So, you guys make your students blog pseudonymously?
It seems awfully wrong to force a student to put class work in public domain, forever visible, warts and all. I mean, the whole point of a class is a learning exercise so the material may have flaws or may not best represent the student.
I don't think anyone is recommending that.
I think the question is whether one makes students blog for the whole class or just for the student and the professor or whether one has students follow a blog and then comment on their thoughts some other way. We (these fora) have had huge trainwreck threads on why making students comment--not blog themselves, but just publicly comment on public blogs--was unethical.
As it turns out, the more that I think, the less inclined that I am even to have my students follow a blog and then comment in any fashion or have any kind of blog on their own learning. Better pedagogy for my purposes is to focus on hard-copy notebooks that can be used in class for the students' own benefit than to play into their notions of electronic gizmos. I'm just going to eliminate the electronic discussion all together for this face-to-face class and grade the snot out of the first few assignments to try to get the writing levels that don't make my eyes bleed instead of trying to get students to gently realize how poorly they write.
