Comment Wall

One of the biggest dilemmas I faced in switching from the Ning group blogging platform to Blogger was losing the great Ning Comment Wall feature. A simple solution — having students create a post called "Comment Wall" at their blogs — has turned out to work just fine! Not as good as Ning's Comment Wall... but definitely good enough!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. Each student creates a simple post called "Comment Wall" in their blog which is easily accessible via the Comment Wall label. The post exists so that visitors to the blog can leave comments there. This is how students comment on each other's websites, and also how they leave thank-yous and other miscellaneous messages for each other. You can see how that works by looking at the Storybook listing for Myth-Folklore. As you can see, each Storybook has a link to the student's blog with Comment Wall. (For the Portfolio, since the writing consists of blog posts, students can just leave comments at those post although, interestingly, some students choose to do that at the Comment Wall instead and, of course, either way is fine!)


DETAILS.

Students do brainstorming and develop their Storybook projects during Weeks 1-5 of the semester, and then in Week 6, they begin commenting on each other's Storybooks. By that time, they have been leaving comments on each other's blogs for five weeks already, so they have become proficient at that, so the Comment Wall makes sense as a mode of communication. They receive feedback on their Storybook in this way for Weeks 6-12, which means every student should get around 10-15 comments total, and sometimes they get more if they are selected as a "free choice" in addition to the commenting group assignments.

I subscribe to the comment feeds for all my students' blogs, and I am really pleased by the quality of comments that are left both at the Comment Wall and also on the individual blog posts. Thanks to the power of Inoreader, you can see an HTML clippings view of the comment feels in my two classes. The Storybook comments are longer than the individual blog post comments as you'll see:
Myth-Folklore Comments
Indian Epics Comments


HISTORY.

For five years, I did all the student blogging in a Ning, and I used the wonderful "Comment Wall" on the Ning Profile page for students to leave comments for one another. That was the single best thing about the Ning: the Comment Wall really fostered CONVERSATION, in addition to comments, because it had a "reply" link with every comment, where you could create a threaded conversation back-and-forth between Comment Walls. Admittedly, though, students rarely took advantage of that option, and I suspect that was because the Ning had a strangely impersonal quality (see below) because of the generic design that did not allow individual customization.

In any case, I was very sorry to give that up that threaded conversation feature when I switched to the blogs, but I'm still pretty happy with how things have worked out: I use an Introduction blog post which serves much the same function as the old Profile Page did (I should write up an explanation of that also!), and the Comment Wall post solution has been working just fine.

One way in which this solution is superior to Ning is that when students visit another person's Comment Wall, they go in through the blog's main page, using the Comment Wall label to then click on to the Comment Wall. This means they get to see at a glance the person's latest posts, giving them an impression of what that person was doing for class over the past week. In the Ning, the Comment Wall was not integrated with the blog in that way and given how nicely the students are customizing their blogs to create a sense of personal presence, I really like the fact that to get to the Comment Wall you go through the blog home page.

Another factor that is contributing to the quality of interchange is how the students are in groups of three for their Storybook comments each week (new random groups each week). So, that means that they are both giving-and-getting comments to-and-from the people in the group. As a result, there is a sense of interchange that results from the round-robin strategy of using the groups. The comments are connected to one another in a kind of conversation among the group members each week.  Much of my approach here was driven by the QuadBlogging approach, along with a combination of randomization (so that everybody can meet everybody) and free choice (so that people can connect and reconnect based on shared interests).


GOALS. I consider student feedback on the Storybook to be one of the most crucial components of the class:

* Students have an audience for their work that is not just me.
* Students tend to provide holistic, personal feedback that is different from the feedback that I provide.
* Students learn how to provide feedback by practicing this skill every week while also receiving feedback each week from others.
* Students receive feedback in a timely fashion that allows them to improve their project week by week.
* Students can access all the project comments in a single place to review each time they spend time working on the project.


GENERAL THOUGHTS

The switch to Blogger which provoked me to use this "Comment Wall" post solution has been one of the best things that has ever happened in my classes. I had not realized what a negative effect the sameness of the Ning interface was having on the interactions: all the Ning blogs looked more or less the same (in a mini-Ning, students all had to use the same blog design), and all the comment walls looked more or less the same also. With Blogger, the sense of individual student presence and personality is so much stronger than it ever was before, which I think has given a big boost to the quality of the comments overall, with much more of a person-to-person dimension. I am very pleased with both the blog commenting and also the project comments at the Comment Walls!

(photo by Alan Stanton at Flickr)

Weekly Blog Comments

The blog commenting assignment is an important part of each week's activity. My goal is for each student to get one or two comments on their storytelling post each week. I can't guarantee that with 100% certainty, but I am pretty happy with how this assignment is working.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. Each week, (most) students publish a storytelling blog post on or by Wednesday. On Thursday, I put the students who have published the storytelling post in random groups of three. On Friday, that assignment becomes available and lasts over the weekend: students respond to the other two students in their group.


DETAILS. One of the tricky things with a self-scheduled course is finding ways for students to interact with each other about the work they are doing. In addition, not everybody does every blog assignment each week, and not everybody does blog commenting each week, but I still want to make sure that everybody gets at least one comment, and hopefully two, on their storytelling blog post. I also want to help students get to know each other, so I ask them to comment on each other's Introduction post as well; if they already know the person (and thus commented on the Introduction post previously), they can choose another post in that familiar person's blog to respond to.

Here's how I make that work:

1. After the Wednesday grace period ends at Thursday noon, I can see which students have done the storytelling blog post; usually there are two or three students in each class who have not done that post (which is fine — they can make that up with extra credit later on).
2. I copy the list of links to student blog addresses (raw HTML) into a text file, each blog address on a separate line. Then I delete the students who did not do the storytelling post.
3. Next, I paste the remaining blog addresses into a randomizer.
4. I then divide up the randomized links into groups of three and paste them into the page that the students see here: Blog Responding.
5. I then copy the plain text (names only) into a text file, copy the group numbers after the names, and sort alphabetically to create the group index.
6. If there is a group with two people instead of three, I just add "choose at random" to that group. If there is a group with only one person, I move a person from another group, and then add "choose from group (whatever)" so that the students in those two groups are responding to each other.

That sounds complicated, but it only takes about 10 minutes per class. I then update the main page of instructions, letting students know the assignment is available starting on Friday through the weekend: Blog Responding.

Just as there are two or three people who don't do the storytelling post each week, there are usually two or three people who don't do the responding. Overall, though, most people do get two comments on their storytelling (plus their Introduction or some other post), and everybody gets one comment. For extra credit, students can choose to comment on additional stories, so that increases the overall amount of commenting that goes on each week (those extra credit comments are free choice). This is not a perfect system, but in terms of overall effectiveness, flexibility for the students, and ease of preparation for me, it works pretty well!


HISTORY. For years, I tried to keep the groups stable over a period of three weeks. That just didn't work, though, because of the students who either didn't do a story in a given week. So, I finally decided to randomize the groups every week, while also having a comment on the Introduction be part of the assignment in order to give a sense of connection even when the groups are random each week.


GOALS. This is a really important assignment for all kinds of reasons!

• Get Feedback. Students give each other great feedback, and the feedback they give each other is often different from the kind of feedback they get from me.
• Learn to Give Feedback. In the process of getting feedback, students also learn about giving feedback and can hone their feedback skills.
• Discover Ideas and Inspiration. By reading other students' writing, students can discover ideas and inspiration that they can use to improve their own writing.
• Building Community. This weekly assignment (along with the Storybook feedback in Weeks 6-12) is a way of building a sense of community in the class.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

I feel really lucky that the students do a great job of commenting on each other's blogs: they are very enthusiastic and offer lots of detail and personal observation. I try to create a positive climate of blog commenting with the comments that I leave on the Favorite Places posts and the Introduction posts from the first week so that when the students start commenting on each other's posts they will do a good job with that. In a separate entry here, I need to explain how I use Feedly to keep an eye on the commenting, just to make sure everything is going well — and it does!

Students regularly comment in the end of semester evaluations how much they like interacting with other students, getting feedback, and sharing ideas online like this. This type of interaction is admittedly different from a regular classroom-based class, and I would argue that this difference is a good thing. I won't contend that the interaction online is better or worse, just that it is a different, and that this difference is a positive value in and of itself. Who knows what kind of non-face-to-face communication students may need to use in their 21st-century careers? I hope that the online interactions in my classes can help prepare them for whatever may come!

(GrammarCatz)