Group items tagged

In the context of ethics education, this presentation seeks to articulate how blogging allows faculty not merely to deliver content to students about ethical theory and practice, but also to perform the virtues of inter-human ethical interaction with students in light of the theories and practices under consideration. Blogging thus allows us to perform the ethics we teach.

I embed here the video Teaching and Learning with Technology produced to highlight how I use blogs in my Philosophy classroom

Before you knew it, I was addicted to the blog, checking it multiple times a day and posting more and more, either with comments or my own posts. This blogging element works: it turned a cynic like me into a true believer, and I even started to enjoy reading platonic texts. And the reason for this road to Damascus conversion was that the blog is a 21st century equivalent of what Socrates was doing over two thousand years ago: organic dialectic. The very nature of the course encourages this online, expanding the class outside of the one hour and fifteen minutes classes twice a week. It's impossible to have this sort of conversation without the blog.

This format can be quite disconcerting for students at first - in fact it probably alienated a minority of the class - but the overwhelming majority of students found it engaging, and those intimidated at first eventually came to embrace it. It takes students out of their comfort zone, a necessity to truly participate in the dialectic. My own views were challenged and I even changed my mind, most notably my dislike for philosophy classes. And this was achieved through a blogging cooperative community, one that went beyond online and into real life.

The model is based on two insights:Learning is social and so it is most effectively pursued in communities of education in which teachers and students are actively engaged together.Social media technologies are transforming education because they are able to open dynamic communities of learning between teachers and students.The power of new social media technologies for education lies not in the information they deliver, but the communities they can create.