Course blogs are everywhere these days. While Tumblr and instagram might be the “it” social media of the moment, a course blog’s suitability for exchanging ideas, presenting research, and engaging in an open, distributed conversation is hard to beat. Course blogs come in all shapes and sizes of course, but the format I’ve been using extensively this year came about with the help of Gardner Campbell. I’ve deployed it in a range of course settings, from seminars with six undergraduates to upper-level courses with thirty-eight. It has worked beautifully for helping new graduate students come to terms with historiography as well. Several people have asked me about the set-up, and although it can be explained with spoken words and hand motions, it will be easier to lay out here. So what follows is partly a plug for this particular configuration and partly a “how-to” for those who want to try it themselves.
Why does a motherblog need a spouse?
Like many course blogs, this format uses a “motherblog” that syndicates posts from all of the contributors’ individual blogs. Each student has their own “childblog” which they can customize according to their own preferences. The student’s blog becomes an eportfolio of their work, a “deliverable” they can take away (and continue to build on) when the course ends. The motherblog aggregates the feeds from all members of the course in one easy to find and search place.
Mother Blog
Child Blog
But how do you handle the comments? One of the main advantages of having students blog is the amplification of the audience. Instead of completing an “assignment” for me (“Is that what you wanted?”), they are writing for a much more diverse and interesting audience — it includes me, but is mainly comprised of their classmates and anyone else who happens to be interested in what they have to say. Commenting gives us a chance to engage in a multilateral conversation about the substance of the posts over a few hours, several days, or the entire term. But since every student has her own blog, the comments on a particular post are going to be attached to the individual blog, rather than the course blog. (You can set the motherblog up so that comments on the syndicated posts appear on the course blog, but then they won’t be attached to the student’s blog.) This means you have to click around and look for a conversation to join, which could be serendipitously fun, but might also be a pain in the neck.
The solution is a second blog that aggregates all of the comment feeds from the students’ blogs. I think of it as a (mostly invisible) spouse to the motherblog, because it does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of pulling content together and pushing it forward. But like many spouses, it does this quietly and without much recognition. It will work just as hard as the motherblog, but never rise to a search engine’s attention. This blog of the collected comments from all of the students’ blogs appears in an RSS feed on the mother blog. When someone goes to main website to see what’s been posted recently, the comments on those posts are visible on the front page as well. Clicking on a post or an interesting comment will take you directly to the student blog you want to engage.
Comment feed on Mother Blog
Student Blog Post
It’s elegant, functional, and not hard to set up:
1) Create and set-up your motherblog to aggregate the posts from all of your contributors. (If you don’t have access to a WordPress enterprise installation, you can use an RSS multiplier to get the similar kind of functionality as you have with the syndication application.)
2) Create another blog to do the same for the comments.
3) Syndicate the individual blogs to the comment blog:
4) Select the “comments” feed:
5) On the motherblog, pull the comment blog through the RSS feed and relabel the RSS feed as a comment feed:
6) Drag the “recent comments” widget on the mother blog to the “inactive” area of the dashboard:
7) Create a link to the comment blog on the motherblog (optional):
8) That’s it!
It seems that rats really made us think this week. As Megan says, go team rat! I’m looking forward to a good careful discussion today of the paradox that many of you noted in your posts – namely that we seem to project the worst parts of human “nature” onto our images of rats in order to deny them consideration and validate their destruction, at the same time we embrace their suitability as research subjects due to their similarities to humans. I was thinking about your posts this morning as I read this fascinating piece about (human!) empathy and our penchant for dehumanization. It turns out that animal behavior tells us a lot about ourselves. We often criticize non-scientific explanations of animal behavior as “anthropomorphic,” and yet it seems that attributing human-like qualities to non-human entities (such as Wilson the volleyball) or the geometric shapes in the puzzle (see video in the article) is just something we like to do. The stunning twist (for me at least) is not our penchant for anthropomorphism, but the ease with which we de-humanize people and attenuate the empathy we instinctively feel for non-human animals.
