Faculty Spotlight: Amy Rutstein-Riley

Collaborative Blogging
Sociology of the Family, Spring 2009

Introduction

In response to students who did not have time to meet in person, Amy decided to move her undergraduate group project online to provide more flexibility. She developed the class blog, The Changing Nature of the American Family, as a way for students to participate in collaborative research, develop leadership skills and engage in a dialogue with their peers.

Throughout the semester, students worked in teams to compose blog entries around various topics, utilizing text, images, and video from the web. By creating a week long discussion maintained by the students themselves, students were required to take more authority over the group work and facilitate an ongoing dialogue with classmates with minimal encouragement from Amy.

Timeline

At the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester, Amy sat with an Instructional Designer for a one-hour consultation on setting up a blog and structuring the assignment.

Equipment

• Blogger (free)

Process

Students were divided into assigned teams and chose a theme related to the topic of the Changing American Family. Students then worked together to collect resources and write a concise blog entry around their theme. Each team was responsible for maintaining the blog for a specific week, by writing blog entries, posing questions to guide discussion, and posting a summary. Classmates were asked to post comments and questions in response to the blog posts.

Outcome

By the end of the semester, students had built a collection of posts on various topics of interest, including gender & family, aging & healthcare, adoption, war, media influences, and other current topics in family sociology. Students posted links to articles, short video clips, images, graphs and charts to enhance their well-researched blog entries. Students reported that they found it to be an interesting and engaging exercise. You can view the blog at http://sociologyofthefamily.blogspot.com.

Amy's Next Steps...

In the coming semester Amy will continue to use this blog as a tool for student research and collaboration. She will develop the blog as a part of the classroom that is primarily student led. While she will monitor it and facilitate questions, the blog is created with their voices, their work and their thoughts. Since some students required more technology instruction, she will spend more time at the beginning of the semester showing them how it works.

You Can Blog Too!

• A self-paced Blogging Tutorial is available in the eLearning & Faculty Resources Community in myLesley. Contact eLIS@lesley.edu if you are not yet a member!
• Contact eLIS@lesley.edu for a special one-on-one training session.