Documenting Class Events with Blogging
Purpose: This exercise demonstrates how various media and individual experiences can shape our interpretations of an event. This is also a great way to develop a body of student-generated class notes that students can access online (but with a healthy bit of skepticism). For students who miss class, this log becomes a way for them to see what they have missed without emailing you. If you do not have a blog set up, you could easily do this with Twitter or devote a discussion board to holding these notes.
Description: In this exercise, each student in the class will serve as “class blogger” at least once during the semester. The class blogger will be responsible for documenting all classroom events. This exercise works best in computer-assisted classrooms.
Suggested Time: If blogging is done in “real time,” it requires the entire class. It could also be done after class as a writing assignment. Ideally, classroom blogging would continue throughout the entire semester.
Procedure: Set up a blog that all students can access and edit. Also, clearly explain you expectations for these texts -- maybe you want to use the genre conventions of blogging to do this. Each student will sign up to be the “class blogger” for a particular day. The purpose of the classroom blogger is to record notes, summarize conversations, and narrate classroom action as best they can. They are also invited to take photographs and video footage; in essence, they are reporters documenting classroom events.
Reflect: After each student’s experience as a class blogger, they write a short reflection paper about their experience that answers the following questions: what aspects of the class did you focus on and why? If you chose to use other media, what did you use and why? How did occupying the role of “class blogger” change your perspective of the classroom?
In the second part of this exercise, students also write blog comments that reflect upon their experiences in response to a particular day’s blog—do the events documented in the post reflect or contradict your personal experience? In what ways is it similar? Dissimilar? Are there some details that someone outside of this class would misinterpret or not understand? What questions did they still have after reading the class blog?