The methodology of the non-course includes each student who participates to have a blog that is publicly available. (Students will use an alias to hide their true identity from the rest of the world.) The advantages of the public blogging approach include these points:
- Other students in the non-course can read your post and perhaps comment on it.
- Students who have yet to sign up for the non-course can get a sense of what it is like and decide to participate in the non-course on the basis of what they read in the student posts and the comments on those posts.
- Other interested outsiders can get a sense of what the non-course is about. This includes potential grant funders who could help the non-course to scale and universities that might embrace some of the non-course ideas for themselves.
Based on my prior experience using student blogging in my teaching, it takes students about a month, with one post per week that I give comments on, for students to get comfortable with the approach. Eventually, most come to like it. But, honestly, most students are afraid of it ahead of time and some will drop my course when they find out it has this blogging component.
Email you sent to me should be reserved for logistics or technology issues, making appointments with me for a voice or video conversation, or perhaps to alert me if you think a comment by some student is inappropriate or that spamming or trolling has occurred. (I will moderate comments on the non-course site, which means they won't appear till I approve them. Students in the non-course can choose to have comments moderated or not on their own blogs. If they do moderate comments, they have an implicit obligation to look for new comments on at least a daily basis, if not more frequently.)
The following are links to course sites that I've had in the past which included student blogging. You can get a sense of how I might respond to your non-course blog post by seeing how I responded to the students in these classes. It's not exactly the same, because the students would typically write to a prompt that I gave them. In the non-course, since the students will drive the bus, they get to choose their own prompt and the general subject matter. The students blogs in my courses listed below are linked to the course site in the left sidebar. Some of those blogs may have been taken down, but many are still publicly available.
The Economics of Organizations:
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