kfitz

Blogging and the Classroom, Redux

A weekend post by Liz Lawley returned me to my recent thoughts about how to integrate a group-authored blog into my fall class on the Literary Machine. Liz has ingeniously leveraged MovableType’s calendar-based entries as a replacement for those clunky, kludgy, commercial course management packages.

There was a bunch of buzz last month among a number of bloggers pondering the expansion-of-MT-beyond-the-blog: Rory worked through the MT naming-conventions problem in order to create and maintain other parts of his site via MT; Matt Haughey explored the potential for site management created by MT’s database-driven structure; see also Brad Choate, Doug Bowman, and even — sorta — Jason Kottke.

In terms of course management systems, my campus has started experimenting with Moodle, an open-source (and less clunky, and less miserably interfaced) option, which I’ll be using in both my fall classes. What I’d love, though, would be some way to tie Moodle and MT together: integration of (public, multi-author) course blog and (private, single-author) course materials, a synthesis of the professorial aspects of the class (assignments, readings, etc.) and the student-driven aspects (discussion, presentations, etc.).

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