Skip to main content

Why Blogging Like This Creates Meaningful Education

For this capstone professional writing class, ENGL 515, we have been assigned a normal project with a unique twist, which makes the project more realistic. This semester, we were supposed to write five to six blogposts, which is a common writing task assigned to students on multiple levels of education. Usually when teachers or professors assign a blog post or a discussion post, it is supposedly for a community or audience of at least peers, but what typically happens is that students read the prompt or question and only interact with the posts of their peers if it is required.

For the 515 blog, that is not the case. This assignment is vastly different from a short-essay answer on a discussion forum or website. This group blog on Blogger acts as both an assessment and a teaching tool. It is what Bruce Frey refers to as an Authentic Classroom Assessment: "a classroom assessment task that involves the student deeply, both in terms of cognitive complexity and intrinsic interest, and are meant to develop or evaluate skills and abilities that have value beyond...the assessment itself” (Frey, 2012, p. 14). The reason that this blogging assignment is different than the others and the reason that it matters is because it gives us skills that are valuable outside the classroom. The blogging process goes like this: getting and writing down ideas, drafting, revisiting, creating it for public consumption, readying it for publication, checking it post publication, and advertising. This list describes many more skills than one gets by responding to a discussion forum once a week. The key part here is the process. Students have to think of an idea, then they take notes, then they revisit their notes, draft up a blog for an audience, and start the publication process. This process is educational, teaching students the processes of creation and publication.

It also is a form of differentiated learning, giving the students choice in what they write about and what roles they choose in the Blogger team. Some students are more inclined to lead. Others want to edit. And others are social-media savvy. We're all writing, critically thinking, and collaborating–but we're choosing our route. This differentiates the assignment by allowing multiple relevant paths to success. Everyone learns differently, which is why student choice is such a powerful tool. This is a great way to intrinsically motivate students, which is difficult to do in pandemic school.

Those of us in the English crowd learn early on that the goal of every literary character is self-knowledge. It is also the goal and an important intrinsic motivator in education if a teacher intentionally fosters it. Instead of maintaining the school-to-job mindset from the industrial revolution, we should foster the development of self-knowledge through interaction with content. Let’s create education that matters to the soul of the learner. With assignments like this class blog, in which we analyze the world around us and write about it, and with the team-building and publishing tasks that we choose, we are engaging with our education in order to grow and learn about ourselves–and that carries far beyond the classroom!

Source: Frey, Bruce B. “Defining Authentic Classroom Assessment.” Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, vol. 17, ser. 2, 2012, pp. 1–18. 2, doi:https://doi.org/10.7275/sxbs-0829.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Proposed Plan for Socially Distanced User Study of Wix.com

Plan for User Study: www.Wix.com I. Introduction Although a usability test is unlikely in this socially-distanced and pandemic-filled world, if I were to do one, this post describes how I would see myself doing it as well as a basic overview of my plan of study, had this been an option. II. Identifying Users 1. The users of this site align most with the age group of 20-35. This demographic uses Wix primarily for educational purpose and small business website platforms. 2. Users in this case will work through website creation, as that is the main function of the site. III. Target Identification of Problems Below are the main heuristics and an associated question to further explore the content of the site as I plan a User Study. A. Engagement Are the screen and workplace too crowded, and are they layered to maximize engagement? Is the site   nested too deeply with helpful tools to be useful? B. Error Tolerance Does the Help Desk analysis show enough specific problem de...

Design Surrounds Us

Despite surrounding us in every object that we own, encounter, and interact with, design is oftentimes an invisible sort of force. Good design generally directs the user without being overtly noticeable, which means that it is often easier for us to pick out elements of bad design—that is, we most often notice design when we’re frustrated or confused by it. However, when we feel these emotions, it is important to understand which aspect of a design has caused them. Sometimes the failure in design is not caused by the most obvious component; indeed, the design of a specific frustrating component may have been the best design available if there are external and unmalleable constraints that it had to work within. Noting which level a design fails at, then, will make addressing design concerns much more exact and relevant, as critiquing a specific frustration without addressing the wider problematic system brings about no progress. While perhaps not the most exciting topic, a strong exampl...

Think “Experience Architecture”

At the beginning of this class, we were assigned readings and videos about airports in order to conceptualize the main theme of the course, experience architecture. Experience architecture is the design of spaces (architecture) for users (experience), such as an airport. In de Botton's work, "A Week at the Airport," de Botton addresses a doubt about experience architecture that sheds light on the scope in which the concept applies. "Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration...[and] yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of a chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic." (de Botton, 2009, p. 3-4). Simply put, experience architecture is design that is meant for the experience of the user. De Botton communicates this through an exp...