thanks for your comment and your reply in seesmic.

You ask about the students ease with the rubric…my students didn’t say that they had any difficulties with it (or appear to have problems with it), so not sure if they would have preferred a bulleted list or not.

What is interesting to me about your question is that i thought about it when i was writing it and decided against defining it better/more clearly… in part because i was somewhat uncertain about the activity, and didn’t want to be so locked down in case i needed flexibility… now after having had the experience with it, i would definitely make it clearer…more specific… bullets will do the trick nicely. It would definitely make it easier to use from the student, as well as from the instructor’s perspective.

so here is my start on bulleting the qualities of a #4 blog post: ( i see them falling into 4 major chunks)
1. The blog post is thoughtful, original, relevant, and provides insight to your learning and your engagement with your classmates, the activities, and course content.
2. It also provides feedback and suggestions on how and what would improve the course and your own learning.
3. Four point posts are reflections on your learning process in the course that apply, report, explain, defend, refute, question, self-assess, summarize, synthesize, and analyze your engagement with course content and as a member of our class community.
4. Four point posts make your thinking and learning visible,
supported by specific references from course discussions, the course manual, the presentations, the courses for observation/interviews, course readings, diigo resources and/or external sources.

i might also include something about addressing the questions posed for each blogging assignment (fyi – each assignment provided the students with some questions to provide connection and context to course activities and to help guide/frame their blog posts.

for example: reflections blog assignment from module 2
what did you learn? what can you apply?
After viewing the presentation, doing the reading assignments, discussing it all with your classmates, and listening to the introductions and coursemap tours of the courses posted for observation, please reflect on what you have learned. What did you learn that you did not know before? How will you apply what you have learned to your own course? What decisions have you made so far about your own online course? What did you observe about yourself during your own completion of these learning activities? How do you interact? What is working for you? What would you change/suggest to make it better for you?

so what do you think Kate? better?

thanks for sharing your rubric. It’s very useful to me in understanding how you used blogging as a learning/teaching instrument for this particular course.

I note Michael’s comments on blog titling and your response. Vive la difference!

I do have one query, and it relates to whether or not your students had difficulty working out what the ‘qualities’ were in your descriptor statement for the task. Perhaps it’s unfamiliarity with the rubric on my part (we tend not to use rubric formats in the Australian higher education sector), but I would have found a bulleted list of ‘qualities’ of use in determining the focus of my response and clarifying the evaluation I would eventually receive.

Many thanks again for your generosity in sharing.

Collegially …

For my course, the purpose of the blog is as a metacognitive journaling activity, to get students to reflect on their learning, to make their thinking and feelings visible to me, to show me how they are interpreting the course content, applying it, refuting it, etc. And to demonstrate to me what and how they are learning and how the process and experience could be improved. To achieve that i have chosen to impose the subject line criteria as part of the way that their posts are evaluated. From an andragogical perspective the post titles become advanced organizers that assist the readers to know what they are going to read about in advance, and are a mechanism used to get the writers to synthesize an abstract of the content of their post into an single sentence. There are teaching and learning benefits from both perspectives.

All that to say, that i am not advocating my rubric criteria as a measure of effective authentic blogging, but rather it is an online journaling learning activity in my course that has very specific requirements with very specific learning objectives. So the purpose is not to teach them to blog per se, but rather to get them to articulate thoughts about how they learn.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to any additional thoughts you may have. I am curious about you and your interests. Care to share?