Here are some notes that I use to guide my facilitation/animation of student blogging.

It is important that we begin with the learners, and identify their needs.

One way of doing this is to ask them to take a blogging survey. This will begin the process of getting them to begin reflecting on anticipated roles - what blogging can achieve for them as learners.

It is also crucial to start off the dialogue with learners by acknowledging their confusion and ambivalence, and suggest that they undertake a regular series of Pause-Points, or reflections in their blogs about their assumptions and intentions about blogging.

I have been willing to be more open to using blogging as an innovative tool, so I would always encourage students to give themselves permission to be passionate and creative. Towards this end, it is always a great idea to offer examples, and demonstrate other genres not part of the formal scope of learning within the cohort.

Before assigning required blogging assignments, always consider their expectations and commitment levels. It is always important to provide scaffolds, and suggestions on resources.

For myself, I always find it useful to do the preparation before facilitating learners. It is crucial to draw one’s own mentoring toolkit, and begin by itemizing your own resources.

Some things I do to facilitate blogging is to begin with a self-appraisal to identify your own goals to ask the following questions:

What do you want to do for your learners?

Do you want the learners to develop as self-regulated learners?

Do you want to encourage cooperative, or collaborative group learning?

Do you want learners to share their experiences, and engage in creative sharing?

Do you aim to foster independent learning skills so that students blog as role models for others

If you want to have students develop and showcase their own products of learning, for example, you would need to prioritize and determine for yourself how you will model the required blogging behaviors:

·         sharing with learners your presentations, podcasts, articles, and photos

·         demonstrating blogging skills for sense-making, or reciprocal exchange of content

·         describing one’s own processes of ideas development:

·         modeling activities such as berry-picking, way-making, path-sharing, sense-making, sense-sharing

As a mentor, you will need to showcase and model blogging exemplars.

You will have already created a series of post exemplars for learners on how to blog for the following reasons:

·         Reflections

·         Process capture

·         Rehearsals

·         Iterations

Digital Footprints are a special type of learning event, consisted of a series of exemplars of blogging practice connected together under a related theme, often presented as a unified multi-modal learning object.

You will need to demonstrate and provide scaffolds at various points of the digital footprint creation process, and provide feedback to encourage students to independently build their own learning objects.

As a facilitator, you will need to demonstrate and moderate the use of a discussion meme, a post with open questions, which encourage responses, before encouraging others to create and facilitate their own meme discussions.

In addition, as animators, one needs to pay attention to the way one provides feedback, and strive to offer useful ideas and advice, sometimes directly through blogs, and sometimes through back-channels, so as to encourage learners to relate in meaningful manner to their own posts and that of others.

In addition to engaging learners in conversation about course-related matters, it is advised to also

engage learners in conversation about unrelated course content.