Blogs and Collaborative Learning

When I was a student, I never cared much for group projects--unless my group was full of really awesome people. In other words, the best group projects were the ones where I knew the people in my class, and we knew the teacher well enough to know to what he or she would be impressed with. We knew our collective ethos, and we knew our audience.

I put my students into some kind of partner/group collaborative work every week we meet for class. It's the only way I can get them talking to each other since we only meet once a week for an hour and twenty minutes. I don't like that I don't know my students' names. For the first time since my very first semester teaching freshman composition in 2003, I don't know all of my students' names.

It's not necessarily the number, either. Working at my last university, I taught a 5-5-4 schedule: five three-credit classes winter semester, five three-credit classes summer semester, and four three-credit classes fall semester (the school ran on a trimester system, and we only had a one-and-a-half month break between summer and fall semesters). At one point, I had 125 students in four composition classes and a British literature survey course. I knew all of their names. I saw them more than once a week. I encouraged them to get to know each other outside of class by putting them in four-person groups, requiring peer reviews to take place outside of class in the location of their choice. I assessed them by reading their reflections on how the peer reviews went, as well as by skimming over their revision ideas prompted by questions I prepared to guide them through their peer review process.

One semester, I had a British Literature class of only twenty students. They were a little shy, save five or six talkers, and I worried that not everyone was getting enough discussion in during class. So we started a blog. It's a private blog, so I won't link to it here, but my image up top is an example of a post inspired by Swift's "A Lady's Dressing Room." Another great one I got later on was about "The Art of the Ancient Mariner." It included five images of art inspired by the Mariner over the decades. Besides via blogging, how else could a student have shared these images or even had the desire to look them up and share them with the class?


The blog was a riot. Multiple students emailed me after the course was over and thanked me for the opportunity to share their thoughts in that way. They said they struggled in class discussions, and this gave them an opportunity to think about the literature that they didn't get inside the classroom. The shy students found they could say much more via computers, and everyone loved added YouTube clips and pictures to their posts on Defoe, Dryden, Pope, and, later in the semester, the Romantics. We had great discussions online that prompted our discussions when we met for class later in the week (it was a Tuesday/Thursday class).

I had my students in three groups, with responsibilities to post on the blog rotating every three weeks. In one week, everyone from Group One would post reading responses to that week's reading, and then everyone (including Group One) would post three comments to whatever posts they wanted to (and they could post three times to the same post, too). What happened was that almost everyone posted MORE than three times, and some of the conversations grew long and interesting. Not every week was this effective, but it was about four hundred times more effective than the semesters I used discussion forums via Blackboard.

Blogging can be an excellent way to get students collaborating outside of class. But it helps to meet with students more than once a week, and it helps to know their names.

I don't feel like my classes right now can collaborate with each other because there is no incentive to know each other. Maybe for next semester I can figure out how to incorporate groups in my classes that meet outside of class. I'm just not sure I would know how to assess their participation in the 8 points allotted to me for instructor assignments outside the regular curriculum.