For the course Introduction to the U.S. Political System, which boasts an enrollment of nearly 150 students, Mark Rom turned to a course blog to help stimulate class discussion and personal interaction among students. Because class discussion can be intimidating and unwieldy in such a large class, Rom decided to integrate a blog into his curriculum to ensure that all students had the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussion about American politics.
Because Rom’s course fulfills a major requirement for government majors and a general education requirement for the college, Introduction to the U.S. Political System is guaranteed to draw a crowd. With the majority of his students studying in their first or second year at Georgetown, Rom believes that it is especially important for students to interact both with each other and as a class through dynamic conversation.
Rom says, “I see student engagement with the course blog as a really constructive form of activism, where people write their ideas and putting them out there for public consumption.”
To move discussion beyond the handful of outgoing students brave enough to speak in front of 150 people, Rom requires students to write three posts per week on the course blog. Posts can range from an entry on almost any aspect of American politics to a response to another’s post.
Rom is impressed with the length, depth, and breadth of discussion that has grown within the blog. Although many students began the semester with shorter, less analytical pieces, Rom has seen a major increase in quality of conversation and in the quality of writing seen in the blog posts throughout the semester. Rom believes that students improve their writing and analytical skills through repeated practice, which is another reason why the blog has been a useful pedagogical tool for Rom’s large class. Although students are only required to write three short posts per week, Rom notes that if he took all of the students’ posts and put them into the format of formal papers, many students would find that they had written the equivalent of twenty-page papers over the semester.
Because it is all too easy to forget class content once a course is completed, Rom believes that the blog will become a part of the way students think and communicate on a daily basis, even after the class is over. Rom hopes that constant engagement with the blog will allow students to construct their own meaning of American politics that will remain with them indefinitely, as opposed to passively absorbing lectures that will be forgotten when the class is over.