In her course Linguist 187, Variety in Language, Erin Callahan-Price used a course blog on Duke’s WordPress MU in Spring 2011. The course, which deals with social, regional, ethnic and gender variation in English language, provided opportunities for students to engage with the subject matter in new ways with a public forum for their work.
Callahan-Price’s first post on the blog set out “10 Reasons We’re Blogging” to set expectations for the students in the course, also highlighting some of the benefits creative use of a blog can provide to the class. Besides eliminating written journals and paper, the blog was used to add sound, an essential component of sociolinguistic research, and to allow students to compare their writing to other students and communicate their needs more effectively with the professor.
Categories in the blog were used to help everyone easily find posts on specific topics and themes, and built in the relevant use of linguistic terminology into student posts. The blog sidebar included rss feeds with current headlines from local media and stories about linguistics topics in the news. The blog also also included a Twitter feed of bilingual tweets from Mexico and a Flickr feed showing photographs of “Urban Markup Language” to help spark discussion in the course. Callahan-Price also used simple polls in the blog to gauge student understanding of various topics.
Callahan-Price had a “Guest Blogger” week, inviting two prominent sociolinguists, Drs. Erik Thomas and Walt Wolfram, to comment on student work and create their own posts. The blog and guest bloggers helped the students connect their work in the course to their own lives and engaged them in more in-depth discussions.
“The students posted their own vowel charts, which Dr. Thomas commented on,” Callahan-Price noted, “and the fact that each chart was so visually distinct was, I think, a turning point in helping the class to realize that an ‘unaccented’ English does not exist. Throughout the semester, as the students posted spontaneously to the blog—everything from the death of a Hollywood dialect coach to a British library digital exhibit on “Evolving English” to Sean Paul’s codeswitching— I was able to see where and how class concepts were resonating in students’ “real-world” lives– and these posts often served as the most valuable departure points for “real-time” class discussions.”
The Linguist 187 WordPress site can be viewed here. You can find out more about using blogs in your own course and more examples of class blog sites at Duke’s WordPress MU site.