Monkeybrain Lives Again

Once again, after a protracted break, the Dowbrigade is back in the
classroom on a daily basis. For the next twelve weeks we will be working
with a group of 16 foreign business students, representing nine different
countries: Korea, Japan, Taiwan, France, Spain, Switzerland, Argentina,
Egypt and the Ivory Coast.

As a lapsed cultural anthropologist, this is the kind of class we love,
offering endless opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons and group
activities. About half of them will be starting MBA programs in September,
the rest returning to their countries.

Accordingly, we have cranked up the old teaching blog, Monkeybrain,
and have some new ideas about how to use it this summer.  In the
past we have tried: 1) getting our students to start their own blogs
on a Manila server (this was largely unsuccessful as only one out of
15 ended the semester with a living blog) 2) making our students co-editors
and having them find, compose and post stories to Monkeybrain (this was
much more successful as they were all able to do the minimum 3 postings
and some went wild and posted many more, and 3) having each student,
after an exploration of the blogosphere, select a blog, read it daily
for two weeks, and then do a show and tell with the projector reviewing
it for their classmates (this was enormously successful and introduced
us to several blogs we still check on a regular basis which we would never have heard of
otherwise).

What
will we do with Monkeybrain this
semester? We haven’t quite decided, but probably some combination of
two and three above, with a few new
twists.  For
one, we think we finally have the equipment and expertise to make a
decent recording of some of our classes, and post them as mp3 files (although
we still don’t have a  clue how to include them as RSS enclosures
for those who aggregate the Dowbrigade). At the very least students who miss a class could listen to it from home, and maybe there is some political prisoner in Tibet with internet access who is just dying to follow along with a course in Advanced Academic Business English.

Anyway, those of you interested in the application of blogging to teaching
and higher education might want to keep an eye on Monkeybrain for the
next 3 months…..