Those learners who have already been blogging have a need for learning skills and knowledge to become edubloggers on a larger scale. The development of an extensive personal information network will be required, as will a mastery of RSS feeds, aggregators, and a number of tools to create and host educational content that is shared with other professionals.
These networked edubloggers will aim to have set up between 50 to 100 bookmarks, 50-100 RSS feeds, 5-10 presentations, 5-10 podcasts, and have been blogging within a number of networks for more than a year. Assessment will be portfolio based, and the demonstration of the open portal to share with professionals. I think that tools will change. For now, using edublogs as the blogging tool, along with capture of bookmarks in delicious, or using a combination of posterous and pageflakes will suffice as a professional archive.
The teacher’s role is to act as a mentor, a critic, a provocateur, pointing out flaws and ommissions, throwing out ideas that inspire the apprentice to think further and deeper on the tasks and ideas. The academic expert has a vital role in the facilitation of learning.
these student bloggers have already felt fairly confident with managing their information flow within at least one social network, and are comfortable with coordinating their own efforts in navigating between more than one learning network.
The nature of the assessment should in fact be negotiated with the learners, to identify which tools they want to work with. I was interested in using e-ortfolio assessment, and mentioned that tools change – indeed they do, I just read a ,post by Tony Bates about PeddlePad.