Comp Classroom Blogs

Clancy Ratliff's Culture Cat blog has a great post from Sunday about her experience this month with classroom blogs, in which she says, in part that FaceBook and MySpace have taken over for the "community building" aspect, one of the reasons instructors have chosen to use blogs.

Clancy also points to one of the primary challenges for instructors with classroom blogs -- making time to be involved. This was a problem I found myself with my 50-student blog for WR 222 last winter. According to April's essay on Blogging for Lisa Ede's Literature Technology and Culture class ENG 595, (under 20 students, several grad students) she quotes Lisa saying that she would probably not try a class blog for a large - 65-student - class such as ENG 104 intro to fiction (a class that also has a much higher percentage of underclassmen and no grad students) - which is probably in part due to the numbers of participants involved.

Meanwhile, here's a link to the CCCC SIG (special interest group) on blogging, with our TYCA-PNW friend Bradley Bleck making a call for review of the literature. All of us here at OSU should jump on this, I think. Michael?

Finally, Clancy says she is going to use Moodle sites in the future (something I had not heard of but looks interesting and should explore).