Excellent cat name, btw.
(Speaking of deity pet names, my cat Pandora was originally named Sekhmet, but I changed it when I discovered that my ex, still in the same town, also had a cat named Sekhmet. It weirded me out.)
(Whatever class it is.)
Last semester I had students make posts on a Facebook wall or in forums on the course website (official university courseware). I don’t like to require people to use Facebook for class because there are lots of legitimate privacy concerns. However, many people like to use Facebook for making required “connection points” that relate to the material (race & ethnicity last semester), and if there’s a course FB page it’s really easy for students to share content from it with their own social networks, which increases the likelihood that they’ll go out and think about course material outside of class, and apply what they’ve learned to outside sources, etc.
I know that Tumblr isn’t anywhere near as widespread among my students as Facebook is, but some of them definitely use it (hi, Jake), and it seems like it might be easier for people to set up a separate Tumblr account for a group class blog even if they did have their own, personal Tumblr—correct me if I’m wrong, please. And it certainly would allow users to share content on their own personal Tumblrs if they so desired.
It could also be password-protected to grant better within-class privacy, which would be nice.
Of course there’s the possibility that students might then start reading MY personal Tumblr, but I’m pretty mindful of that on any non-locked site anyway. They know I research Facebook and am pretty tech-focused in general, and I’m not exactly inconspicuous.
