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September 24, 2004
Blogging for Grades
The Poor Man has recently discovered he is assigned reading for a few sections of English 101 at USC-Aiken.
I'm sure this isn't the first time freshmen have been assigned to blog and read blogs as a way of working on composition and style, but it's the first time I've seen it. It also works very well as a way for each student to have easy access to every other student's writing, something that was a pain in the ass when I was a freshman. Of course, when I was a freshman, the computer was just a faraway twinkle in the eye of Charles Babbage as he worked on his Difference Engine. OK. I'm not quite that old, and in fact, a very primitive type of computer was being used to break Nazi U-Boat Enigma codes back then.
Perusing the student blogs is kind of fun for a little while. It's obvious that some are more into this aspect of the classwork than others. I also get the feeling that interacting on-line is a new experience for some. Looking at some of the entries on the Poor Man it's also apparent that a few students weren't introduced to sarcasm and irony by their high school teachers. That's all right, though. My high school English teachers were, for the most part, more interested in making sure we could underline subjects once and predicates twice, circle prepositions, put adverbs in parentheses, put squiggly lines under adjectives and get a chicken to crap on each gerund.
Seriously, though. This is a very cool way to encourage out-of-the-classroom interaction between students in a freshman writing course. Kudos to Dr. Lynne Rhodes.
Posted by Half-Cocked at September 24, 2004 06:31 PM