Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi-experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.
Interesting. I agree. I wish that we didn't have to grade student writing and could just give written or oral feedback. I love the "facade of coherence" comment.
Done right, she said, eliminating grades promotes rigor.
the elimination of grades — if they are replaced with narrative evaluations, rubrics, and clear learning goals — results in more accountability and better ways for a colleges to measure the success not only of students but of its academic programs.
Absolutely. My own institution, Dickinson College, sends ~70% of its students abroad for at least a semester, and most often a year. I have experience in education in different national contexts, and grading conventions simply do not translate.
ending grades can mean much more work for both students and faculty members.
Aye, there's the rub. Those of us who are serious about learning - students and faculty - have to recognize that better learning is more work. On the other hand, it's more fun, too.
When faculty members are providing written, detailed analyses of multiple course objectives and are also — for majors — relating performance to larger goals for the major, so much more is taking place she said, than in a letter grade.
the training that colleges provide to professors before they start producing narrative evaluations, and officials of the no-grades colleges all said that training was extensive, and that faculty members needed mentors as they started out.
IBM will be opening up its software portfolio online to academia to enable faculty to incorporate technology into their curricula. The cloud allows people in higher education to use IBM software at no charge without having to install and maintain it on their respective university's computers.
Instead of concerning himself with applications or even defining a specialized area of research, Demaine chooses projects based purely on his curiosity, regardless of where they may lead. Where others seek answers, Demaine looks for questions. “I collect problems,” he says. “The problems are the key to everything.”