Student Blogs for More Learning?

Blogging is an application of technology that would not have been easy to forsee. After all, who would have predicted that 9 million blogs would exist today, with a new one being created every seven seconds. Millions of Americans sit at their computers daily yakking away at the keyboard about their hobbies, boyfriends, girlfriends, and misery. Yak, yak, yak. Blog, blog, blog. It's cathartic, I suppose. Educational blogging is an even more improbable concept.

Student blogs, like faculty blogs, are new to the blogosphere. As such, their efficacy in promoting learning is untested. There are a few English faculty who have students create blogs in order to improve their writing skills. As far as I am aware, I will be the first economics instructor in the world to require students to blog as a way to increase their learning of economics.

That's right! My plans are to require student economics blogs in my honors macro principles class this fall. Will blogging improve their writing skills, their research skills, their facility with technology? I hope so, because monitoring and commenting on as many as 35 student blogs is going to be some work. That midnight oil is going to be burning a lot this fall.

I'll need to develop a rubric so that students will know how their blogs are going to be graded. I'll also have to teach them how to create a blog plus a little HTML. I'll show my students what I consider to be an exemplary student blog. You can see it too. Just click on the title of the post and visit Cantillon's Paradise.