Teaching with blogs

That’s right, make your students write a blog. I suggested this idea some time ago, now David Tufte has tried it. Here is the result. Keep in mind they are undergraduates. Here is one cynical but not totally inaccurate post about “bad economists.”

The advantages of this teaching method? People tend to remember and care about what they write. And getting students to write regular short bits is probably better than giving them a procrastination-inducing longer paper.

The disadvantages? There are not enough constraints on blather and fallacious reasoning. And perhaps the students decide that whatever they wrote is in fact true, a kind of lock-in bias. [Not that we professional bloggers ever have this problem…]

Here is Tufte’s own blog, and he directs my attention to this post. It is reported that only ten percent of published Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking papers can be replicated by outside parties.

Is economics a science? Yes, but let’s keep in mind that being a science, taken alone, doesn’t get you very far.