Course Blog Planned for Shanghai Trip
May 5th, 2005I am going to experiment with blogging as a tool for the MBA class Doing Business in China that I am currently teaching.
The course is a travel course. In about 15 days, 25 MBA students and I will leave for Shanghai. We will stay there a week, having an intensive series of meetings with PRC government and business leaders.
Only one of the students has been to China before. I am sure many of them will be captivated by China and the astounding changes going on there. I’m excited about accompanying them and helping structure their experience. I think keeping a course blog will be a good way to get them actively involved in what we do in China while also being a good group collaboration exercise. It offers the additional benefit of helping acquaint them with an important technological and communications trend.
In January I taught a similar travel course for undergraduate students. We went to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. For that course I asked each student to keep a daily journal. I hoped that writing a journal while in Hong Kong would help them keenly observe and reflect on their experiences. I asked them to test in their journals the “book learning” they got before the trip against their more direct experiences in Hong Kong. The journals would also, I thought, provide them with a meaningful record of what for most was their first trip to Asia.
Generally I think the journal assignment was effective in meeting those aims. But one disadvantage of the journal-keeping was that it tended to keep the students cooped up in their rooms, writing in isolation.
MBA students are accustomed to teamwork. That’s something new for me. In law school we hardly did any group work (nor did we do any in my East Asian Studies graduate courses). In my previous teaching I’ve not assigned any group work either. Thus I was ruminating on what kind of group project to assign for the Shanghai course when it occurred to me that I could get the students to build a group blog.
Each day in Shanghai we will focus on a particular topic, specifically:
general overview of doing business in China stock markets insurance banking manufacturing.
It occurred to me that I could assign a group of students to the topic for each day, asking them to create a blog entry for that day. I hope the blog entries will 1) chronicle our meetings that day– including photos and a journalistic account of what we did 2) provide some analysis about the topic, plus 2) link to or reference other resources for more information on the topic.
We’ll see how it goes. I’ve set up a WordPress blog at www.doingbusinessinchina.net/shanghai2005/blog/
Sunday is the last of three preparatory meetings (each one a three-hour affiar) before we fly to Shanghai. Each team will present a briefing on their topic to the entire class, giving everybody at least a little background on the discrete areas. And I’ll give them a crash course in blogging.