Imagine you are encouraging students to begin blogging and want to develop activities that can be assessed.

Evaluation is based on the need for accountability, using benchmarks, and rubrics, and tests. These are tools for identifying transfer of learning. Do they have a place in blogging at all?

Some would argue that blogging is a voluntary activity, hard to measure. The very element of evaluation adds an element of constraint, or coercion, that might lead to limits on free expression.

Instead of evaluation, there should be a more liberal approach, where students are allowed to blog however they see fit, and assessment is based entirely an personal reflections at mid-point and end-point of the course. In effect, the students assess themselves, based on whatever things they consider significant.

On the other hand, some argue that open assessment is ineffective, because there is not enough structure and support for students new to blogging to actually blog effectively. The argument can be made that instructors need to set guidelines and support learners. But is the support of blogging processes (mentoring, for instance) involving evaluation, or does it involve something else entirely?

If instructors model the activities of effective blogging, and students in turn copy those actions, and in turn model these actions for other students, is this not the ultimate aim? Does evaluation have a place in this type of assessment paradigm? Should the extent that students incorporate their mentor's and other peers' blogging activities be the yardstick by which students should be assessed? I think that this is a great idea as long as students are in fact beginners, and the instructor/mentor is experienced, and has some help of experienced student bloggers as tutors/animators. Thus, students aim to try to create thier own blogs so they appear more like their tutors and mentor instructors.

Note to readers: To see this image, please click on it, and it will open in a new window. I tried to re-set the access settings for the blog post from logged in users to public, and the result was that it did not show up at all. I then tried resetting the image file from logged in users to public, and still it did not work. I have then tried to set it back to the original privacy settings (logged in users) and still the image does not appear. So, please click on the image placeholder to view the file.

But it might be argued that not all students can aspire to such complex blogging, nor should they be. Besides, it is not the outward artefacts that should be evaluated in isolation, but how the bloggers connect the ideas and use their resources, with the blog itself as the central hub of learning activity. Most students will need help with blogging, and it will take longer for them to have a decent grasp of blogging than what can be accomplished during one course.

I can relate to the need for providing key details at certain steps of the learning journey. For me, knowing what was the end result was less important than having my mentor, Terry Anderson, supporting me in my blogging. And it is the timely support which was far more crucial for leaps in blogging skill. Rather than having to "jump through others' hoops" to engage in others' designed activities aimed at evaluating my blogging, rather than teaching me something new, I set up my own deliverables as the means for evaluating my learning.

If evaluation is a set of activities imposed by an external source on student bloggers to determine if they have met specific requirements and mastered specific skills, then it is critical we have a pre-set notion of what it means to actually blog, and have a consensus as to what an effective blogger does.

Next post: What blogging activities can be evaluated? Are there specific types of blog artefacts that can be identified as products to be evaluated by instructors? Are there key processes bloggers engage in to develop their knowledge and skills as bloggers? What skills do expert bloggers use, compared to beginners?