So what decisions did the MMC 2100 team make about blogging in our class?

The consensus was that very few of the 250 students in the course have their own blogs. But we’ll find out before we start the assignment. 

We weren’t sure how many of our students are reading blogs. We think that those who are reading blogs may be reading ones that are more entertainment oriented rather than media-related blogs. Again, we’ll need to find out. 

We agreed that we want the students to make several posts to get the sense of that aspect of blogging. We decided on having each post be four to eight paragraphs. That would encourage the students to have more to say than a few words but to be concise. As I reminded the lab instructors, “The students will be writing, but we’ll be grading.” Each lab instructor will be reading 40 blogs. 

We also decided to develop a grading form for the blog assessment. We’ll post the form for the students to review before they begin their blogs. Having an evaluation form will help the student know our expectations and will help us be more consistent and efficient in our grading.