Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephen D. Krause, an English professor at Eastern Michigan University, notes that requiring students to keep a blog has several advantages compared to a paper journal assignment:

First, I don’t have to haul around a bunch of student notebooks. Second, students can include direct links to materials they find relevant to their entries; on paper a mere citation is the best a student can do. Third, because the blogs exist in a public space, students can read and comment on each others’ entries. In fact, I have students write about their classmates’ blogs, a task that would be difficult to manage with paper notebooks.

Later, he alludes to the further advantage that blogs can include multi-media content. Despite these advantages, he laments, “Most of my experiments with [blog assignments] have been problematic, if not outright failures.” Sounds like my own initial experiment with a blogging assignment.

He offers three lessons from his experience:

1. “[J]ust because you give students the opportunity to use a new and exciting technology doesn’t mean they will want to use it.” Krause notes bloggers, including himself, blog because they enjoy it, not because they are required to do it. The implication is that one ought not assume students will immediately share this attraction to blogging and a blogger’s inclination to publish. For a blogging assignment, more specific instructions work better than an open-ended invitation to blog.

2. Email lists and bulletin board functions in software like WebCT and Blackboard stimulate discussion better than the comment features of blogs. He notes even among academics, blogs don’t prompt much threaded discourse compared to email list exchanges.

3. “Blogs work best for publishing individual texts that are more or less finished,” Krause concludes.

It’s a short piece and doesn’t exhaust the subject. For example, while blogs have some advantages over paper journals, there are potential downsides, too. For instance, once a student posts something to a blog, the entire world may easily discover and archive it. I for one am grateful many of my undergraduate and adolescent musings aren’t captured in any public, potentially permanent record. Also, blogging requires electric power, an internet connection, a computer, software, and some knowledge about how to operate these things. Paper journals have lower barriers to entry and are more portable. In some circumstances, these factors may counter-balance the advantages of electronic, disintermediated publishing.

While his discussion can be extended, I think Krause is correct that while blogs hold promise for education their successful application requires a tailored, nuanced approach and that making explicit one’s expectations about a blogging assignment is helpful for both students and instructors.

Visiting Krause’s own site, I note he is also using WordPress, apparently with the random image template. He’s separated his personal “life” blog from what he calls his “official” blog about his teaching and research. That’s something I want to do.