What has always struck me as interesting is that students almost never comment on the blogs from different sections, even though the blog assignments and curriculum are nearly exactly alike. This suggests that there is a real social comfort forged in the classroom that translates to their online behavior.

I just did a spot check that might be of interest. On one randomly chosen blog, the most recent ten comments broke down like this: two were from me, one was from the author, three were from groupmates, and the other four were from classmates outside of the author’s group. By the end of the semester, this is pretty representative of the class.

As for keeping their blogs? Most of the students in my Intro to Ethics classes are taking it as a general education requirement (typically for a business degree), and I get the sense that they don’t particularly want to associate themselves with their philosophy assignments. (I can’t imagine why not.) Once or twice in the past few years a student has continued using the space to blog after the term, something I accidentally discovered because I was still subscribed to the feed. In those instances, I have unsubscribed because the new use of the blog wasn’t particularly interesting to me, and it felt a little bit like creepy eavesdropping to read about former students’ personal exploits. Were the class in a discipline more closely related to their personal or academic interests, I wonder if more students would continue to use the sites.

From my own perspective, I have the same students for an entire year, which is broken into four marking periods. My plan is to rotate the groups at the start of each new marking period, thereby creating an opportunity for students to read others’ writing and get a sense of different styles, approaches, etc. I suppose something similar could happen at the mid-point of a semester on the university calendar.

Of course students are always free to read the blogs of those outside their groups, but I think you raise the good point that this type of organic blog-browsing might not take place on the students’ own volition. Some type of stick or carrot needs to be involved. At least by rotating groups I know students will see a variety of writing.

As for the life-long writing hopes, as I mention in my post about the pros and cons of different blogging structures, I see real value in the blog as a launching pad for a student’s interest in writing, though I too have similar doubts about whether or not this will actually happen. From the secondary school side of things, I think the blog can serve as a form of digital portfolio for the students who can then use it as an integral part of their college admissions file. While many high school students might blog, hopefully having them write about academic subject matter might shift the content away from angst-ridden navel-gazing (I’m being somewhat hyperbolic here; not all teenagers, or their writing styles, fall into this category) and toward more outwardly analytical writing. Perhaps the carrot of “distinctiveness” on one’s college application will prompt some of these students to keep blogging.

Dividing the class into reading groups is an innovative approach and solves the manageability problem. Even better, groups would make blogging more intimate, fostering one value I mentioned in a comment to Nate, a student’s sense of audience. Is there ever any cross-pollination between the groups, i.e. do any students ever end up reading or commenting upon other group’s posts, totally on their own? Also, I wonder if you have a sense of whether students carry on with their own blogs after the semester is over? I like to think of blogging as a way to turn students into lifelong writers, but I’m not sure, in practical terms, whether this is true.

@Nate – Thanks for stopping by. Yes, it was your comment (among others) on Mark’s blog that made me think of the post, but I hadn’t seen your response until now. The way you’ve analyzed the pros and cons of the two methods is extremely helpful. I’ll be watching to see how your experiments work out – I’m especially interested in how the considerations that are germane for high school students vs. college students change your strategies. Good luck!

I’m starting school next week and am figuring out precisely how to roll out my class blog structure and what resources we’ll use. I teach on the high school level and will be using this structure with ~35 students, so it’ll be busy, but I’ll also see the students every day, which will allow for more feedback, tech troubleshooting, or perhaps even dedicating class time to feedback and blog synthesis. I had already planned to follow through with much of what you suggest — everyone using Wordpress and everyone using Google Reader as the RSS reader. I do, however, like the groups for blogging response and synthesis as this should, as you say, help students focus on both audience and material to read, process, and comment on.

Thanks again for your insights and suggestions. If I find myself with any free time I’ll hopefully post a follow-up about how the progress is going and how high school students take to the blogging format.