Ok, I admit I am more faithful at reading the blogs of the people that I have a more personal connection with. At first, it was just Prof. Schroeder because she is the “boss” and my two colleagues/friends Geri and Sommer. Now that I have worked some with Emily I am now interested in her thoughts (which are as equally as great as my original three). So I think in a classroom setting the same types of things would happen—students would be most interested their friends’ thoughts and more inclined to comment to them. So I am thinking that the best set-up would be a requirement to comment on someone you haven’t already commented on before. I also think that for the sake of convenience I would just have one blog spot that the whole class would go to. Even with my google reader organizing my RSS feeds for me and giving me a single spot for the various blog sites of classmates it is still a pain reading one blog at a time and then commenting on each one individually. I like the idea of having a student each week start a blog and then the others would be required to comment to the blog (or the comment of someone else). The only problem I see having (which happens with our wiki comments) is that if you are commenting towards the end it is very hard to come up with stuff that hasn’t already been said. I would have to say that I like blogs much better than the discussion board on D2L because I can see everyone’s comments on one page rather than having to click on each separate comment in a different window. Additionally, as weird as it sounds I am a visual person so it really helps to see the picture of the person commenting so I can make a more personal connection with them.
"The only problem I see having (which happens with our wiki comments) is that if you are commenting towards the end it is very hard to come up with stuff that hasn’t already been said. "
ReplyDeleteI see this as a problem with most kinds of asynchronous methods of communication. In real life face-to-face, the conversation either petters out or changes direction. Maybe we need to work on ways to extend the conversation either through the original question / prompt or the responses. I have seen people require each comment end with a question that leads to the next comment. Another option is to create a prompt where the comments lead to a final solution that each comment leads up to. There are many aspects of online communication that still need work as the teacher as facilitator works slightly differently than in a face-to-face situation.