Comments on: Classsourced blogging

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:25:15 +0000

…and then the blog police will come and get you

By: Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:03:37 +0000

I didn’t necessarily mean implications for the number of marks you give them. I meant that before I was a blogger, I grew up debating things in English, and I was involved in long discussions online in other fora, including email cc lists and more formal listservs, usenet, and blog comment threads. Blogging grew naturally out of that. For someone who hasn’t *interacted* with the internet in that way — who hasn’t used *the web as a conversation* before — blogging might well be a big and new and rather uncomfortable leap. And the entirely predictable result is that you end up with blog entries which don’t smell like blog entries at all, but rather like dutiful school essays.

By: aaron

aaron — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:06:16 +0000

Felix: I agree, although I think an important reason why many of the foreign students come to New Zealand to study is to learn or improve their english, so asking them to write a blog post would help in that regard. In any case I allocate very few marks to the actual grammar, the ideas are more important.

By: Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:19:17 +0000

Have you wondered about the implications of that? Blogging is hard enough for native English speakers…

By: aaron

aaron — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:44:53 +0000

Felix: It depends on the subject. In my econ class, I guess about 75% of the students would not have English as their first language. In other subjects (e.g. law, literature etc), the proportion of native English speakers is higher.

By: Chewxy

Chewxy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:03:34 +0000

Why aren’t any of my Econ lect as cool as you -_-

By: Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:58:18 +0000

Genuine question: Do any students in NZ have English as a first language?