A Hive of Learners

A learner is like a bee. Bees are a very communal insect that work for the betterment of the hive. While one bee is not so important, it is the total of all the small contributions combined into a whole that make the hive strong, produce honey, and nourish all the members. Bees also rely on strong networks of communication to distribute work and relay the location of pollen sources.

The hive works similarly to George Siemen’s theory of connectivism. In the video “The Conflict of Learning Theories with Human Nature," he states that the “learning and the act of knowledge creation is a function of network…where it is the aggregation of activities of many individuals that generates meaningful or useful knowledge.”

So, like the bee, it is not the work of any one individual that determines the ability to grow or create, it is the “aggregation of activities,” our the buildup of output, that generates a useful product.

In his essay “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, he places importance on the connections between nodes in networks and the diversity of the network. These three principals as stated by Siemens are:

Learning and knowledge rests in a diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.

He implies that in order for today's learner to take advantage of all resources he must rely on connections to information sources, on taking care to maintain connections, and to utilize a great number of nodes. Again, this is similar to the bee and its hive. Without a strong system of communication between each node and care for the nourishment of the network, there would be chaos. It may be near impossible to find food, allocate work, and in the end, flourish.

EFL Classroom 2.0

I joined the social network EFL Classroom 2.0 via the networking site Ning. It seemed like it was one of the largest and most active groups on the topic of English language teaching on Ning. It has a lot of resources that would be helpful in the classroom. There is a dicussion forum, links to members blogs, a space for video conferencing, and a link to helpful sofware. There are also a great many resources for the classroom such as lesson plans, games, and downloadable videos, songs, and books for teaching.

I think the greatest use for a site such as this is that it generates ideas. Sometimes a teacher is unhappy with his lesson plans or cannot even get started, and it is good to have a place to go for ideas. Other times a teacher is tired of the same old lessons or the same formats and needs to spice things up. ESL Classroom 2.0 has a wealth of information and offers opportunities to gain many insights.

The Growth of Global Communication and Educational Effects

This video, entitled Did You Know, was quite eye opening and mind boggling. I think I'd begun to realize already that the Internet and high tech communications were still in their infancy in the year 2009, but this video shows us that they are maturing at an exponential pace and that the potential is a great unknown.

The video puts the onus of preparing people for these changes on schools and teachers. Preparation is so important because if a person does not have a skill set to work in the forthcoming environment he will be left behind.

I believe it will also be the responsibility of schools to take advantage of the possibilities. With so many resources available instruction will be able to take an unlimited number of forms and harnessing the potential will be difficult but exciting.

I don't know if the video was implying that technology was a cause for some of the other developments in the world such as English becoming a common language or increased educational opportunities in some countries. I do think, however, that these linguistic and knowledge shifts are notable because it is cause to teach more tolerance to students as they will be dealing more readily with a great diversity of people.

I also think that educating students in learning strategies or exploration strategies will become important because it will be impossible to teach all of the knowledge. It may be the primary job of schools in the future to show students how to become independent researchers and thinkers in the technological realm so that they will be able to keep up beyond their school years.

Safety tips for blogging

1) I think the features that restrict who can view the blog are important. If a teacher wants to be very cautious he could limit who would be able to view the blogs either to just those in the class, just those in the school, or to family members also.

2) I liked the idea in the Richardson book to go over procedures with students of what to do in case they receive inappropriate comments (i.e. don't respond, inform your teacher immediately).

3) Lastly, it is good to inform students to keep personal identifiers off of the blog and also to remind them that the blog is for academic purposes only.

Ideas for using blogs in the classroom

After reading chapters one, two and three, here are some ideas I had for using blogs in class.

1. I am very interested in working with refugee children, teaching ESL. Refugees are often recently arrived to the country, have very different ethnic backgrounds from their new neighbors and may feel isolated. It would be great to use the blogs as self-publishing tools to share their experiences in America with either schools in the refugee camps in their home countries (if technology permits from that end, and in many cases I think it will) or with other refugee communities in America.


For the benefit of those still to come to America, students could post writings about daily life in America, schools in America, food, pictures, etc. It would be great for them to see their work online and it would be a great cultural orientation for those still in the home country. The project could be themed such that the students in America are explorers sending back exotic new treasures.

To link with other refugee communities in other cities in America may help students see how other people are coping with adjustment. It could act as a sort of support group.

The partner communities would have to be set up by the teacher and may take a bit of research to find, but I don't think it would be hard to persuade another teacher in the US to collaborate. It might be difficult to find someone overseas, but I think that there enough resources in many cases.

2) For the purposes of a writing class, a blog could act as a process journal. It could be especially useful for a research paper. Research is a process. It starts with a topic, moves onto questions about the topic in order to gain focus, and finally the researcher decides on a problem he is interested in solving. After that he does the research to try and answer or at least explore the problem

All of these steps could be posted on a student's blog and other students would be able to give feedback on the researcher's thoughts and questions, suggest possible places to look, and ideas for understanding and synthesizing information.

For the researcher himself it would be beneficial to look back to see how his thoughts progressed and to get another perspective on his work. Also, as an archival tool, if one path of inquiry did not workout, the researcher would easily be able to go back and maybe pick up on an old path of inquiry that had sprouted but had never been pursued.

Also, in this procedural way, blogs could also be used to demonstrate an actual, live writing process for creative work. Usually in writing books there are models suggested for the writing process, but they are ideal models, and rarely does a real person follow all the steps. Real people prefer one method over another or jump back and forth between steps.

It would be great to see someone post draft after draft of a creative piece. Imagine if the student was assigned to update their draft every day or two. The writer, class, and teacher would have great examples of how the writing process really works.


3) Finally, on page 38, the book discusses using blogs as reflective experiences on teaching. I'm assuming the audience for these posts would be other professionals.

However, it could be an interesting experiment for the teacher to post his reflections on teaching for the students to read and reply to. It might be bad because it may break down the student / teacher relationship too much, but in another way, aside from being able to give feedback, the students might gain an appreciation for what a teacher does (too hopeful? maybe)

The teacher could post about: why he used a certain technique in class; why he thought the class went well or did not go so well; ideas he was considering for the next class... Student comments might then be able to say: "the lesson on Tuesday worked well for us"; "no one understood the lesson on Wednesday"; "Thursday's lesson was fun, but Friday's was boring."

In the end it may be more of a collaborative tool so that the students had a hand in planning the class. Perhaps the teacher could give some options and the students could vote on what they would like to do.

This type of blog might be great because the students may prefer the democratic feel of the class; then again, it may be slightly dangerous for the authority of the teacher.