Greetings! I have been a notoriously bad blogger for the past two years, which is something I intend to remedy immediately because it would seem that in our current, technology driven world, blogs have become an important mode of communication. Not only can we share our ideas and experiences with friends and family, but blogs have also become relevant networking and information sharing tools in the professional world.
As a communication professor, I am always contemplating new teaching strategies and tools. I'm sure that anyone who teaches would agree with me when I say that promoting a sense of pride, ownership, and accountability for one's work among the students is one of the biggest challenges we face as educators. We assign readings, which many of the students don't do. Then we make them take quizzes or write reading responses, which they hate. The typical undergraduate today has grown up with technology and expects a fast, exciting, fresh approach to everything they do. I feel like many of the traditional teaching methods (e.g. lecturing on material in a textbook) just aren't relevant in our fast-paced world today. I hear professors complain all the time about students being lazy and entitled, but I actually find most of them to be pretty awesome if they are motivated in the right way. Perhaps all of us educators need to be more willing to embrace new approaches that work better for this generation, rather than wishing this generation would fall back on approaches that are becoming obsolete.
So I've been trying to figure out how to create assignments that make a broader impact and actually matter to the students beyond the classroom, with the goal of getting them interested and more involved. I landed on blogs as a possible outlet for this -- rather than turning in papers that only I will read, what if the students publish their writing online, on a public blog, and promote it to people who might be interested in things like workplace communication, relationships, and organizational processes?! Perhaps they will recognize the importance of producing high quality work because they are representing themselves among a broader audience, such as to potential employers. They could use their blog to network and connect with others who are interested in or already working in their chosen industries. They can get more creative with how they present information, and have a chance to utilize the technology that they are so good at using. We could have a 'best blog' feature each week because competition is generally pretty motivating. Hmmm... so many ideas.
I decided to implement this blogging experiment this term in my Comm 324 class, Communication in Organizations. I am lucky to have a friend from grad school who is a social media scholar and uses blogs in his classes -- shout out to Dr. Matt Kushin! Matt gave me a ton of great tips for how to get the students set up with their blogs and suggestions for how to integrate the blogs into class discussion. I've decided to provide the students with a specific prompt each week. They will post their blog entries based on the prompt prior to class each week, and we will integrate their ideas and observations into class discussion. It will require me to stay extra organized, but luckily I'm pretty good at that. I predict that it will be either A) a brilliant success, or B) a complete disaster... but either way I am eager to try this new approach and see how the students respond to it. My intent is to reflect on the process here in my own blog as we go, so if you're interested in that kind of thing, follow my posts and share the experience with us! I'll share the featured blog of the week as well.
Cheers to trying new things!
