A teacher reflects on blogging as a teaching tool

Leslie Whitaker, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee posted her recent experiences with using blogs as a teaching tool to The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog today.  She had her students blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama's address during the memorial service for the people killed at Fort Hood earlier this week.  She gave them 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they'd written.  The results impressed her.

Here is an expert of some of the responses her students gave:

One student, who had family members in the military, wrote a prose poem that started every line with "I hate", including one line, "I hate that my brother lost six years of his life in the Army."

Another student wrote "I have never witnessed the horrors of a murder. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone I know. I cannot approximate nor rationalize nor understand the emotions involved, and pretending otherwise seems false. So I am detached."

What Ms. Whitaker reflected was that by hearing her students' reactions as they shared with each other, made the experience of watching the president's address far more meaningful than if she had watched it with her family or by herself.   She also felt that her class was able to give voice to the videly divergent views that exist in our country.


She closed by posing the following questions: 

• Is this what blogging at its best offers us as a society, the chance to put the various slivers of reaction to any complex problem side by side? Or is the process I stumbled upon simply a standard educational model of requiring students to think, write, and then discuss? 
• Was 10 minutes too short a time to process a reaction to such a complicated situation? Or is 10 minutes longer than we usually get?"

Here are my responses to her questions:

• I do think that blogging offers us as a global community to put our reactions to complex situations side by side.  That's one of the great powerfulness that blogs and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, allow us to do is respond in a rapid manner as news happens
• I think 10 minutes was long enough.  It gave enough time to think it over with too much time to over-analyze it.  Would her students have been so brutally honest given more time?
  

 What do you think? I encourage you my readers to post your responses as a comment.

National Online Educators Face Struggles with State Regulations

In an article on Oct 13, The Wired Campus, The Chronicle on Higher Education's tech blog, reported that distance educators, state regulators, and accreditors met in Washington, D.C. in an "attempt to reconcile the desires of a booming cross-border online-education industry with the need to protect consumers from shady online operators and resolve their complaints."

The article states that, "The problem, in the eyes of those who want reform, is a decentralized higher-education system that empowers each state to establish its own rules. Distance institutions must often get approval to do business in each jurisdiction. That means untangling a “complex and redundant web of processes, regulations, and standards,” says the report, called “Aligning State Approval and Regional Accreditation for Online Postsecondary Institutions.” It costs lots of money, takes lots of time, and ultimately restricts access to education, the report argues.

“We’ve got a structure here that was created for the 19th and 20th century,” says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, a distance-learning institution based in New York. “It is not appropriate for the 21st century.”

The situation is made worse because some states “create defensive barriers to protect in-state institutions from external competition,” says the new report, published by the Presidents’ Forum, a collaboration of national, adult-serving institutions that embrace online education. Local colleges or professional associations occasionally prod institutions to build protectionist walls. "Some may discriminate specifically against online learning," the report says.

[...] The big issue is who deals with problems like student complaints, administrative misbehavior, and unqualified faculty, he says. State licensing agencies set up their "vast list of rules" to "prevent problems and resolve those that occur," he says, "because no one else can or will."

What do you think? Who should deal with problems like student complaints and unqualified faculty if state regulations are lifted?