Lessons from Blogging 101

Thanks for those who participated in this first attempt at integrating a blog into my courses. I've learned a few lessons that I will apply in next semester's rendition of MariettaEcon.

1. The content of many of the earlier blog posts did not contain as much "analytic" thought as I was hoping. Rather, many of the posts merely introduced a topic and then "asked" what the reader's thoughts were on the issue. The original post should contain at least one conjecture or quibble regarding the issue at hand. I blame myself for this as not clearly explaining my expectations and not providing enough proper guidance early on. The comments, on the other hand, tended to be very good--I could see that some of you were quite passionate about some issues.

2. From a grading perspective, while it still seems to me that quantity is more important than quality at this point, I suspect I will change the grading scheme to assign point values to posts and comments rather than setting quotas. I will also put more emphasis on spelling and grammar in my grading scheme.

3. I did not have 100% participation, even though 5% of the student's course grade was a stake. Perhaps I should raise the weight of the blog beyond 5%--I'll give this some thought.

4. I need to do a better job of getting students to space out their blogs over the course of the semester---there was too much bunching of posts during the last week of classes. Such procrastination does not allow for adequate time to comment on late blog posts.