I noticed a lot of people left early, missing the session by Gardner and Patrick. A summary of the topics discussed can be found at my FacAcad Blog:

http://facacad.blogspot.com

Ernie Ackerman kicked off the blogging panel by talking about his personal blog which he uses for reflection on a variety of topics. Although it’s a personal blog, he occasionally posts about topics covered in class that week and points students to the site for further reading.

An interesting conversation developing about how students treat blogs vs. discussion boards.  Students may treat blogs as more “their own” then a discussion board.  It’s funny how students at first don’t think of their blogs as “public” because they see no evidence that the rest of the world visiting them. But at some point, they just start to live in the blog, and the fact that’s in public seems unimportant.

Students seemed reluctant to post about content outside the walls of their blog — Teresa Coffman found students only did this when they were required to.

In Chemistry, Leanna Giancarlo is using blogs for a history of science class. She wanted to transform the final project where students were creating posters about an under-represented scientist. She considered having them create a Web site, but this required more time for training than she was comfortable with. Ultimately, a class blog was set up–each group presented the content for their scientist on the blog. Leanna also used the blog to have extended conversations about some fundamental questions at the heart of the course, but found getting students to comment and participate was a challenge. For next year, Leanna is considering using the blog to replace some of the ongoing journal entries as well.

From the business department, Dan Hubbard shared two student blogs: Post Haste Taste is a blog about sustainable agriculture by Matt Tucker (part of an independent study). Dan says it best: the best thing about working with Matt was to “see a student catch fire” through blogging. Another student is blogging about Business in Canada for an independent study.

For some comparison, Mike Killian talked about how he used an advanced dicussion forum in an introductory biology class.  He used phpBB, which provides some more advanced features than the discussion forum in Blackboard. One reason, Mike used a forum was because he wanted to add some variety to the evaluation process–students were awarded points for the entries they added to the forum (phpBB allowed Mike to easily scan these comments and determine how many posts an indivdual student had made). The comments were often so enthusiastic that it seemed like students had forgotten the work they were doing was part of an assignment.  The biggest problem Mike encountered was finding the time to respond to the comments from 70 students. Also, as many as 25% of the students had very weak participation. In fact, some students who were great participants during lecture didn’t participate in the forum at all.

With time running short, the rest of the panelists are giving brief summaries of their blogging experience. Jeff McClurken is honest that he is a reluctant blogger because he is self-conscious about his blogging — particulary as an untenured faculty member. Marcel Rotter (whose students used the blog for German writing assignments) found that many of his students were actually very self-concious about blogging, not wanting to post more than their first names.