Assessing Weblogs in Writing Courses

I don't intend this post to be a response to Mike, but a recent post of his got me thinking about assessment of weblogs in writing pedagogy. I'm asked to give talks on the topic more and more often these days, and people always ask about assessment; I also get a good deal of questions about grading weblog posts in f2f conversation and via email. I'll make my argument for how best to assess weblogs a little later, but for now: What I say is, judging from the responses I get, not really what people want to hear, but I preface it by explaining that my method of assessment is specific to my goal for the weblog, which is primarily to enhance community in the classroom, but then they invariably end up learning a lot about audience and rhetorical practices by engaging in the conversation, too.

But to Mike's post. He points to a thread at MetaFilter about life-changing experiences, observes that the comments there are remarkably different from writing-course essays on life experience, and expresses what I think is a very important insight:

I mean, I look at some of the MetaFilter responses, and I look at the innocuous question with which Jeremias prompted such responses, and I’m floored – although the openness of the MetaFilter respondents and the closeness of first-year writing respondents really ought not to be surprising.

I wonder if this could be one of the ways in which blogging might change the pedagogical practices and written products of first-year comp.

Bingo. My own rather strong reservations about the personal essay aside, I can appreciate this, as Mike said, meta-moment as a statement on assessment of weblog posts. Given the way I use weblogs in my classes, the best method of assessment is to grade based on participation only: If you participate, you get full credit; if you don't, you don't get credit. Doing only the required posts will result in a grade of C; being more active, especially by leaving comments under other students' posts, will result in a better grade.

That means no rubrics, no criteria, and no grades on individual posts. I think giving each post a grade is akin to giving each comment a student makes in class discussion and question a student asks in class a grade.

What if MetaFilter, Crooked Timber, Pharyngula, and Feministe all of a sudden instituted the following criteria for those who wanted to leave comments: "Comments must be at least 500 words, must contain at least one link, must address and synthesize topics X, Y, and Z, etc. Comments will be assessed according to how well they met or exceeded these criteria." and so on. People would guffaw, I bet they'd get far fewer comments, and the comments they did get would have an overly self-conscious, forced blogging kind of character.

Another thing I don't like about criteria and rubrics for weblog posts is what strikes me as a lack of faith in students. It's almost like an assumption that students will write crap if the criteria and rubrics aren't in place. It's best to trust students to use their intuitive knowledge of rhetorical situations and let them learn from their interaction with the audience. They almost always take pride in their writing when there's an audience of readers who will respond. It's just a matter of trusting them to do so. People want to be perceived as thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, funny, well-read, etc., and they'll take pains to make sure their writing facilitates that perception. That's why I think class weblogs work best when the discourse is as unregulated as possible.