Class Blogging Assignment

Being forced into blogging, did not sit well with me at the start of this assignment. However, I am finding more and more interest in attempting to discuss some points that are being raised. However, I am having problems remembering which posts I comment on, and which team had the post to begin with. I believe there are two main flaws with the assignment. Difficulty in monitoring reactions to comments, and the amount of effort needed to monitor past posts.

First, while it is easy to see new posts, it is not easy to see new comments. While I think that there is a way to get notification when a new comment has been posted by subscribing to comments. I have been unsuccessful in finding it. (I did a search in help and it talked about subscribing to the comment by selecting a "subscribe to comment" button on the original post, but I have not seen it. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.)

Second, I do not believe that groups are constantly looking back at their previous posts to see if new comments have been added. As I am sure that I am not the only one who was trying to do the minimum to complete the requirement, looking back at previous posts to check for comments has not been a priority.

If we were to assume that the average student wants to be interested in the work that was assigned, but perhaps due to time constraints is still trying to minimize the amount of effort to do an assignment, I think that if blogging assignment were structured differently the amount of discussion would dramatically increase.

I propose that there be only one blog, it have weekly posts, and the groups would be responsible to enter comments. Since weekly posts are still made, there should be ample variation in post topics to allow for diverse discussion. This would allow for easy monitoring of new comments by all groups. The blog posts could be restricted to talk about a specific topic designated by the professor or the posts could be completely open, I would recommend that the group responsible for a post be required to inform the professor what the post topic will be to ensure ample variation in topics. Either way there would be more focus on discussion, since only one post would be made a week.

In addition I think that the original post be made by the professor. This would direct the initial discussion to a class related topic and would provide a good post example. The first week's comments could be quickly reviewed and improvement tips could be made prior to the next post, while comments could be made by an individual the post should be a group activity. This should foster the team environment, while still letting individuals express their thoughts. It might be a good idea to have two or three groups make a post the first week following the professors initial post to immediately have diverse discussion, but the number of posts should be kept relatively low. As new comments decrease on older posts, or marginally good posts, it may be necessary to again assign multiple groups to post in any one week. I think that a target of 4 or 5 actively discussed posts should be kept.

I am very interested in hearing what some of you think about the blogging exercise.

Jason