TypePad in the Classroom

Bud Gibson, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, writes about using TypePad in the classroom. On the three reasons why blogging is not just another technology in the classroom fad Bud writes,

By design, blogging allows individuals
to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without
having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design
consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with
students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one
person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit
your pages or even delete them.

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very
easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place
while still maintaining individual attribution.

Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and
resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did
ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but
they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly
produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs
make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.