www.sociologyfornerds.com/2012/06/call-to-sociology-teachers-people-learn.html

I hope you can figure out how to get through the problem of people not turning in their work until the last minute.

In my case, having each student responsible for blogging about one of the tools and one of the readings over the course of the semester ended up leading to a nice rhythm. That, along with having everyone post one comment on any of the 4-5 posts that came up a week seemed to go well.

Along with this, I have enjoyed assigning previous student’s blog posts to future students which might be fun to throw in the mix for conversation.

To answer Roger’s question, one of the ways I developed an audience for my students’ blog posts last year was to tweet about those that I was reading. Since the course was an Intro to DH, it turned out a number of people in my Twitter network were interested to read my students’ work. And I went out of my way to invite those people whose essays we were reading to come and leave comments.

I think cross-campus commenting is an interesting idea, but I wonder how easy it would be to leave germane comments if the students weren’t sharing reading. It would be hard enough to be really engaged without the context of the classroom, but without sharing readings, I think it would be almost impossible.

Another way to plug in to an audience would be to try to get students’ parents/families involved in reading their work. But that wouldn’t spread across the class very well.

Hmm…let’s knock our heads on this for a while.

Roger’s idea is great–can we set up networks of DH classes that create a peer audience, or can we teach students to solicit outside feedback (via Twitter, pingbacks?).
I’d be interested in discussing ways of teaching and assessing non-written blogs (video blogs, comic strip blogs), too.