WebLogs
First, I'm going to copy the comments down here, mostly because it belongs to the general discussion category:
Professor:I saw your comment over at http://blog.case.edu/mxs24/2005/01/26/my_own_blog about how you are trying to use your blog to supplement your teachings. I think it is great!
I just wanted to let you know... it kind of... well... it kind of sucks right now. We're working on ways that any course that wants it could set up a blog. And, once we do that, we can set up ways to facilitate handing out course material and distributing course information. And, I hope, it will be awesome.
But, we're working on that. Right now, we're in Beta; and we're trying to convince management blogs are a good thing to have and a good thing to spend money on; so the more you blog -- the better.
On a related note, I used to be a CompE. student; and I would be interested in hearing what all of this "supplemental lectures" and "reading materials" are. If, maybe, in your posts, you could provide some more information for use former students and prospective students and randomly interested parties... well, we would just eat it up.
Cool!
Last year, I started keeping an announcement log on the Web page of EECS 340 and when I saw the Case Blog, I migrated it. The 340 Blog is still much related to the course Web page (which is only one click away: click on "Announcements"). That's why Blog readers would know where the supplemental lectures are: they are posted on the main Web site, and refer to Dave Mount's lecture notes.
Perhaps the biggest potential of Blogs is for research. I think I read somewhere that this is actually how Blog started: lab researchers would keep their lab journal electronically, and at some point decided to post it on the Web. Here are a couple of examples of research blogs I'm involved in:
- The Networked Control WebLog
- Ben Greenberg's project log
- Ahmad's research log
Ahmad's log is significant in a couple of respects. First, some of our research is (sort of) proprietary, so only few people should access it. Second, it is really important for us to be able to post figures, charts, diagrams on the log. Another thing is that there are many WebLogs, and it is nice to differentiate among them by category - basically, creating multiple virtual logs. In fact, there is at least two or three other WebLogs that are important to me (and that are password protected).
With all of this, you can see that I am an old-fashioned professor: for me, a WebLog is mostly an activity Log on the Web.
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