Reconsidering the blog assignment

I ran into Thom in the Telecom hallway after one of the brown bags and I thanked him for the interesting T101 syllabus he posted on the Media ecology list and I told him I swiped his blogging assignment for my own class. And we got to talking about it and he told me—though I knew this already but ruled it out—that he let’s the students blog about their daily experiences, which essentially is what blogging about anyway. I told him that I was going to have the students blog about their readings so I can make sure that they do their readings. He recommended that I give them daily quizzes instead. Although I didn’t like his idea of blogging their daily experiences at first, I started to think that that this is what blogging is really about. So if they blog about their readings, they are not really blogging in the true sense of the term. First of all, it is not really fun to blog about assignments, unless you’re a crazy graduate student like I am, secondly, the blogging experience does not include blogging about homework, it should be about whatever that interests you. So the real question is, how am I going to define that “whatever”? I decided to give them daily quizzes instead and keep to blogging about whatever. I think this will give them a better comparison about blog writing and academic writing, which I will ask them to do twice in the semester anyway.