Interaction Style 3: Class Journal
This data flow diagram illustrates the how teachers and students would interact to create, discuss and assess a private (student to teacher) class journal. Periodic review of student blogs (chronologic, personal, reflective portfolios) is likely to be a common interaction style that many teachers would find useful as an venue for formative feedback.
Blogs frequently allow readers (in this case the course instructor) to leave text comments (which this would also support). However, this interaction style would leverage the ability of students and instructors to identify learning outcomes for the journalling process and allow assessment of each blog entry on an ad hoc basis for formative assessment purposes.
Student blog posts would appear as messages in the instructor's inbox. Instructor's would periodically read the blog posts and send back either plain comments or comments with assessments (as related to tagged goals). An important feature of this interaction style is that it supports the idea that "knowledge is emergent" by allowing students to add new learning outcomes to their Goals and to tag their blog posts with those tags. Assessment of student learning, then, can be done in response to student Goals and Faculty Goals (related to the original activity description).
Again, once the course ends or the student leaves the institution, they have the option to keep a copy of all of these posts, assessments and comments for their own use, much like they do with email.
An important assumption is that a system that can engage in this sort of messaging becomes standardized, allowing students to remix and reuse their content from other activities in multiple classes at multiple institutions.