Year End Update
In the past 6 weeks, I’ve finally put BlueTube shows online. I still don’t have any comments from the general public and that’s disappointing, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a columnist at the Dallas Morning News. He’s lately gotten into the blogging game and expressed frustration about lack of comments. He certainly exists in a bigger universe than I. Kinda like the tree falling in the woods (or is that the bear?).
Anyway, I still like using the blog for public literary criticism. While it hasn’t made all students think about all things at all times, it’s better than previous attempts. I think they’re learning from it (how to dish out criticism and how to take it). The collaborative end of it has been minimal, at least student-to-student. I have used it for some teacher/student evaluation/feedback, but students apparently find it too time-consuming and non-immediate. They still prefer texting. I keep telling them that one day they’ll look back on the “old days” of texting and think how ancient it was.
So, have I improved my methods of class communications in the past year? Overall, I think, yes. How will I know? I hope the students will tell me. I plan to use the final days of class for review of our year and suggestions on improving the system. To that end, I’ll use the blogsite for at least a portion of the evaluation. I want to make some of the evaluation anonymous and blogging doesn’t facilitate that (without use of email aliases). The challenge next year will be communicating my expectations at the beginning of the year and designing a system from day one that students will be able to access.
I enjoy watching the shows. It is a different way of kind of keeping up with news of the high school.
I’m not sure how big or what kind of an audience you will “grow.”
Do you have any kind of expectations on that?
I’m don’t have any idea what kind of traffic our site (parisisd.net) gets either. would you be shooting for x percent of total traffic?
I guess in an idyllic world you’d like to envision a massive worldwide audience with regular patrons like a bed-ridden 70-year-old PHS alum who now lives in Japan and comments that he/she “watches our shows while undergoing chemo” and that it gives him/her “strength to face another day.” Instead, you get spammers who want to link your site to sex products. How I ultimately want to present our shows to an every-changing world is still a work in progress. I still like blogging for communal critiques, even if it’s a “forced” critique due to grading ties.
If only those we wanted to love us loved us. Instead we rely upon the ones who do. Communities are often not very big but that’s okay isn’t it? The internet might be like the world communities, very splintered but devoted to the group. I think I like this about the blogging and it sounds like you do too. It facilitates dialog?