I explored connectivism in the context of blogging for my culminating assignment in #inf530 Concepts and Practices in a Digital Age in my Master of Education (Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation). Over the past few years, schools have introduced blogs for their students although it would appear that these are not used extensively. Certainly, the students in my school in the higher grades are not fans of blogging.
I started to explore connectivism, a new emerging learning theory widely attributed to Siemens (2005) and Downes (2005), and the connected tools that are essential to promote a connectivist learning environment. Certainly, the extensive features of a blog hits all the buttons. My goal was to examine the relationship between connectivism and the use of blogs in a K-12 environment and try to understand the conditions required to promote a connectivist learning environment.
The comments from my inspirational lecturer (@junewall) led me to sharing this work through this post and at the recent Learning2 Asia conference at SSIS. Clearly I was not going to read out my paper over the three-hour extended session at Learning2 and therefore, with the help of @jenasimon, a colleague at WAB, found a way to present my findings through an interactive, hands-on, learning-by-doing workshop. I also reached out on twitter to those posting under #connectivism and was fortunate to be given feedback on my workshop outline from Katie O (Thank you Katie and Jen). What I discovered was the power of being brave and putting your stuff out there!
The slides are here and resources here.
So what next? @jenasimon has written a wonderful blog post entitled The Blogging Dead: Infuse New Life into ‘Zombie’ Blogs and we are now presenting a shortened version of the workshop for colleagues.
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