By design, blogging has been a huge part of this course. The range of complexity and applicability of class concepts could not be addressed by the instructor or other students through class discussion, office hours, and email. As others have noted, the blogosphere enabled our class to share information at angles previously unexperienced. Teacher to student, student to teacher, student to student...it didn't matter, we just helped each other out and presented interesting readings to one another. Not only did conversations continue back and forth through blogs, but they spilled over into the classroom. I will probably address several of my classmates by their blog names in the future (Tranquilidad and RissRoss beware). More seriously, student participation in the blogosphere affected the way the professor presented material in class. Since middle school teachers have always been trying to integrate computers into learning, and a PowerPoint slide show doesn't help me learn that much better than a blackboard and a film strip. Blogs, however, do.
Blogging catches my eye in terms of learning, individuality, and knowledge management. This has done a wonder for our class, and we've talked about its effects on the enterprise. I'm interested to see how it takes off there, and who knows, maybe I'll look into it in the near future. Thanks, Bud, for making the blogosphere a novel approach to this course.
"Blogging catches my eye in terms of learning, individuality, and knowledge management."
Blogging catches your eye, thom, because you ran out of ways to spend your "productive" time away from your friends on things other than being productive. You are likely the only human being to have ever reached a dead end on the world wide web. no, tom, it turns out that the web is not infinite - your capacity for wasting time with crap, however, is.
Faithfully yours,
Grizz
Posted by: Dan Adams | December 18, 2004 at 08:08 PM