This exercise provides an opportunity for the student to practice communicating their academic knowledge in a website format in which the recipient is not a co-examiner or teacher, but the general public. In this process the students become aware of their writing skills and receive text-oriented feedback from their teacher.
The exercise gives the students an immediate target for their written work, and the end result may provide them with an experience of both personal and academic success. Through the feedback, the students also gain greater insight into how texts in professional collaboration contexts are often created in a process that takes place among several people with different roles. At the same time, the exercise focuses on the increasing need to communicate academic knowledge through online media and trains the students to communicate to an audience outside of the academic environment.
As a teacher you must create a blog or gain editorial access to a website working with the communication of the academic material included in your course.
Already at the beginning of the semester, you must introduce your students to the written format of the selected medium. On this occasion you introduce the students to the given assignment of formulating text for the selected medium.
The students then prepare a draft for a post in the medium in question and submit this for feedback.
Feedback is given by correspondence, in which you as a teacher assume the editor’s role, while the student acts as post author. You must give feedback on a regular basis, so that the students can improve their written work on the basis of this. Use two to three feedback rounds, for instance.
Bear in mind that this feedback should be text-oriented and focus in particular on well-functioning passages and text that might be improved. As an editor you have the opportunity to suggest passages, so that writing the product becomes a joint effort.
At the end of the process, the written product must be published in the selected medium and made accessible to the general public.
