students as content providers

http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/2005/06/22/students-as-content-providers/

Found this interesting article in "blog of proximal development" entitled, "Students as Content Providers". 
In it the writer was worried about how to evaluate (via exam) months worth of student blogging about social justice and human rights. She had found that students had "found, wrote about, and discussed much more than I could have possibly given them as a teacher". 
Students would never have willingly accepted the volume of reading and writing that they had done via their blog if it had been presented to them as a textbook OR as something found by the teacher. But since it was the students' own find and own writings, they willing did probably more than was required. So, she was pleased with the effort and the knowledge no doubt gained, but the big problem was how to evaluate what they had done without invalidating their work by only asking questions about the novel.
I found this a fascinating conundrum because here you have a clash between a relatively new way of learning, come up against an ancient way of evaluating - the exam. In the end what she decided to do was simply ask them what they had learned from each other, basing their exam on the content that they had generated. In the responses, students talked about ideas that they discovered that were new to them, that they had learned from classmates and that were generated by individual interests covering a wider range than the teacher could have ever hoped for. In summary I really enjoyed the blog/article as it showed that students who have a say in the direction of the learning community usually create and accomplish more than what's expected of them. I also thought that while we're being creative in how we teach, we must also spend time in thinking of unique ways to evaluate material so as not to discourage and to give it a proper place in the learning environment.