WebLogs II
First of all, I'm going to copy this here: this is a much more appropriate posting for the general discussion category (rather than for the EECS 340 category):
I am interested in seeing how to use blogs for teaching and know you are using this for your class. But if I were a student in your class, what would I get from seeing this entry under "Reading"? The phrase "Lecture 7" does not seem to convey any information. Am I missing something? Or is it that actual students in your class have other information that makes this meaningful to them?Thanks,
Mano
Thanks for your comments, Mano. An old-fashioned professor (such as myself) would just use a WebLog as a log on the Web. In that respect, my Blog (under the EECS 340 category) is just a continuation of the announcement blog that I used to have in previous semesters.
In practice, this means that the students have access to the course Web page, where they have much more material posted, and then if they click on "Announcements", they will be brought to the Blog sub-site on EECS 340. This for example allows me to effectively create multiple parallel blogs, one for each course and for each research project. In summary, the Blog is a continuation of what used to happen anyway in the previous Web page by other means. The student would get out of this a continuosly updated syllabus of the course before each lecture.
Is this worth the effort? Could you do this with Blackboard or just with plain html as I used to do before? Probably. I suppose the jury is still out, but I think I'm going to give it a try for this semester. Perhaps, the biggest thing that I got here is that I should mark the EECS 340 track as not being open for discussion.
Are there other potential uses for blogs in education? You bet, but I haven't thought a whole lot about it, and probably I'd like to take it slow.
Is this an appropriate use of blogs? Aren't blogs supposed to be used for discussion? A Blog is a log on the Web and so this is entirely appropriate. As I was mentioning in my previous posting, I am already maintaining a number of publicly accessible activity logs (for a variety of very good reasons), so this is probably going to be helpful independently. Finally, this is my blog, and I'm going to use it as I want! :-)
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