Seth Fein, Professor of History, demonstrated and discussed how class blogs have been used for the last few semesters in his classes. In his current course on Film and History he and his students are using a WordPress blog set up with the help of Yale’s Instructional Technology Group. Fein uses a lot of multimedia in his teaching and the blog offers an easy-to-use tool for him and his students to engage with primary source material, creating posts that include images and video clips (some of which the students have created and edited).

Fein was careful to point out that the use of the blog technology is driven by the pedagogical objectives of his course which include understanding history beyond the screen and analyzing how historical periods, particularly the 1930s, are portrayed in film. The blog enables students to spend more time with the media used in class, and are therefore more engaged with that media. He cited three impacts the use of the blogs is having in his courses. They improve the use of class time because students are more prepared; the uploading of video clips prepare students for a final project involving the production of a video; and finally, the public forum of the blog has seemed to encourage the creativity and quality of the students’ writing.

Professor Fein includes the students’ contributions to the blog in his course assessment. A different student each week is required to do a presentation involving film clips, which they post to the blog for peer comments. The final project involves the production of a longer film clip and Professor Fein has noticed that the weekly posting of blog presentations and comments have resulted in a greater ability on the part of students to critically engage with the film clips.

Ken Panko followed Professor Fein briefly showing a few other blogs that have been used in Yale courses. These included Sandy Isenstadt’s Modern British Architecture course, Lori Hit’s Abnormal Psychology course, Robert Greenberg’s course on the Balkans, and a blog developed by Paul Bass and Yale’s Instructional Solutions Group for use in his class on Politics and The New Media.