Stuart Berry wrote:

We need to develop ways to allow faculty to "observe student learning" as well as encouraging participants to "think out loud". It has gotten me thinking. How can one capture learner presence and learning process as a contribution to a larger online conversation? The posts and comments themselves are the current standard unit of analysis. I would like to suggest that learners intentionally capture their learning activity as virtual snapshots, using a combination of screencapture and livescribe technologies. The focus would then shift from the written word of the blog post, to a multimedia presentation, embedded into the edublog. LiveScribe is an electronic pen that records one's self-talk while taking notes/drafting ideas. (As a cheaper alternative, I also think of the Fly Pen in combination with a digital voice recorder to record talks as MP3s). I think that the FlyPen, in combination with a digital voice recorder, would capture up to 10 minutes of live activity as the learner attends to a learning task. It would only capture the final written result, the final set of notes, or the final outline or illustration or table, not the intermediary points. A Livescribe pen, however, would capture all the steps, the errors, the repetitive information, and the accompanying narrative in real time. Again, the learners' activities are captured in voice and written form. Again, I would suggest no longer than 10 minutes in length. But capturing the note-taking and drafting and self-talk is the first element to learning process capture - I am interested in also capturing the learners' online way-making activity. Screencapture (I think of Jing, or Camtasia Studio) captures the mouse movements, the voice narration, and the screenshots.

There are inevitable gaps and limitations - this has not really been done before using the combination of the two technologies, and how it would be implemented within an edublogging environment is entirely unknown. However, both Inge de Waard's and Thomas Shepard's work on the use of video and podcasts which were then embedded into their blogs, have suggested to me that the capture of learning processes using a variety of multimedia might open new potential for instruction and assessment. The combination of these two technologies capture the information gathering and sifting processes - if faculty were to capture a short snapshot of how they collect, sift through and analyse ideas within an edublogging environment, it would be a far more meaningful artefact for sharing for students. Then the blog post might explain highlights of the learning event. The learning event itself embedded within every blog post becomes the focus of learning. The processes captured are intended for sharing, for contributing to open discourse.