I teach Entrepreneurship at a variety of institutions and on a variety of levels. This summer I used student blogs as weekly journal-type assignments for the first time as part of an MBA class. I found it to be quite an interesting experiment.

I required students to write one blog a week. I was purposefully vague about what I expected but told the students that they should take an entrepreneurial idea they had been thinking about, tie it in with something we’ve been doing in class and add a healthy dose of personal opinion. Typical of any open-ended assignment, I found the results to be mixed (based mainly from the students’ abilities to be creative and think on their own.)

I created a new blog at wordpress (http://startupsherpa.wordpress.com/wp-admin/) specifically for this purpose and had each of the students sign up. They created their own aliases and I added them as “contributors” which gave them the ability to post and edit their own posts but not touch the rest of the site.

I have given them a little guidance over the last few weeks and some of them have taken it to a higher level. It was definitely an interesting experiment and I am interested in seeing how well it works out in your own class.

Best wishes!

Keep me posted on how yours goes. I’m using a mix of formal essays and weekly blogging posts, including posted questions from students/groups and responses to group presentations. Annotated bibliographies, done by groups, and presentation handouts will be put online, too. I’ve been doing this all along in this class, but doing it online seems to make sense now.

DM

This could be a silly question, but how do you ‘close’ the blog after the 20th of August? One of the things I am worried about is the fact that if I use Wordpress on my own server space, students’ writing is out there on the internet. It would be very useful if I could make it unaccessible to the general public.

Your short response essays - great questions - would make ideal material for the kinds of questions that Constantia posted for discussion on the course blog, to have students answer in the comments. The advantage, I think, is that they could then read each others’ responses before going into class, and you could have a good basis for discussion in the seminar. Added bonus is that students would see others’ writing more than they usually do (in regular Dutch courses, at least).

I am going to talk to our tech support person on Tuesday, so I hope to build a blog next week. I’ll keep you posted!

http://engl3301.wordpress.com/

DM

OK, I met with Jennifer, our College Tech person, and we decided that Edublog and Wordpress were effectively the same, as long as my class size remained small enough (below 35) to stay below the Wordpress limit per class.

So we mocked up two courseblogs, which already look pretty good, and it was amazingly easy and straightforward. So score one for Wordpress. I’ll keep you posted.

DM

I’ve wondered why the blog was so much more successful than similar activities I’ve attempted on WebCt. Lots of the students already read/write blogs, so it’s a format that feels very comfortable for them, while WebCT discussions seem artificial and awkward. At my institution, WebCT has a reputation for being slow and unresponsive and crashing periodically so many students have a sort of knee-jerk resistance to it. Also perhaps the course blog creates a web-based community that seems more connected to other communities that they are a part of. I used the blog to post announcements and occasional non-course-related reflections (on the VA tech shootings, for example) and I found myself in my other course missing that kind of centralized online meeting place.

Hope this helps! And I hope you blog about how you eventually decide to use blogs in teaching!

Constantia, your experiences are really encouraging, thanks for sharing them. I am glad to hear that a course blog can really work as a way to engage students with the material, and boost discussion in class as well.

And it’s true then, that a blog indeed triggers more response from students than the built-in discussion boards in WebCT or Blackboard. I wonder why that is — did they give you any clues?

The idea to have students comment on questions you post yourself is interesting. I’m curious — was it a conscious choice of you not to let them write their own entries, or was that determined by the technical side of things?