As the session gets underway, we’ve had some interesting new blog requests for new teaching blogs. I have been asked for information on how to get students writing good blog posts, and how these can be assessed.
Read on for my reply…
Academic Blogging
In an academic setting, student’s blog postings are often made in response to the various educational resources presented ie lectures, readings, or case studies. Word length ranges are usually specified ie 250-750 words. The aim of the activity often has a component of “demonstrate that you have read and understood the materials” and often asks student to write a reflective c500 words blog post explaining whether they agreed or disagreed with material presented, or to compare and contrast theories presented, or to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of a case.
A different blog-related task is to ask the student to locate 3 other articles on a class topic and blog about those new resources – it could een extend to posting a draft annotated bibliography to support a larger essay or assignment. I have also seen blogging used to host on online debate, where students in teams wrote for or against a topic, and guest/expert markers judged who won the debate. Feedback was made to each team via the blog commenting feature.
As you can see, for each different type of blogging task – the marking criteria is subtly different as it flows from what is asked of the students in the task. So for ease of writing good marking criteria, first you need to design and write up a good blogging task!
Marking criteria examples
For example, if the activity is to “demonstrate that you have read and understood the materials” - and to write a reflective c500 words (ie blog post) explaining whether students agreed or disagreed with points of views taken in readings required for that week, then the marking criteria would be around how clearly they have taken a position, how well they have explained and justified that position, referring to (all/some/few) the materials presented.
If the blog post was a compare and contrast type of writing activity, then the marking criteria might ask for a certain number eg 3-5 similarities which are noted and justified, and a certain number of differences noted and justified.
You might want the students to summarise the material, or take a certain point of view in which case the marking criteria would be about synthesising the different sources into a cohesive argument. For an annotated bibliography, it would be about the number, variety and quality of each source, and perhaps the succinctness or helpfulness of the annotation.
Giving marks for commenting on students’ posts
Similarly, if you want the students to read and comment on each other’s work, there should be an aim for this which can be used to shape the marking criteria. For example, if there’s an international perspective focus in your task, the students might be asked to find 3 posts where the situation described in the blog post is different to how things are done in their country/culture – and be asked to write a 350 word reply (ie comment) to each explaining how things are done in their country/culture and to offer an opinion as to the pros and cons of doing it this way.
If the purpose of the post is to write up a project proposal and the purpose of the comments is to provide feedback and constructive criticisms to students as to their proposal, then there might be 0-5 marks offered for the quality of the feedback over three criteria ie research question, research method, quality of sources.
When students need to learn and practice public blogging and social media integration
Where you have journalism, communication, media or PR students, they really need to practice being media/comms professionals. They would benefit from getting up to speed with both public blogging and twitter use as communication channels. You could try what Dr. Ted Mitew (Arts) does in his “Convergent Media” class (BCM112 ie first year subject!). The students have to use Twitter “tweets” with links to material, and blog postings every week. This is called their “learning portfolio” and they submit a selection of their posts and tweets with reflective commentary twice during semester. The submission is done via the Assignment tool in the eLearning space ie formally. The students are also encouraged to share and learn from each others’ discoveries, so they use a twitter hashtag #bcm112, which creates a feed of the students links to their discovered resources. It also teaches them how to use hashtags and twitter properly for best social media practice. Essential comms skills for some professions!
Another great public/media assessment is to swap a group presentation for a group produced YouTube Video presentation/story (3-4mins). The students have to create a YouTube account, make a YouTube clip, upload it, post it to the blog. Then view other students videos and use the facebook “like” button or a voting/poll tool to vote for their favourites. There can be some marks (maybe 5-10 marks for example) given in the assessment criteria that comes from how many votes they got. But you still might want the majority of marks coming from teacher’s mark or formal peer review using assessment criteria matrix. See http://blogs.uow.edu.au/thepitch for a sample of a video competition in the blog.
I hope this is helfpul, and if you have any questions you can email me at Sarah Lambert – slambert@uow.edu.au.
