I suspect there isn’t one “right” way to deal with newbies. My experience with the teachers I deal with in my collaborative projects is that the people who could most benefit from clearly laid out instructions on how to proceed tend not to take the time to read them. Many of those people just need the one-on-one “human” touch. I’ve had teachers e-mail me to ask the basic questions covered in the tutorials section on the project sites. I e-mail them back, explaining it to them one-on-one, (sometimes in the same words as in the tutorial), and they seem to get it. I think they just need the reassurance that there’s a caring human on the other side of the monitor. Maybe we should put big signs at the top of our blogs saying “You can’t break this! Please explore and have fun!”

One important thing I learned during this audit is that I have no contact info on my blog. Since my intro is in the form of a VOKI there isn’t even a contact page where people can leave general comments or inquiries. I need to rectify this!

Thanks for your feedback!

One thing I would say is that if people aren’t familiar with blogs, they really may need more assistance in figuring out how to leave comments, etc. I’ve had people email me that they wanted to give me feedback, but weren’t sure how to do that. I know it’s surprising, but you can never underestimate the confusion of a newbie. Stuff we take for granted isn’t so obvious to them, I’ve found.

I agree with Andrea that you have a very friendly voice, so that’s obviously not an issue.