Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Last week in Shanghai my students were asked to post material to a course blog. The idea was that they would make near “real time” entries about our experience in Shanghai, posting journalistic accounts of our meetings (I imagined with both text and pictures), analysis of the issues we were exploring and links to additional resources.

The students are continuing to post to and improve the course blog. Perhaps one advantage of a blog over a traditional academic assignment is that it can more easily be incrementally improved, not frozen in time. I think it will soon be a good record of our trip. However, the experiment was not as successful in “real-time” as I had hoped. I’ve been reflecting on how things went and how I might be able to improve the exercise in future classes. Some initial thoughts are that next time I need to:

1. Communicate expectations clearly–explicitly– and don’t assume they imagine the assignment as I do;
2. Encourage students to write portions of their blog entries in advance, so that the can easily add information, including quotes and photos, based on what each presenter actually says;
3. Schedule time for them to work on the blog;
4. Schedule time for the entire class to view the blog while in-country, probably at daily breakfast meetings.

I gave the students a brief introduction to blogging before we left Maryland, but I think a disconnect remained between what I hoped they would do while in China with respect to the blog and what they imagined they needed to do. I hoped they would at least post a basic daily entry, providing a journalistic account of our activities (whom we met with, ideally with a photo or two) and links to some other resources. More extensive material would of course be welcome, but I didn’t intend for them to write a magnum opus while in Shanghai (nor did I allot time on the schedule for them to do so). Some of the teams managed to do this, and I was pleased by their enthusiasm for the project. They plan to upload audio and video files. But I didn’t clearly explain that something is better than nothing, and I think students in some of the groups imagined that they needed to post a comprehensive report. Consequently, some of the groups failed to post anything immediately.

Besides more clearly explaining what I want, I will also try to provide explicit time on the schedule for the groups to work on the blog. That seems obvious, but having failed to do that this time, groups had to work on the blog at night when, after our long days of meetings, they were 1) fatigued from the day’s events, 2) suffering from jet lag and 3) distracted by Shanghai night life (moderate sampling of which is not antithetical to the course objectives).

One of the students suggested daily breakfast de-briefing sessions, and I agree they could be useful in several ways. I could use them to amplify any particularly valuable points from the previous days’ information (or offer alternatives perspectives and make corrections when needed). During them we could also look at the previous day’s blog postings. Knowing that their peers would be seeing it would I imagine be a strong inducement for doing a good job.