Glenn - this is a really useful conception to help me make sense of the many layers of blogging. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm aiming my research at marginalized groups struggling to make transitions to post-secondary education and am very compelled by the potential of social networking, particularly blogging, as a means to facilitate this. What emergees from my work with students over the years is the realization that they are, given the opportunity, predisposed to story-telling when talking about their struggles (and triumphs) with learning. What is often missing, sadly, is that opportunity, a sense to them that story-telling is permissible or appropriate.

Your scheme could be extremely useful for me in not only designing the learning interventions that enable story-telling but as an analytic tool for investigation. Is that what you envision here? Have you used this scheme as such a tool?

Cheers, John

In reply to: John Hannah

Hello John,

The processes are a result of analyzing my own blogging activities within Me2U and AU landing between September 2008 and December 2009, in which I participated in a number of independent study courses to complete the MDDE program. What was central to the success, I think, was that I was blessed to have one faculty member, Terry Anderson, acting as my mentor working with me.

The "blogging apprenticeship" is intended to be a framework for designing instructional activities for learners using the blogs. I assume that the blog is a central tool, and that other tools are peripheral (although crucial) elements to blogging.

In the landing, there are maybe a dozen tasks performed consistently by users that provide a small fraction of the overall skills needed for learners to blog well within various settings.

Providing design schemas to guide posts, and asking learners to review their own metrics to measure their own activity and the extent to which they have been using the tools, and having learners themselves review and reflect on their own tag clouds compared to other peers or their mentor's tag cloud, is not direct assessment, per se; however, the metrics exist for learners to engage in self-assessment activities. To me, the capacity for self-regulation is central to identity construction.

Othere than guiding my own practice, it is still in the development phase. I need to streamline it into a more coherent whole to present to College stakeholders. This will require piloting, research, and follow-up studies before implemented widely within a College setting.