Once student work becomes public, whether to the cohort of the world doesn't really matter, forms of peer critique become easier. Peer critique achieves several things:

• provides students with a critical language to critique their own, and others practice and work
• provides a language by which to judge their work
• generates a structure that they can apply to other contexts
• teaches skills that are applicable outside of the individual course or program
• separates out the personal (and personalities) from critique

There are lots of ways to undertake structured critiques. The key thing is probably to realise that if you are going to undertake a critique then it must be clearly structured so that students know what their role is. De Bono's coloured hats critique is a simple structure to use. Students can either be one 'hat' at a time and rotate through the colours, or can work in groups. Similarly a SWOT analysis can also be effective. The key point is to model for the students how to undertake the critique, holding them to task as they learn how to do it, and remember that for students who do not come from a design background this is novel, so you need to be clear for yourself why they should do this and what the benefits are.

In my case my rationale runs something like this. We expect you to be critical thinkers and makers. At school and university you tend to rely on your teachers to tell you if something is good, good enough, or not. Once you graduate who is going to tell you if your work is good enough? You're supposed to know this, but how would you learn this if you're not taught the methods or tools 

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Governance issues can be substantial in blogs and wikis. Governance in this context covers things like appropriate behaviour, 

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Peer learning is where students teach and learn from each other. This does not happen by itself, it needs to be scaffolded, supported, nurtured and rewarded (for example through assessment). Blogging can be very supportive for the development of peer learning. Students write material about lecture content, readings, technical classes, problems they are having, references they have found, answers to problems, and so on. That's the nuts and bolts of peer learning.

The process side of peer learning that blogging supports is more substantial than this. It is where students can read each others work and begin to contextualise their own work. A student who might always get a Credit can now see what better (and worse) work looks like. They can see the different ways in which people understand things, the gaps and absences in their own and others understanding. They can comment on each others material, link to it, and follow ideas or threads of their own development. This shifts where formal learning happens. It is no longer the classroom, the lecture theatre, or library, but is now happening in the blogs. But since blogs are about connections between parts the learning is not just in the individual blog but in the connections made between blogs. It is one student reading another one, linking to them, and in this act making their own connections between parts.

Another benefit that can happen from individual's student work being visible to each other is that in some disciplines students develop on each others work. They may take an idea from one student and expand on it. Or they may see creative work by one class mate and see that their work is going to have to match that for quality. This can be intimidating for some students at the beginning, so care needs to be taken to support such students so that their individual qualities can be recognised. This is where reflective practice and critique can be invaluable.

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It is probably easiest to begin with why not to blog.

You don't blog because it is new, fashionable, or a panacea to teaching ills. You will use a blog because what a blog provides or allows for supports something you want to achieve in your teaching and learning. These aims (it should be obvious) should come first, then you can work out what technologies will support or work with these outcomes.

So, a blog.

• They can be individual or group
• They are about serial publication (so small, regular writing and posting rather than longer, essayist style content)
• Everyone's writing can be public to the world, or just the group
• Hence some peer learning happens
• Supports text, image, video and sound
• Has a relatively low technical threshold
• Can be personally defined
• Allows for individual design and presentation
• Assists in the creation of an online 'identity' that is student controlled
• Can be used as an informal (or formal) portfolio
• Can be used to support collaboration and group work
• Can be used to support reflective practice
• Can be used to support the development of communities of practice

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Aggregation: Gathering information from multiple web sites, typically via RSS. Aggregation lets web sites remix the information from multiple web sites, for example by republishing all the news related to a particular keyword.

We will be using this space for collaborative editing and content creation.

Cookbook Introduction

Blog Recipes

Blog Introduction

Recipe 1: Personal Blog

Recipe 2: Collective Student/Course Blog

Recipe 3: Collective Academic/Project Blog

Extra Blog Ingredients: Blogrolls, RSS, Tagging, Widgets

Wiki Recipes

Wiki Introduction

Recipe 1: Collaboration in a Wiki Space

Recipe 2: Large scale collective collaboration

Social Bookmarking Recipes

Social Bookmarking Introduction

Recipe 1: Del.icio.us Networks

- Audio or video based blogs. Usually distributed via RSS.

- ie. Educational Podcasts. Technical walkthroughs for software or hardware.

ie processing blogs

i.e. bloglines, newsgator.

-Ability to have all news and blog posts sent directly to the one location.