Thursday, February 16, 2006

On Teaching and Blogs

This is just a quicky so don't expect some great pedagogic insight. This teacher asks her students to keep blogs as part of their business studies course. I thought wow! That's a great idea. It works like this:
There are no restrictions on subject matter provided they follow one rule: they link the topic to one or more of the four strategic management theories and analytical frameworks that comprise the core of this course. Those theories are Michael Porter's "Five Forces", Gary Hamel's "Business Conception Innovation"; Jay Barney's "Resource-Based View of the Firm", and David Baron's "Four I's".
Each week I recommend up to three articles that the students may blog about. They are free, however, to choose any article or any topic beside those. This past week, one of the articles I recommended was one entitled "Effect of Danish Boycott Patchy" that appeared in the Saudi English daily, Arab News, on January 29th. As one might imagine, several students decided to write on this topic.
For it to work you would have to be teaching something connected to current affairs. Could you have a blog devoted to group theory and rings? On the other hand, an algebraic number theory blog would be something else.

No comments: