Maintaining that learning theories should be reflective of underlying social environments, Siemens (2004) describes the limitations of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism (and the epistemological traditions which underpin them - objectivism, pragmatism and interpetivism - and their representations of what is reality and knowledge) to introduce connectivism as 'a learning theory for the digital age.'

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).

Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

Connectivism, "a learning theory for the digital age," has been developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes based on their analysis of the limitations of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism to explain the effect technology has had on how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.

An overview of connectivism.

Example of a wiki as an e-portfolio.

It is a "best practice" for classroom teachers today to use a website as a learning portal for links and resources related to class studies. In this learning module we'll learn the difference between blogs and wikis, explore examples of K-12 exemplary classroom wikis and professional portfolios, as well as tools for creating educational wikis.

By combining writing with online technology, teachers can provide opportunities for students and future educators to develop their digital fluency while also strengthening their traditional literacy skills.

Study of blogging in higher ed information systems course suggests that blogging is a significant predictor for learning outcomes while traditional coursework is not, that blogging has the highest predictive power for high & low students but much less for medium performers, and that blogging has a positive learning effect.

Understanding the tenets of copyright in general, and in particular, in online communication and publishing with Web 2.0 tools, has become an important part of literacy in today's Information Age, as well as a cornerstone of free speech and responsible citizenship for the future.

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address "new problems" facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This "hybrid" course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams.

Most writing instructors have a repertoire of methods to help students find a thesis that will focus and guide an interesting and persuasive academic paper. We offer some of those methods here, with the observation that these instructors in fact teach the thesis in multiple ways in their classrooms.

There are several free online grammar and writing websites that will give you an instantaneous answer to your query - even if it's something a little more fun like wanting to know which famous author you write like.

The centuries-long domination of texts and words in culture, particularly Western culture, has come to an end. The new "pictorial turn" means that  images no longer exist primarily to entertain and illustrate. Rather they are becoming central to communication and meaning-making.

Academics have a long history of claiming and defending the superiority of verbal over visual for representing knowledge. By dismissing imagery as mere decoration, they have upheld the sanctity of print for academic discourse. However, in the last decade, digital technologies have broken down the barriers between words and pictures, and many of these same academics are now willing to acknowledge that melding text with image constructs new meaning, and some may even go so far as to admit that images, as communication devices, can stand on their own.

There is a tendency in universities today to think of teachers as, like sales people and politicians, interested in outcomes. And so there is a tendency for teachers to treat their students in the way sales people treat their clients and politicians treat the voters: without respect. Professors these days, as well as our graduate student assistants, are encouraged to approach the classroom as a social engineer might. We are prodded to think about how most effectively to seat the students, to organize them into working groups; journals, wikis, presentations, and such like, are devices we are told to use to restructure the classroom experience. And we are encouraged to get ourselves videotaped and so, in general, to come to think of ourselves as teaching professionals whose main concern is student outcomes. Now there is nothing wrong with working hard to make the classroom the most exciting place it can be. But we are not social engineers and students are not products we are manufacturing. To think of students that way is to insult them and it is to make genuine teaching and learning impossible. Students, like citizens, are free and equal, and they have the power of reason; they can make up their own minds and can discover and enforce their own conceptions of value and truth and meaning. To view them as any less is to view them the way politicians so often view the public, without respect.

a scaffolded list of skills to help them understand the embedded skills in blogging - the kind of skills that a blogger would take for granted, but a non-blogger might not think about. They feel that they understand the more traditional skills already (obviously) but don't really know what needs to be taught for digital literacy.

How the Web inspires creativity and innovation.

Steven Johnson talks about creativity.