I am a student at North West University. I also teach Second Language English to grade nines and Mathematics to grade eights at Goudveld-Hoërskool.

I agree with the statement.

Learners are controlled by assessment. Assessment gives an indication to where learners are, what they know, who they are and their roles. It can also be seen out of assessment what their needs for technology are.

I believe that technology is not there to take the teacher’s role in teaching. Instead, it’s making it easier, comfortable and interesting. Technology can be used for more than just work.

Learners should be included in the lessons and lessons should be broad enough for every learner’s needs. The learners who are not interested in writing should be involved to debating or interviewing, etc.

I am all for the use of technology in e-learning. Learners get stimulated visually. I hope that soon all of the educators will start to feel comfortable with using technology in teaching. We have interactive white boards at our school and the learners enjoy it very much.

You wrote:
“…assessment is still being ‘content’ rather than ‘process’ driven – or at least, this is how assessment is being perceived by our students.”

I absolutely agree. There is a need to shift the thinking of learners so that they become intrinsicly motivated to learn, rather than be animated to learn entirely by the carrots and sticks of testing.

Assessment is so dependent on context – who the learners are, where they are, their anticipated roles, and the degree to which technology plays a role in their lives.

E-learning should start with an assessment of what motivates the learners to begin blogging in the first place, and what keeps them motivated to continue sustained activity well past the duration of a course or program.

For any sustained learning activity to work, it needs to involve a combination of learner self-assesment and expert assessment. In future, however, learners will not have to settle for the one assessor/teacher – when what really matters to them is gaining validation from peers or others considered trusted experts.

How can institutions control the outflow, the overflowing of student and faculty learning and teaching activity beyond the walls of the classroom/LMS/learning community? This is the wrong question to be asking.

The questions should instead be: how do we assess these outlying learning activities for entry into programs?
How do we define our roles as educators to maintain firmly established boundaries, protecting the learners with a safe space, while also providing them with the required skills to venture out confidently as future netizens?

Requiring learners to use blogs within a conventional assessment model will not work. It does not address the future skills/values/knowledge these learners will require to fulfill their roles. I strongly disagree that learning activities should be set entirely in terms of vocational objectives – technology is used for much more than just work. First Nations learners, for example, might not choose to be academics, so why expect to only test them based on essay writing? This is not just about First Nations learners, but for all learner, struggling to learn to write and put ideas down. Why not expand the assessment to include , storytelling, journaling, and creative projects, as well as a PLE, in which these projects are stored as digitized content? I think that testing and evaluating the individual posts is far to simplistic-it is the connections, the processes, the development over time, which needs to be captured, not the individual posts or “units of analysis” . If learners were offered choice, allowed to own their learning content and own the process of learning, and be offered choices about how they want to blog (as a private blogger, working on private thoughts, or as an autonomous blogger (using blog posts as a linklog and sandbox to draft ideas, in full view of others, or as a social, or embedded blogger, working with others to discuss and debate and share ideas, o,r as an anonymous blogger, one whose personal identity needs to be shielded, so that they feel protected while engaging in heated discussions and debates with others in an arena of ideas).

Assessment needs to encompass the different ways learners might choose to blog, so that they can confidently take on their future roles, years or decades into the future. This involves a portfolio, a capture of learning processes. With a combination of pencasting, screencasting, podcasting, and edublogging, and with a personal information management network in place such as pageflakes (compiles delicious bookmarks, and offers learners a choice over hundreds of flakes) and posterous (allows learners to post their podcasts, videos, and other documents), the emphasis of assessment shifts and incorporates process.

I think that before learners tackle higher-level content creation skills, they require an apprenticeship, and this is where the teachers play a vital role. They require safety, privacy, and yet also an oppprtunity to choose the means of assessment and the validators.