I had students write on a collective history class blog as the reflective companion of the Broken World wiki textbook they created (World War I to World War II).

The Broken World Blog was a success, I thought, though hard to keep up with (40 students wrote on it weekly). The only requirement was that students write once a week on whatever detail or topic captured their fancy from the week’s student lectures. That made each entry unpredictable, and opened all of our eyes to the individual interests each student had in history. It was cool.

I don’t know how I would do it differently next time, but I would try to minimize the amount of new posts per week (maybe make group blogs for groups of ten, so that each week no new posts would be pushed into the archives too quickly? Seems a good idea!).

I would also encourage Skype podcast interviews with outside experts as permissible blog entries to spice things up.

But overall, I really liked it.