Dustin Hixenbaugh's blog

6 Tips for Making the Most of Your Class Blog

Dustin Hixenbaugh — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:23:20 +0000

Author:

Dustin Hixenbaugh

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Taro Yamamoto

For several semesters I have had students engage in digital conversations using discussion boards on class management sites such as Blackboard and Canvas. This semester, wondering if writing for a public audience would increase their investment in participating in these kinds of digital conversations, I decided to set up a class blog. Since I have been pleased with the results, I thought I would share a few recommendations with other teachers who are either interested in starting a class blog or looking for ways to make more of one that’s already in use.

As previous Blogging Pedagogy writers have noted, there are many benefits to having students blog. Regularly posting their thoughts to a public site builds students' confidence in their voices. It gives them practice expressing arguments in reader-friendly language, and the comments they receive help them understand how effectively (or not) they have conveyed their ideas. These are experiences that students are bound to find helpful, whatever their major or career interests.

Blogging can also positively impact classroom culture. For example, Lisa Gulessarian observed that sharing a blog helped her students treat one another with greater empathy. As she reflected after one semester operating the blog, “The camaraderie in my class is one that I would like to recreate in my future classes." Tekla Hawkins learned through her students' posts what they found challenging about her lessons, leading her to make productive changes to her instruction.

Once you commit to having your students blog, you will want to spend a few hours setting it up. Our previous writers have also made recommendations concerning the preliminary decisions you will be making, and I will refer you to them if you want help selecting a platform, discussing the differences between academic and internet writing, or encouraging students to incorporate images in their posts.

My six tips take a longer view on student blogging. Although some of them suggest actions you might take within the first few days of the semester, my hope is that they will ultimately help you maintain--rather than simply begin--your class blog. If I have learned nothing else this semester, it is that blogging is an activity that is only spontanous in appearance. In fact, a successful blog requires thoughtful planning and a fair amount of energy and inspiration that must be sustained throughout the semester.

#1. Start by writing author biographies. This is an excellent ice-breaker. You and your students will learn a lot about each other from the information you share, and if you include pictures, you will also shorten the amount of time it takes for everyone to learn each other's names. Moreover, writing biographies helps students take their role as contributors seriously. From the beginning, they will appreciate that blogging is an exercise in developing an online persona and that they should write posts that make them proud and do not disclose details they are uncomfortable making public. (Note that biographies should never include FERPA-protected information such as students' grades.)

#2. Give students the freedom to select their own topics. Asking students to answer specific questions in their posts can hold them accountable for doing their homework and improve their participation in class. However, blogging can be more fun and even more rigorous when students determine their own topics. This semester, I gave the students in my "Rhetoric of Country Music" class free reign, and I am consistently impressed to see them taking on issues that are more personal and certainly more timely than anything I would have selected for them. My friend Beck Wise, who is teaching an English course on "Feminist Speculative Fictions," strikes what I think is a good balance, giving her students both structured and "free topic" blogging assignments.

#3. Stagger the deadlines. The joy as well as the misery of having students blog is that they can generate a lot of writing. Your students will benefit from writing several blog posts a week, but you will become overwhelmed trying to read--let alone grade--all of them. I decided to have my students write three posts of at least 400 words each. (They may write more, but not for class credit.) When I introduced the assignment, I distributed a sign-up sheet giving students the chance to select their own deadlines. They are happy because they chose deadlines that suit their schedules. I am happy because I have a manageable stream of 6-8 posts per week instead of an overwhelming flood.

#4. Stagger the publication. I allow my students the freedom to choose their topics, but I take control for determining when their posts are published. Usually, I receive 6-8 posts on Tuesday, which I then schedule to appear over the course of the week--ideally one per day. This is important for two reasons: First, releasing posts daily respects the habits of the typical Internet reader, who prefers a steady stream of content over an overwhelming weekly dump. Second, it ensures that none of my students' posts gets buried beneath the others. In effect, each student can count on being the class's featured writer for three days over the course of the semester.

A technical note: If you are using Wordpress, you can schedule the date and time a post will appear from either the "edit" or "quick edit" screens. You can also schedule posts to reappear at a later time if your students accidentally publish them themselves.

#5. Walk students through the posting process. This is an obvious step that I forgot to take this semester and that has caused my students more setbacks than anything else. After spending so much time setting up my class blog, the Wordpress platform that I chose began to feel so obvious that I made the assumption that my students would be able to figure it out for themselves. In fact, many of them had to email me for help with such "obvious" tasks as locating the log-in button. Next semester, I plan to resolve this problem by having my students write their first posts as Word documents that will all be due on the same day. As a class, we will go through the process of transferring the documents to posts that includes images, hyperlinks, categories, and tags.

#6. Give students grades for their comments. The single best way to keep students invested in writing engaging, thoughtful blog posts is to ensure that every one initiates a conversation between students. (As a contributor Blogging Pedagogy and other sites where readers hardly ever leave comments, I know well how disappointing it can feel to spend time writing posts that generate no feedback.) This semester, I am requiring that my students write at least ten comments to their classmates' posts. My expectation is that each comment will be at least 100 words in length so that students can compliment each other's work ("I wish I had thought to write this post!") as well as contribute their own insight, story, or question. While I always enjoy the posts that my students write, the truth is that it is the conversations that are carried on the comments that lead to the most class participation and eventual student learning.

Student Research in the Era of Bookless Libraries

Dustin Hixenbaugh — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 03:36:59 +0000

Author:

Dustin Hixenbaugh

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Ghostbuster Wiki: The Compendium of Ghostbusting

Debating what new technologies mean for old libraries is one of the Internet's favorite obsessions. On one side of the issue there are the Defeatists who think that every innovation is a nail in the library's metaphorical coffin. When Florida Polytechnic University recently announced that it had opened an entirely bookless library, the Defeatists took to Twitter to voice their disappointment:

As the US continues to eviscerate #highered, Florida Polytechnic opens a library w/ no physical books... http://t.co/tCKrlGnPfu

— Mike Bess (@mkbess) August 31, 2014

A bookless library: http://t.co/0JdTtR7wUp (If it won't have books, can't we at least call it something besides "library"?) @prufrocknews

— Gracy Olmstead (@gracyolmstead) August 26, 2014

I appreciate this second tweet because it reminds me of the complaints my undergraduate institution received when it announced that it was going to renovate its library to accommodate a coffee shop. Is a library still a library when it buys subscriptions to e-books in lieu of the books themselves? When its employees mix lattes instead of hissing their patrons into silence? The Defeatists think not.

On the other side of the issue there are the Optimists. They tend to claim that literature has an enduring appeal that will survive the transfer from paper to PDF and that libraries like the one at Florida Polytechnic are wisely evolving to meet the needs and interests of modern readers. They also tend to defend their perspective using statistics that are as catchy as they are inconclusive: The majority of millennials know where their local library is! In the United States there are more libraries than there are McDonald's!

I think it is because I am more Optimist than Defeatist that I decided to require that the undergraduates in the "Rhetoric of Country Music" course that I am teaching this semester conduct research using library books.

Yes, it surprised me when the mostly junior and senior students who enrolled in my class reported that they had neither visited the main branch of the University of Texas library system nor checked out even one of UT's more than eight million books. But I recognize that my own sentimental attachment to libraries comes more from my grandmother taking me to one for puppet shows every week when I was a child than from finding them useful as an adult (though I do). As a Ph.D. student, I enjoy accessing materials instantly through the library's e-books and online databases and have consumed my weight many times over in library coffee shops. I would not say either of these innovations has damaged my appreciation for books.

The project I assigned had students work in groups to research a subgenre of country music (i.e., honky tonk, rockabilly, Outlaw). My aim was to give students experience researching with books, but also to ensure that they were engaging robust scholarly texts. My research for the syllabus led me to believe that the best research about country music is, in fact, printed in books. The field's leading scholars tend to publish their work in edited collections rather than referreed journals, and the Internet sources that rank highest in Google searches are typically promotional and not ideal for student research.

At first my inner Defeatest wanted to plan a lesson that would climax in what César Salgado calls a "'Eureeka!' moment" ("Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory," 1999). After my 75-minute class I hoped my students would throw their hands into the air and pledge to apply for cards at the ten nearest libraries. Such expectations, I realized as I prepared the Research Guide, were as impractically high as they were misguided.

The truth is that modern libraries do not necessarily want their patrons visiting them in the flesh, let alone disturbing the stacks searching for particular titles. At UT, students can print whole chapters from a variety of e-books and even request that sections from physical books be scanned and delivered to them electronically. Students who want to borrow actual books or CDs, DVDs, and other materials that are impossible to scan can click the "Pick It Up!" button and have these items delivered to the hold desk at any library location they choose. UT is by no means the only library to offer these kinds of services.

The primary challenge that my students faced was determining which books or sections of books they wanted. At UT, students placing scan requests are required to specify exact titles and page numbers, but since the library's catalog does not consistently record this information, it has to be located elsewhere. The fact that Amazon, Google Books, and publishers' websites provide these details makes a good argument for digital innovations actually helping users take advantage of libraries' print resources.

After completing this project most of my students still have not set foot in the UT library nor checked out a book. For the record, I consider this a somewhat disappointing success. But more importantly, they have written extensive webpage-essays synthesizing the library's best research on country music--and in a remarkably brief period of time. I would love to know what you think about their work.

Optimist that I am, I think bookless may be alright.