Sojourn to South Africa

Next month, I will have the privilege of joining Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jean Stewart in South Africa to work with their students at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Just below this paragraph is an open letter to the students. I invite you to post commentary and get involved in what I hope to be one of many online community forums that result from this project and sojourn.

To read more about the Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change, please visit their website: http://cvm.za.org/


Dear Knowledge Producers:

Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Stewart have told me many great things about your group and I have had the privilege of viewing your photos and videos brought to Canada, where I study with Dr. Mitchell. I am very excited to have the opportunity to meet all of you and share my teaching experience and ideas about creating an online community.

One way we can build an online community is by creating blogs. Blogs are online journals. Researchers that have written about blogs say "Bloggers are driven to document their lives, provide commentary and opinions, express deeply felt emotions, articulate ideas through writing, and form and maintain community forums" (Nardi et al, 2004, p. 41). One of the most important strategies of becoming a reflective and intentional teacher involves documenting our lives as teachers, expressing our opinions, emotions, and ideas through writing.

Blogs offer a unique online format that allows us to create our own personal online space with the ability to limit who can access and read our blog, post comments on our blog, and network other resources and information that may be beneficial to our ever-evolving teaching practices. Perhaps most importantly, blogging offers us teachers and soon-to-be teachers a communal outlet to network and develop existing relationships with our colleagues as well as build new relationships with educators in our own school districts, universities, and other world communities. With access to the Internet, we can adopt and utilize this free online space from websites like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, and LiveJournal.com. Using our own experiences of blogging, we can create the same learning experiences for our students as online access and computers are made available to them.

My objective as I work with you is to extend the activities and purposes of your work with Dr. Jean Stewart and Dr. Claudia Mitchell by helping you upload your photos, video productions, and reflections to a community blog that we'll create together. As we create this blog, you may also create your own blogs and continue to build upon the group experiences we share. Additionally, we will explore other social networking websites, video blogs, online games, and so on. I am very excited to meet all of you and look forward to our time together!

Yours truly,
John


Reference:
Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M. and Swartz, L. (2004, December). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM, 47 (12). pp. 41-46.