But to us too it seems that this will be a good place to stop

As you do your last round of commenting, I'd appreciate it if you dropped a comment or two here about the blog thing as a whole.

As a general rule, I want to avoid, as much as possible, making students do things that seem pointless, irritating, or otherwise bogus, so your honesty (laud or lambast) is important to me. If you'd prefer to do this anonymously through the course evaluation, I completely understand.

What worked?
What didn't?
If you were running it how would you do it?
How often did you take a look at the links/info I put up?
What else might be helpful?
Would you do this again, or would some other regular writing assignment be better?


I, for one, appreciate all your hard work and diligent participation here.
Jeff.

"True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises from the enjoyment of oneself; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions."
                                            -Joseph Addison, politician, writer, and famous conversationalist.1711

Comments

[Tyler Halpin-Healy]

This was effective, but more often than not I would just post and not come back to it, I feel that if when one had to post a discussion topic, they would have to comment on their thread, it might be more productive. This is preferable over writing assignments, and everything you put up here was helpful or at least enjoyed.

[Mike]

I really enjoyed this blog site. I basically checked it out on a weekly basis (whenever commenting time rolled around), but all of the links were either informative or amusing, which is definitely great. I think that this is a really effective approach to online discussions, and it is a lot better than weekly writing assignments. When I was either posting comments or creating a new thread, I would have to peruse each book to find quotes to use, and this greatly helped in my remembering specific quotes and understanding each work as a whole.

I guess the only thing that you may consider changing is the way people comment. Perhaps you can add a third required weekly comment, in which each student has to directly respond to a previous comment. That way, students may go on the site more than once a week.

Overall, though, I think this site is a success.

[melissa im]

Coming in at semester I was a "newbie" to the website but found it fun on those moments of insomnia. But I agree with Tyler in the fact that I never revisited my comments. I believe commenting is a way to get things out on paper... one thing that I would have liked to try was during class maybe once a week have a piece of paper and when you have a thought or comment jot it down and then look back on it later or turn it in.

In class its hard to get to everyone's comments and I feel like this webpage is a place were we can share our thoughts yet sometimes I forget what I had wanted to say in class, so the piece of paper would be helpful.

As for the information that was posted I enjoyed being able to look onto the feed and see a picture or listen to an audio clip. It makes what your reading something real that you can connect to other items.

And although I admit to posting right before class, overall it was beneficial. And a place that seemed like we could loosen up [after Jeff's comments coming into second semester]

[Erik Zambrano]

I really liked the whole web system. I thought it added a lot to class dimensions because at times people would refer to something they read on the website. I also liked the pressure created by the two discussion topics because they forced you to read over some stuff and articulate a question or an idea very much like class discussion. I also liked the extra links people put up because they were a good way to spend some time doing nothing and gaining some extra information.

[Elisabeth Fabila]

No writing assignment please! I enjoyed this system because it was effective at prompting discussion about the texts amongst ourselves.

The only suggestion I have is to let us know Monday who is up for discussion topics that way we know we have until Wednesday to come up with one.

As far as the links goes, I looked at them when I could. They were on the whole quite interesting and the pictures/paintings were even more so. The fusion of the two arts was a great complement to the class.

The fact that we were also able, toward the later part of the course, to respond to a simple quote from the book was very generative. So I think that should definitely be kept in place.

As an incentive, maybe you should also award the person with the most interesting discussion topics and number of comments so as to really get some heated discussion going. Comments on our responses is also helpful.

Sometimes I am personally curious as to how you would react to a response I have written Jeff...but anyway thats just to appease my curiosity.

Overall, the website is awesome...don't ever get rid of it.

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