Blogging Students

The above photo is a view out of a window near a classroom where I am currently teaching at Albright College, on their main campus in Reading, Pennsylvania.  I teach in an accelerated program for adults who are over 23 years old, and the current course is Diversity.  This is a great program for people that never finished their  4 year degree and want to; catered to working adults, one night a week for 4 hours.  For more information:  http://www.albright.edu/accelerated/

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend a one day teaching conference at Albright, where I am an adjunct professor.  The keynote speaker was a professor from Virginia Tech named Gardner Campbell.  Dr. Campbell has taken the use of digital communication to a very high art form in the classroom, and has had his students blogging assignments for years. Here is a link to Gardner's musings:  http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/ 

I know that the students I teach are very tired of writing paper after paper, so for the first time I offered them the option of blogging rather than writing a final paper.  The same guidelines will apply, length, must be clean, well written, analytic and error free.  They must still reference professional sources and cite the work appropriately.  This is a paradigm shift for me, and for them...a few students are going to give it a try, others are choosing to stick with the final paper format.  

The topic of this class is Diversity, which mainly focuses on systems of white privilege that create oppression for many people in our society.  A sample of an essay that we read is by an author named Peggy McIntosh.  She is a white woman who started writing a list of ways that she is privileged, just by being white...little things that I had never even thought of before, such as always being able to purchase band aides that match my skin color; of normally have a boss or coworkers that are also the same race that I am.  Such as being able to move into nearly any neighborhood and neighbors will be friendly or at least neutral to me.  This is not the case for many minorities.  This essay is thought provoking and worth a read:  http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf

I am going to blog about this new experience in the classroom.  Even thought blogging is nothing new and has been around for years, it is new for me as a teaching tool, and I will be excited to report the results.  One thing Dr. Campbell mentioned really stuck with me; potential employers will routinely Google someone they are interviewing.  How great will it be for a student to have a well written, academic style blog that shows up in a Google search?  It is a competitive world out there, hundreds of resumes being received for nearly every decent job.  Any little tool students can use to set themselves apart will help.