Student Blogs Revisited - Again

I haven't quite given up on student blogs, but I am going back to a modified version of my original plan, which was to have a single blog for an entire class, with students now contributing the posts instead of me posting assignments and asking students to respond in the comments section.

I probably should have anticipated the difficulty in monitoring several student blogs at one time, but I was overly ambitious and optimistic, as usual. What's that line about people repeatedly doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? (Definition of insanity).

I am a little surprised that students didn't take some initiative on their own - after all, I made it acceptable to write about things other than science on their blogs, but all I got was a few students doing a couple of posts for extra credit, then basically abandoning their blogs.

So I will link again to the original Class Blogs - 801 & 807 - and Monday will give students assignments to post their ideas for extra credit.