A very rough way to judge classroom blog participation...

In our OSDDDI course, contributing to the class blog is part of each student's participation grade. It's not weighted particularly heavily and is not the centerpiece of the course, but it can make a difference for students on the border between one grade and another.

As well as reading and commenting on student's blog posts throughout the semester to get a feel for how each student contributed, we can also do a bit of quantitative analysis (querying the back-end database) that will save the effort of manually opening up all the archives and looking at various posts to get basic data like how many posts students wrote and how long they were.

Follow up:

Specifically, with command-line access to the MySQL database -- which you likely had to have to install the database in the first place; if not, ask who did your install to run this query for you -- we can run a query like the one below on the back-end database to get a rough quantitative feeling for how much people blogged. Note: This is written for users of WordPress, but should be portable to other types of blogs with back-end DBs... although the use of a subquery means you'll have to be using MySQL 4.1 or greater:

SELECT sums.first, sums.last, COUNT(sums.length) posts, SUM(sums.length) bytes FROM (SELECT b.user_nicename name, b.user_firstname first, b.user_lastname last, LENGTH(a.post_content) length FROM prefix_posts a, prefix_users b WHERE a.post_author = b.ID AND a.post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY 1) sums GROUP BY sums.name ORDER BY posts DESC, bytes DESC ;

(Note: change prefix in the FROM clause above to the prefix for your tables in the database (usually wp).)

This produces a query result that looks like this (flip the last two arguments in the ORDER BY clause to get it sorted on bytes):

+-----------+-------------+-------+-------+ | first | last | posts | bytes | +-----------+-------------+-------+-------+ | Student | Zero | 8 | 20000 | | Student | One | 6 | 10000 | | Student | Two | 6 | 7000 | | Student | Three | 4 | 13000 | | Student | Four | 4 | 4000 | | Student | Five | 3 | 6000 | | Student | Six | 3 | 5000 | | Student | Seven | 3 | 4000 | | Student | Eight | 2 | 8000 | | Student | Nine | 2 | 4000 | | ... | ... | ... | ... |

Which displays each students first and last name, the number of posts they did on the blog and the number of total bytes that their writing contributed to the blog.

Some notes: This doesn't take into account comments, and a lot of good interaction can happen in comments. Also, this shouldn't be used as a substitute for trying to evaluate from the text of each blog entry how much effort and care was put into a given post or set of posts. For that, I recommend taking notes during the course and note who makes especially compelling contributions, etc.