All the difference in the world

Just to be true to form, I'll reproduce exactly how this conversation occurred in email, putting Mark's comments in block quotes.

Mark observes:
As I read it, basically you as an instructor can see what students do from their blogs (21st century journals, essentially) and see if they are up to speed. This allows for automation of searches and so on. Is this qualitatively different from collecting homeworks or journals or is this a far more efficient process for doing this?

Both answers yes. It is qualitatively different in that it is not a top-down, instructor-driven community. Yes, to be part of the community, you have to make blog postings, and that is mandated by me. However, from that point, I do not drive blog postings, they emerge from the students. The students can all see each other and cross-post about each other.

From an efficiency perspective, the system has mechanisms for showing who is talking about who and what they are saying. We should even be able to automatically generate "semantic profiles" (I think this has something to do with latent semantic indexing) of the student posts and relate them that way.

So, that is the efficiency part. Note how it too has the feeling of being qualitatively different.

Mark observes:
If my benefit as a teacher is checking student understanding, is this different from pop quizzes (even one's that do not count) as a way to check understanding?

Quizzes really work for a received, well-understood body of knowledge. Accounting practices such as journal entries come to mind. However, even in this case, one comes to the issue of test answer vs. real world answer.

So, the course has two components: tests and projects. The test is really an endpoint. I want to have a non-invasive way of seeing what is going on up to that point and to *help* students as well as getting them to help themselves. The projects are the "real-world" aspect, and there, there is not a well-received body of knowledge about how to solve a stylized problem.