Rather than waiting until the end of the module to fill in a feedback form Twitter can be used as a means to generate immediate feedback about a class or event. It can be used to encourage particular teaching methods and offer advice about how to do things differently.

Distance learners – Using Twitter to communicate with distance learners has the potential to offer students greater learning support and encouragement throughout their courses.

Encouraging students to sign up to external services may not be such a good idea as there are terms and conditions which apply to these services that are outside agreements students have already signed to make use of university services;

We talked about many things, but I think the common thread was that this is really not about “blogging” or even technology. It’s about what happens when students are publishing their own content, and collaborating with each other. What does that mean for assessment? How do you properly engage a class of 100 (or more?) students, having them all publish content, exploring various topics, commenting, thinking critically, and still be able to make sense of that much activity?

Since we stepped back a bit from technology, we defined student publishing more broadly, to also include such things as discussion boards and wikis. We talked a bit about blogging as an ePortfolio activity - that it may be effective for students to publish various bits of content through their blog(s) and then to let it percolate and filter until the “best” stuff is distilled into what is essentially an ePortfolio - and maybe THAT’s the artifact that gets assessed. The activity through the blogs is important, but every student will participate in a different way. Maybe it would be a valuable thing to even make blogging itself an optional thing - but those who don’t participate will have had less feedback and refinement of their ePortfolio artifacts.