Electronic course spaces

I teach face-to-face comp classes, but have for the past five years been using a variety of supplementary online spaces as well: the college's course management system (now the WebCT/Blackboard hybrid),  publishers' web-based document-sharing tools (Bedford's Comment and Pearson's MyCompLab), blogs (course mother-blog, student-group blogs, and individual-student blogs), and wikis. A student challenged me this semester on my choice of blogs/wikis over the CMS he had been using for other courses, which set me to trying to lay out my rationale for choosing one system over another. The first reasons that came to my mind were largely (maybe?) aesthetic, that blogs seem cleaner somehow and less cumbersome. I'm not sure the student found that explanation entirely satisfactory. I suppose there are also issues of ease of use and transferability, for the student, to other coursework and to work situations. What else?

Question of the week (after we get settled that Football Team for the Ages question): If yr classes have some sort of online "presence," what format/tool (I'm not quite sure of the best word here) have you chosen? And, equally important, what factors have influenced yr decision?

(While you're meditating, you might check out this short clip, via Barbara Ganley's bgblogging again, from a presentation at last week's Educause Learning Initiative annual meeting. It made me laugh when I came across it.)

Comments

[Liz]

I have a class blog which I use for all my classes. I post handouts, reminders, assignments, and occasional summaries of class activities for all my classes, using the entry title and categories to designate which class the entry is relevant to. I don’t use threaded discussions or a gradebook.

RRCC has a course management system, but I try to avoid it as much as possible for a few reasons. One, it goes down randomly and regularly, unlike the class blog, which hasn’t gone down once in the year I’ve used it. Two, the interface is clunky and takes too many clicks to accomplish tasks. Three, the CMS is password protected and I want my classroom materials to be publicly available.

The class blog allows me to do everything the CMS would allow except for threaded discussions and student-viewable gradebook. Threaded discussions or something like them actually can be done on a blog, but the CMS makes the threaded discussions easier to track. This past year, though, I’ve had students use their own blogs for the types of discussions I used to do as threaded discussions. The discussions aren’t threaded, but that doesn’t seem to matter for what I do.

I’m not a big fan of the student-viewable gradebook. In my experience, students want to be able to submit an assignment and have a grade instantly pop up in the online gradebook. For whatever reason, that expectation doesn’t seem to exist when there is no online gradebook.

[Holly]

Liz, thanks for the thoughtful response. I like yr term "clunky" to describe CMSs, and I haven't found much value to online grade books either.

A few questions (for you or anyone else who wants to weigh in): what's yr rationale for wanting course materials to be publicly available? (I guess I'd thought about advantages of *student* work being public, but hadn't thought so much about my own assignments, etc. --except the selected bits I post on my own blog.) Whom do you see as yr audience? Do (m)any of yr colleagues do this as well?

And I was also curious about yr (and others') experiences with individual student blogs. I've used groups blogs with students before, but this is the first semester I've had students set up their own blogs. Do you see individual blogs as an electronic version of notebook-journals? How do the two compare, in terms of students' attitudes and investment?

Are individual blogs a help in terms of fostering student-to-student connections? For what type of student? Can instructors do anything to encourage the development of "electronic-community"?

So many questions....(Any books/articles anyone would like to recommend on these issues??)

[Howard Tinberg]

I agree that course management systems can be "clunky" and somewhat static. And perhaps you can concur, Holly, that our campus's system is hardly reliable.

I set up a web page using the Carnegie Foundation's keep tool kit, which is easy to use and great for document storage and navigational links. It's a free service: www.cfkeep.org

I've also started to use blogspot for my college writing course: For the first time last semester I set up a single blog for the course and required students to set up their own blogs (for purposes of posting their drafts), and then I linked their pages to our course page. I was nervous, wondering if students had the time or inclination to set up their own blogs to contain all their drafts. But they came through.

I'm still experimenting with the blog. Specifically, I hope to set up more crosstalk among students about their drafts.

Among my concerns: privacy. The blog is of course available on the web and I wonder whether students fully appreciate that fact.

Still, I continue to resist stagnation and to find ways of using the digital medium to create a community of writers.

[Holly]

Thanks for the link to that Carnegie Foundation tool, Howard. I just looked around for a bit, but it seems like it would be a great way to share course materials, and so pretty too.

I'm curious about yr use of blogs for students to post drafts. (I've just been using blogs as public notebooks so far this semester, but was planning to have students post essays at some point--not sure about all drafts.) Was yr primary purpose for students to be able to see each others' work, to help create audience awareness, or did you try paperless peer-review? Did you find a lot of student commenting, either "forced" or spontaneous?

Wrt blogging service, I'm using wordpress this semester, under the apparently mistaken idea that I could use commentpress with it (a way to attach sidebar comments paragraph by paragraph). I just noticed today that you can use commentpress with edublogs, so I'm playing around with that a bit (topic for future post maybe?)

[Howard Tinberg]

I'm interested in being able to use side bar comments on a blog, Holly. I was forced to comment holistically on our course blog. I'd be interested in learning more about commentpress.

Practically speaking, I wanted to give students a place to deposit their drafts and my comments on their drafts. But I'm interested to make use of the blog for peer review. I haven't gone paperless yet but sure would like to.

[Holly]

Just came across an interesting related page, on the Kairos Praxis Wiki, on Using Web-Based Tools for Teaching Composition.