geekroom

Henry Farrell has written an interesting story about the various possible uses of blogs in the classroom. H2O would work nicely for some of the scenarios he mentions, particularly the ones involving student participation. For instance, having a student post a reading review as a question once a week as a rotisserie would allow the professor to structure the resulting discussion (ensuring everyone responds by a certain time, how many rounds the discussion takes, etc). Or more interestingly, the rotisserie would allow for each student to prepare a reading summary every week and have that reading summary critiqued by another student, setting up a nice peer review process with very little work on the part of the professor, since H2O takes care of all the details (deadlines, assigning the responses, collecting critiques, etc).