“reading and then writing”
2005 June 11
In “Blogs in Postgrad Studies (DMT)“, Grant Matthews writes:
I’ve been using Social Software (Blogs) in my own teaching practice for a year now with mixed success. You can’t force students to be “sociable” and even the best student bloggers’ posts seem forced. Many of them don’t blog weekly and even more are unsure of what to write about. Using blogs as an assessment task (and reporting function) would appear to be counter productive.
I want to try again (Sem 2, 2005) with a class blog (participation voluntary, but as an alternative to a reflective essay), topics based around the students own research interests. The emphasis also shifts to reading and then writing.
… which makes a metric tonne of sense to me. That’s how open source development works. You read quite a lot of code before you start writing. Maybe you fix a few bugs, add a little feature. In teaching programming to late high school kids, this worked well too. It’s also how we usually teach postgrads. If we buy the idea that blogging is a new form, it makes sense that we ask them to read a first and then write when they “get it”.
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