How I Get a Class to Blog

I make my principles students write a blog for class. Others have asked for pointers on how to do this themselves. I've cut and pasted their questions below, with my responses blockquoted.

1) Do you require each student to post atleast once a week thereby perhaps substituting away from quality and towards quantity, but ensuring that all are anxiously engaged?

Yes. The first semester (a five-weeker in the summer) I gave them 70 points to start, plus 5 for each post or comment, with a limit of 100 points. Six in a five week span didn't seem excessive. However, there were problems with students piling them on at the end, and also inquiries as to whether they could earn extra credit by doing more of them. For the second summer session I changed this to a 55 point base, with an unlimited number of posts or comments every week, but with a sliding scale: the first post or comment of the week is 5 points, the second is 4, then 3, 2, and anything after that is 1. This means they can get 100 points for that component of the class with 2 posts or comments each week. Do note that I think the students do not need to build as big an easy point cushion for this class than the previous one ... so I think they'll be OK if they post or comment 6 times in 5 weeks. Also, I will allow them to go past 100 points if they are energetic. I can't see them routinely doing 25 posts or comments for a class in 5 weeks, but maybe I'm wrong. I also threaten to take off points for poor topic choice, or bad spelling, grammar, and logic. I haven't done this yet, primarily due to time constraints.

2) Do you assign a topic each week that they each have to blog on? This would keep students on topic, but might be viewed as a restriction on their own interests.

I don't assign a topic. They have to be broadly within the class, and if they are not I usually note that in the comments, rather than dock them points. I'm not in favor of this anyway ... I want to find out what they want to know very badly, but on the other hand I don't want to slow down the class with too many discussions.

3) Do you require students to leave comments so that you can monitor that they are also reading the blog? Again, the risk is focusing on the quantity aspect as your only measure to monitor.

No, I don't. They actually seem to like commenting more than posting, which surprised me.

In part, I went with the sliding scale to prevent them from arguing through reciprocal commenting to build up points cheaply.

4) Might you actually grad them on their argument instead of number of posts, etc? This runs the risk of students thinking they are suppose to think like you do.

Yes, but that is costly. I just try to steer them in the right direction. My classes are in the range of 15-20 this summer, and I am spending a lot of time commenting on their posts.

Also, this is a principles class. I want to encourage them as much as possible. I have done similar things at higher levels where I have put much more thought into whether their arguments are solid. There's an old story there - fewer students, more individualized critiquing.

In general, what I've figured out so far is that: 1) the students really like doing this, 2) they tend to come up with sources that are sometimes not the best, 3) the length of the posts and comments is probably longer than they need to be, and 4) it requires a lot of commenting on my part to keep them on track for what is appropriate for the class.

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