How blogging can help student writing Yesterday, I participated in on a conference panel where we all talked about blogging, rss feeds, podcasting, and screencasting. There were two chemistry professors (one was our own Michelle Francl), another writing professor, and myself. The other writing professor, Scott Warnock from Drexel University, demonstrated how he was using tablet pcs to comment on student writing while I talked about the CSEM course that Doug Blank and I are teaching together. One of the things that we all ended up talking about was the way that blogging can help students find a voice, learn to generate their own topics, and write to audiences other than their teachers. This has been one of the most powerful lessons I've learned in teaching this CSEM course. I've always tried to do this in other ways, but blogging makes it really easy.

Then, today, I ran across this post by another professor who is also using blogging extensively in a writing course. He uses a quote from Donald Graves to illustrate his point (and mine!).

Barbara Ganley is also blogging in the classroom and has lots of thoughts and connections to others who are doing so. ¶ 4:34 PM, posted by Laura