As a recipient of the State Council on Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV) Outstanding Faculty Award, Mills Kelly was the first to be honored in the new “Teaching with Technology” category. He was also one of five faculty members to be awarded a GMU Teaching Excellence Award in 2005. We interviewed Mills to discover how he uses Blogs* in his courses to facilitate writing and learning

What do you see as the relationship of writing to technology?

First let me say what I think the crucial part of the writing is. When I first started putting up websites for students, I was in a sense posting a textbook for them. I had my lecture notes, and then I would post my comments on my lecture notes, and then I would add another 1000 words to elucidate my notes, and the students were thankful. If they missed class it was all online. But the website was also just about reading, and students weren’t engaged in any active knowledge production. So I took all those lecture notes down from the web and devised a way to get them to write about what they were reading. I always remember my ninth grade geometry teacher, Mr. Comer, who said learning doesn’t get fixed in your brain until it travels up your arm, and he meant writing of course.

So Blogs are a way to get them writing?

What I’ve noticed since I’ve started using a Blog is that my students write a lot more because they’re in a familiar world; they all have Blogs of their own. They may not think about their My Space or Live Journal as a Blog, but it is. I checked the statistics on MyJournal.com, and they have something like six and half million users with two-thirds of them female; Mind Space has 19 million users, most of which are female.

How do you integrate Blogs into the classroom?

What I really wanted to happen in class is argument. I wanted them to argue with each other and with me, because that’s what historians do. They argue with each other and out of that comes great ideas; Blogs facilitate that argument. So I post the questions in the Blog, and they have to post the answers to those questions by Saturday. I break them up into groups, and they also have to pose a response to someone’s writing in their group.

Their response has to add value or improve someone’s analysis or get them to think about something in a slightly different way in order to get credit. So what that means is when they walk into class on Monday morning, they know where their group is with the questions, and we can get into a discussion. They can talk about the topic because they’ve already written about it. I write almost nothing in the Blog, but by the end of the semester I’ll comment on at least one entry by each student.

When it comes to grading, 15% of their final grade is what they write in the Blog. As I prepare for grading, I ask them to pick what they think are their two best contributions, and then I pick two more at random. The four together constitute the grade for their postings. I like the idea of them deciding what is their best work.

What are some of the other advantages to online writing?

One of the advantages to online writing instead of turning in your writing to the teacher is the public nature of it. Students have the perception that they have an audience of millions. It is one thing to turn in a substandard paper to your professor knowing it’s substandard and you could take a hit on it, but it’s another thing to post a C- paper online for anyone to read. It’s a little more embarrassing. A number of my students have told me that online writing embarrasses them into doing better work.

Do you think the stronger writers influence other students in the class?

Yes, I think there is a lot of that going on. For someone who wants to do better, it’s nice to have stronger students set a good example. In the Blog, you can read three or four postings and you can decide for yourself what kind of writing has authority. I think as a writer that can help you to improve because you can decide what works and what doesn’t instead of the professor saying, “This is an exemplary paper, emulate it.” In the latter case, I’d get more papers that sounded like the model instead of papers with a student’s own voice. I think in this class they are on the road to finding their own voice.

One last question, what advice do you have for teachers and who want to use technology in the classroom?

Instead of saying “These are the various technologies, how can I fit them in?” look at the goals or the outcome you would like to reach. Say to yourself “This is the outcome that I will feel proud of this semester,” and see if technology can help you reach that outcome. Technology is not the answer to all learning problems. For me, the act of learning in the classroom is what’s important, so I want activity, and I use technology to get my students to engage with the material in ways that I value.

*Blogs are an online writing medium or system that allows people to make contributions to an ongoing discussion. Anyone who is a registered member to the BLOG can post message to the space, and messages are assigned todifferent categories. Although Blogs can be personal diaries, multi-user Blogs, which is what Mills uses, allow registered users to post, respond and add to comments.