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Web 2.0 & Connectivist Learning will focus on utilizing new technologies to connect, collaborate, create, and share.  The primary focus will be on teacher professional learning and building a Personal Learning Network.  We will explore in depth how web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, social bookmarking, social networking, microblogging, and others can be utilized both for personal professional growth and how these tools might be used in the classroom.

I have noticed an emerging trend of what one goes through when adopting a PLN for the first time. I myself continue to look at the stages I am going through in adopting this new way of learning, interacting, and teaching in a collaborative, connected world.

Recent studies show that literacy practices "are changing so rapidly that educators, students, and parents are unsure about how school literacy learning experiences and out-of-school literacy practices connect." However, "a majority of more than 900 educator-respondents to the NCTE poll indicate that … out-of-school literacy practices are as critical to students' development as what occurs in the classroom."

In that spirit of collaboration, the Teaching Carnival is back. … Each month, a new writer will collect and sort teaching-related links and will post them here. (If you are interested in writing one of these posts or contributing links to the roundup, see the info at the bottom of this page.) This is a great source for connecting to college profs who are writing about teaching in college.

Many benefits of blogging seem to become apparent over time. That has happened in my own learning journey as a blogger as well.  It is the reflective nature and the timeline of a blog, as well as the growing connections with readers that will reveal growth as a writer, the benefits of being a member of a network and a contributor to a global community.

Successful online community building is connecting a group of people online and making them feel a part of something special. This 'something special' element is the overlooked bit.

New students… bring with them literacy experiences from other classrooms, from their homes, and from their communities. The challenge is to figure out what they know and connect to that prior knowledge and experience as soon as possible. … Here are five strategies:

I'd like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is "Motivating Students" by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students. … What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with:  to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people.

Nice video that explores many of the techniques we use in QEP to promote student connectivity, PLNs, and collaboration.

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.

To fully assess the document's evolving role requires a broad understanding of both old and new documents. For documents are much more than just a powerful means for structuring and navigating information space -- important though that is. They are also a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social space. It is the latter quite as much as the former that has made the documents of the World Wide Web so popular.

the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.

here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators.

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.

An ongoing debate has ensued around the status of George Siemens' (2004) connectivism theory and Stephen Downes' (2006) connected knowledge theory as learning theories for the network age (Kop & Hill, 2008).

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the thinking behind new e-learning technology, including e-portfolios and personal learning environments. Part of this thinking is centered around the theory of connectivism, which asserts that knowledge - and therefore the learning of knowledge - is distributive, that is, not located in any given place (and therefore not 'transferred' or 'transacted' per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community. And another part of this thinking is centered around the new, and the newly empowered, learner, the member of the net generation, who is thinking and interacting in new ways. These trends combine to form what is sometimes called 'e-learning 2.0'-an approach to learning that is based on conversation and interaction, on sharing, creation and participation, on learning not as a separate activity, but rather, as embedded in meaningful activities such as games or workflows.

Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! At best, students can narrate what they did, but have trouble thinking abstractly about their learning - patterns, connections and progress. Likewise teachers and principals need encouragement and opportunities to think more reflectively about their craft.  In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection." - modeled on Bloom's approach.

I'm more convinced than ever that blogging and doing it with other students from around the world is essential to helping students connect with themselves and a larger world.

Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

Students around the world are increasingly bringing their own mini-computers (or some connected device) to class. Whether this creates a distraction or a boon to learning is debatable, but these four uses of mobile phones in education - and countless others - could one day help prove the latter.