This digital essay is the culminating project for INF530 – Concepts and Practices for a Digital Age, a foundational subject of the Master of Education (Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation).

Proposal

My professional role is eLearning facilitator in a K-12 international school. As we look to redevelop our blogging system within our school, I would like to take advantage of this assignment to deepen my understanding of how blogs can be effective learning tools.

The use of Web 2.0 tools and the use of blogs is becoming increasingly popular in Higher Education (HE) and had shown to promote learning using a connectivist learning (CL) approach (Garcia, Elbeltagi, Brown, & Dungay, 2015). The use of blogging in schools is also increasingly popular and there is a diversity of uses of the blogs in schools in that the more traditional use of blogs has been repurposed in many different ways, for example as a showcase portfolio, a place to submit homework, the documentation of a process/learning journey (Carpenter, 2015; Haste, 2009; Morgan, 2014). What I am specifically interested in is the intersection of blogging and CL in schools: what are the specific uses of blogs and learning behaviours that promote a CL approach and what are the implications for the primary stakeholders (teachers, schools and the learners). The essay will include an overview of connectivism, an analysis of the key elements or essence of CL and how these relate to a blogging model for use in a K-12 environment (Garcia et al., 2015; Siemens, 2004). I aim to incorporate a number of examples of how blogs are using in schools and highlight the links to CL. My aim is to provide a partial model or framework of what a CL model for blogging could look like in a K-12 environment.

References