Innovatieregelingen 2011

This year I created for the third time a blog with my students in the European Studies Course After Babel: Language Policies in Europe (3rd year Bachelor). Personally I experience this blog as a welcome support and variation in the academic educational setting. And I would like to say that I am often impressed by the student contributions to the blog. The After Babel website turns out to be very lively and pretty successful! (please see the blog at After Babel 2011)

A support of academic teaching

To start, the blog helps in forming a very active group of students, as it provides a platform for exchange outside of class. Thus, in spite of the course falling in a very stressful time, namely the end of your Bachelor’s program, we usually have a very intensive course together. Regarding its contents, the blog has been interesting and very informative: it opened windows to many different language issues and policies and it offered us the possibility to deepen questions discussed in the tutor groups. This worked the other way round as well, as contents of the blog were taken up and led to further discussions in the tutor groups, either spontaneously or during the 5 minutes we sometimes took to go through the website at the beginning of the tutor group.

Low-threshold multilingual experiences

In addition to the various topics discussed on the blog, there was also a multitude of languages used. I came across entries written in English, German, Dutch, French and Spanish. And in total there were even more languages that appeared in sentences or sections of your entries; I counted 24 different languages and dialects on the blog, including e.g. Bulgarian, Portuguese, Swedish, Frisian, and Alsatian… This reflects the high language potential of the group and the blog seemed to offer a low-threshold opportunity to practice foreign language skills.

Supporting student-student & student-staff discussions

Another reason why I enjoyed the blog personally was that it offered an opportunity to get to know my students better. In order to give you a better idea of the participation, here are some statistics:

• Content: 174 Posts, on average 6 posts per student (28 students), and 263 Tags
• Discussion: 111 Comments, on average 4 comments per students
• 948 total visitors and 2910 total reads (mostly internal university visitors; in two months time)

The use of the comment function was a bit disappointing, as it was not used by everybody; however, it was nice to follow the discussions that were going on.

Blog skills

Regarding the technique there were not many problems – we only needed one training session for the students in order to make it work, and most of the students had – surprisingly – no earlier blog experience! And the skills learned by creating this blog together will certainly be of use for your professional lives. I think that we can conclude that the After Babel blog formed an essential part of the course. It added value to it mainly in four aspects: it supported our learning of language policies, it opened a new horizon on the existing issues and debates, it deepened our discussions, and it raised interest.

Dr Charles van Leeuwen – Maastricht University

Grateful acknowledgements to:
Drs Sjoerd Stoffels and his team for technical support
The Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences for providing this opportunity
The students for creating the blog!

Tags: Bachelor European Studies, blogging, interactie student-docent, interactie student-student, Maastricht University, taalonderwijs