001 class, where the students are a bit more insecure about expectations for the blog, I decided to create a “featured posts” category, which I assign to exemplary posts each week. In other words, I read the posts, and the ones I consider especially thorough and thoughtful I click ‘Edit’ and check off “featured posts”–a category I created. It’s kind of a ‘gold star’ reward system with no real value attached to the designation, but rather a means of getting students to understand what high-quality thinking and writing involves. I usually give “featured posts” status to contributions that show up-close reading, identification of the author’s argument, connection to core issues of the course, and/or imaginative takes on the subject. I mention in class that I gave out “featured posts” status as a way to encourage the students to check out if they got it. Hopefully, the weaker students also check out the “featured posts” to see what they need to do better. I can’t really gauge if it’s working, but I notice a couple of students who have improved anyway.

In my 3153 course, I’m using the blog to run an online peer review  of their ethnography project proposals. This is intended as a way to get them to help each other on developing their ideas before I comment on them. None of it is graded, and they get full credit as long as they post their proposal and comment on 2 classmates’ proposals within the allotted time period (all last week). I made rules to ensure a fair distribution of comments across all the proposals. Now they’re supposed to incorporate the useful comments they’ve received from classmates into their final draft proposal, which they turn in this week in hardcopy for me to comment on.

In class once a week we are doing discussions based on readings and blog responses. For the first time, I’m using the tactic of dividing the class up into 3 or 4 discussion groups for 30-40 minutes, each group led by a discussant in charge of keeping the chatter up and covering the material. I float from group to group, listening, chiming in. Then we merge all the groups for a big pow-wow. The discussants recap their group’s conversation, and I add some commentary. I think they like it and are taking it seriously. But I also think they are often not getting the deeper argument and meaning of the readings, and classtime ends before we can get to it. Maybe this is my egoism that they would actually listen to my take on the readings, but there are plenty of things I regret not elucidating for them in order to push the discourse of discussion a bit deeper. The mini-groups tend to encourage anecdotal interpretations and superficial comparisons of the readings, and I don’t know how to balance the advantages of letting them think with the, well, disadvantages of letting them think!

As you all know, one requirement of this working group is that we ask students to evaluate their experience with the blog.  Melis, Luke and I will be designing this evaluation instrument and would like to get it to you within the next month.  However, I would very much like the whole groups input on this, and thought that our blog would be a good place to have a transparent process.  What questions would you like to ask students?

Tags: Assessment