Grading and using blogs

There's a good ProfHacker post at the Chronicle today about grading student blogs. I like the idea of having two student blog grades - one an overall "I did this" grade, and one a grade of perhaps the two best posts, (perhaps revised and) submitted for review. I love portfolio grades in writing classes, and getting students to explain in their own words why they should get the grade they say they should get on their writing is one of the most effective assignments I've ever given.

When I teach in general, though, I use blogs (or discussion boards) as reading responses. I ask my students to raise a question or to point out something really interesting, and then I highlight the best points when I next see my class. Sometimes I put the blog/board up on the screen to discuss; sometimes I quote the best responses and put them in a handout. I agree with the ProfHacker post that sharing the best work with the class gets you better quality work. Some students might feel left out - I've had students ask me "Why don't you ever quote me in class?" But to my mind that's a good incentive for a better student, and I welcome the chance to talk to them about their blog posts. It might not be that there's anything wrong with their posts, but perhaps other students put the same idea more succinctly or more vividly. Or that they came up with something more insightful, perhaps calling back to previous work! Am I the only one who sometimes has a hard time getting students to realize that there's a whole world of work above the "adequate" category?

Sometimes a student will post a long, interesting entry on something only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Last semester I had a good student (who never spoke in class) post a long entry about how much she learned by trying to track down an Nollywood film in a local retail store. I made sure to respond to her on the board. We wouldn't have time in class to spend on such a tangent - but it was a very educational tangent, related to the topic of the class, and I was thrilled that she shared it.

I don't usually grade anything about the quality of blog/board posts because how would I reflect the credit that student deserved adequately? It was a once-in-a-semester event and I treasured it but didn't try to shoehorn it into any kind of a grading structure. Most of the students weren't so enterprising and most of them wrote perfectly reasonable, interesting entries raising a question or a point of observation each week and I gave them credit for doing it. With very little grading overhead on my part I get a class that's going on through much of the week and a bunch of stepping-off points for discussion in each new week's class meetings.