Monday, March 14, 2005

BibleDudes Is Out of the Closet and Assessing Blogs

Over the weekend at a regional ASOR meeting in Dallas I co-presented a paper with my student Whitney Davis about using technology with teaching. The paper was called BibleDudes and Blogging: Technological Applications in Teaching Biblical Studies and Biblical Archaeology. It involved the Theology 1120 blog I've been working on with Bart Everson. In discussion following the paper I realized that I need a better way to assess if the blog is helping me to meet my goals. I do use student evaluations, but I need other means. I think I should contact students about a year or two after they take the course and see if writing so much in the blog for my course helped them later with writing assigments. I don't feel comfortable dividing my sections into two, one with the blog, the other without. So if anyone has any ideas on how to assess this blog project, I would love to hear from you. I want to write this blog project up for a journal article but I feel it would be better if I had a better way to evaluate it.

But, aside from that, this presentation was the first time that the website BibleDudes was promoted at an academic meeting. I presented the parts that pertain to archaeology, especially the stratigraphical layers of the Levant (to launch click the trowel 3/4 of the way down the previous page), and I got some very positive feedback.

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