Bud's blogging students

I am totally blown away by Bud's students. They continually write such intelligent things.

For example, they have been blogging about how to assess blogging. Yesterday Tyr posted his thoughts, saying

I would like to put forth the idea that blogging should be based on a student by student draft, this is rather hard to do for large-scale communities, but at the same time for what we are doing in our experimental blogging class it is the perfect way to address the grading issue. Students, at the beginning of the class should explain what they want to accomplish with their blog as a final goal or as a 'major' goal. The occasional assignment/prompt from the teacher is fine to keep people on track and to make sure they have an accurate depction of what they are meant to do. If a student then does not do what attempted to set out for the class goals, then s/he will not receive an A, the grade would then fall into the hands of the teacher based on the other work this student has submitted. I feel this is the most fair way to grade without degrading the usefulness and limiting our abilities as a community to blog.

What a well thought out idea!

I commented on his post asking

What would you do, though, if a student said his or her goal was to write 5 posts outlining what he or she ate for lunch? Do the initial goals have to be approved by the teacher? What guidelines should there be for that?

And today I received a reponse from Tyr on my blog. It starts out:

I would like to think that a student would set forth and try to go above and beyond say five posts outlining what s/he ate for lunch, but this is obviously a concern. It would make sense as that the teacher would have to approve these goals, but they shouldn't [i]have[/i] to. So, yes, the teacher would have to address these goals and assess whether or not they are worth the time of the student/community as a whole.

Tyr and most of Bud's students get it. I know that Bud has worked hard to make that happen. You have to wonder what would happen if all teachers could educate their students about blogging. I think we would see some pretty incredible thinking and writing.