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Blogging in the classroom

Checking my referral logs, I found a referral from the following blog: Tufte's Economics Classes Blog. This is a blog that David Tufte, a professor at Southern Utah University, created for his microeconomics class. The idea is that each student has to write at least one post linking to something else on the internet, and write at least one comment about someone else's post.

My Organizational Behavior class at my MBA program at ASU (yes, not the world's best MBA program, I know) had a similar online discussion requirement, but it used a bulletin board system and not a blog. One big difference is that the entire world can read Tufte's Economics Classes blog, while the system at ASU was accessible only to those with a login ID and password.

This is a pretty interesting use of blogging software, and especially Blogger. The advantages of using Blogger for this type of exercise are that the new interface is easy to use, it now supports comments, Blogger supports multiple user blogs where each student signs in and posts with his own username, and it's completely free including free hosting at blogspot.

I'm proud that Dr. Tufte has listed the Calico Cat as an economics blog for his students to look at. Unfortunately, I've been mostly posting about political sex scandals because that's what people want to read. But I did recently post about economic behavior in the blogosphere, The free market of blogs.

In the past I've written a lot about the importance of marketing in today's economy, and I think my most insightful post ever was From Information Economy To Marketing Economy, which explains how our economy is changing from an information economy to a marketing economy because we are losing all of our information jobs to overseas competition. But be warned, I may have explained comparative advantage and mercantilism the wrong way. Don't assume that everything you read on the internet is correct!

Yes, the model of perfect competition described in economics textbooks no longer applies to today's economy. The truer explanation of competition can be found in the book Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter

It will be interesting to check out Tufte's blog in a few days to see if his students have written, or at least linked to, anything interesting.

posted Tuesday, June 01, 2004