Will R. posted about a University of Alaska online course on educational blogging. I liked the same thing that Will did… which was section five of the course, which asks the teachers to consider the following questions:

1.  How will the writing be structured?  Will students respond to a topic, a question, a text?   How will they respond to each other?

2.  To what degree will this writing be public?  Will you use this writing as a foundation for other more formal types of writing?   

3.  What are your expectations for the student writing?   Will the posts be „free writes‰ without considerations for correctness?   Or,  do you expect students to use spell checkers,  to proofread their writing, to take a look at each others work before they post?  

4.  What will your role be in the conversation?   Are you going to respond occasionally to the student writing?   Will you reserve the right to remove offensive or inappropriate posts?   

5.   How will you facilitate access to the weblog?   Will students be expected to find computers with internet access on their own?   Will you take them to a computer lab once each week?   Is there a computer in the room they can use?   If you expect students to find access outside of class,  will this be equitable for students that don‚t have computers at home?  

6.  What role will the weblog play in your classroom?   Will you bring exerpts from the weblog into class for discussion?   If so,  in what ways will you analyze the writing?   

7.   In terms of collaboration, will this weblog only be for your class?   Will you invite older/younger students to participate?   What about content „experts‰ with knowledge about your particular area of interest?   

8.  Have you considered the notion of student ethnographers, or researchers to examine the weblog with you as it unfolds?   What do students think about this activity?   What do they say about how it influences their learning about the content in your course, as well as their ability to write and to collaborate with others?  

9.  How will you assess the student writing?   Will students be graded at all?  Will their grade be based on participation?   Or, will you create a scoring guide or rubric to assesss the quality of the writing?

After thinking through some of these questions, post a plan for your class weblog on the course weblog.   Please try to answer some of the questions above.   Provide a brief context for your weblog, as well as your expectations for student participation.   This response should be posted by May 7th.  

What I like most about these questions is that they are fantastic questions to think about educational technology projects, especially in the humanities. I think I may start using them as questions to ask Beacon teachers when they want to incorporate tech into their classes.