Blog

ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a great little piece about how to make students’ blogging more effective, not in terms of production, but in terms of learning. We require students in our leadership academy to blog all three years they are in it and many find it daunting and frankly useless. I think this may well prove a useful method.

My adaptation of Blau’s reading log audit is essentially a blog post about blogging, as my guidelines for the assignment suggest:

Begin by printing and reading all of your posts and comments (you can access a list of your posts from the Archive menu at the top of the site). As you reread them, take notes, critically reading your entries as if they were written by somebody else (or at the very least, recognizing that they were written by a different you at a different time). You are not grading your own work so much as commenting on it and noticing what you notice week to week.

Compose a short analysis and reflection of your posts. This meta-post is open-ended and the exact content is up to you, although it should be thoughtful and directed. Feel free to quote briefly from your own posts or to refer to specific ideas from the readings we’ve studied so far.

Some questions to consider might include: What do you usually write about in your posts? Are there broad themes or specific concerns that reoccur in your writing? Has the nature of your posts changed in the past five or six weeks? What changes do you notice, and how might you account for those changes? What surprised you as you reread your work? What ideas or threads in your posts do you see as worth revisiting? What else do you notice? What aspects of the weekly blogging do you value most, and how does it show up in your posts?

via Making Student Blogs Pay Off with Blog Audits – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education.