Sunday, April 02, 2006

What do you think?

I would like to give you guys more responsibility for the blog. The goal of the blog is discourse and discussion.

According to a paper on Blogging in higher education:

In addition to commenting on the advantages of using a tool that serves as an online journal encouraging personal reflection, and as a means of encouraging collaboration through the sharing of links to resources and up to date information, Oravec (2002, p. 618) observes that the blog has many dimensions that are suited to students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking. The reason, simply, is that in order to develop and sustain a clear and confident voice of one's own, one has to carefully formulate and stand by one's opinions. Writing a blog assists here because it forces a student to confront their own opinions and contemplate how their views might be interpreted and reflected upon by others (Mortensen & Walker, 2002, cited in Lamshed, Berry & Armstrong, 2002).

(Williams, Jeremy and Joanne Jacobs. "Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector." Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2004, 20(2), 232-247.)

I feel that you have risen to the challenge and provided very interesting discussion here. The purist blogger allows for students to creat the posts. Currently I create the posts or prompts and you comment. I would like to provide some freedom for certain people or classes to provide the posts for our class. This would involve giving students within a particular class "scribe" priviledges. Basically, you would think of the prompt/post and create it on the blog.

What do you think? Is that something you would be interested in?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our own posts would be great. It would allow us to talk about things that we think are relevent, not just what you want us to talk about. So please do this.

Anonymous said...

Mrs. C-
I am a middle school teacher in another school system. For the past few months I have been monitoring you and your students through your blog. I have found it wonderfully educational. I am interested in doing this in a modified fashion for my students next year. Would love some insight. May I contact you?

MrsC said...

To the anonymous middle school teacher-
Of course you can contact me. My email is caldwb@mtnbrook.k12.al.us
I would love to help. Thanks for checking out this experiment. It is a great educational tool.
Brandi Caldwell

Anonymous said...

Having our own posts would be a good idea. It would give us an oppurntunity to want to here comments on things we are interested in. SO i would definitely give it a try.

Anonymous said...

Our own posts would be great idea. This would allow us to talk about things that we think are relevent, not just what you want us to talk about. I think that you should definatly do this.

Anonymous said...

I think creating our own blogs would be great. I could see it bringing about more discussion, but the discussion may not always be about the class. I think it would be interesting to blog and read about what others are deciding and thinking about for colleges and futures.

Anonymous said...

I think this is a cool idea. There are some, however, who would probably find a way to prove their immaturity once again, but for the majority I think its awesome. I think we can come up with insightful and fun topics to discuss and because it would be students posting them, more students would participate in the blog.

Anonymous said...

i think giving some people the chance to post their own blogs is a good idea. It will give us a chance to posts topics that are important to us. We can ask questions if we have some. Good idea.

Anonymous said...

Honestly I think that is a disaster waiting to happen. Letting students, some more than others, create posting topics is just asking for trouble. I wish I could say that most seniors are mature enough to handle that kind of responsibility, but sadly some aren’t. So, in theory it is a great idea, but in reality not so much.

Anonymous said...

I think that having our own blog would be a good idea. The only problem is that i dont think that many people would be willing to put the effort to make up their own blog. Also people may post things that are not appropriate.

Anonymous said...

I think our own blog post is a really good idea. It would allow students to talk about what they think about certain assignments and other projects, and not just what your thinking about relating to a discussion. However, I think that you would have to find the right people to make up discussions because some people would not be able to handle this responsibility.