For the first time in my teaching career I am teaching a first-year microeconomics unit. I thought I'd try to develop a blog to help maintain contact with students and to provide information. This is the result.
Students have access to online resources separate to this blog.
So far a number of students have approached me to ask about material on the blog but there has been next to no online commentary. It is an experiment and if it is revealled in student evaluations as being of little interest to students I will rethink or perhaps cancel the experiment.
Comments on the idea of using a blog as a teaching aid are welcome - particularly from fellow economics teachers. Of course if you are not an enrolled student in this unit you should place those comments here rather than on the Microeconomics blogsite.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
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3 comments:
Harry, I am not sure this is going to work, especially with first year students. You would be better of using the discussion board on WebCT/Blackboard.
First, the students already go there to download the materials. Second, the students can start their own threads there. Third, they can continue the discussion in the chat rooms available there. Fourth, the outside world does not have access to it so the students are less likely to be intimidated to contribute.
The fact that in my macro class there have been over 130 posts (two weeks after the first lecture) perhaps documents this.
Harry, UniSA has used blogs in the past and (I believe) still does so as well as using WebCT-style programs. There's a 2007 paper written by some of the staff who use blogs in their courses here (link goe to cached copy, link at top of copy to .doc paper).
Might be worth a look for ideas.
I once in the disco era setup a forum for students in third year micro. It was a disaster. but that's because they were doing all the talking.
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