elearnspace

Just came across a fairly new blog by Gráinne Conole titled e4innovation. Gráinne is Professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. It’s great to see research-focused academics entering the blog space. We need a edublog ecology which runs the full breadth from practical application to theory and research. Many of the original edubloggers were/are practice-based. For example, an instructor or teacher at the classroom level starts playing around with the different ways of expressing herself and engaging with students. The small blog network takes notice and communities form. Over the last few years, the community has gained the attention of researchers and established academics – people like Terry Anderson – who are able to translate the trends at classroom levels into research activities at the academy level (and in the process, improve use, application, and respectability of blogs in the eyes of traditional academics). Over the last few months, I’ve seen numerous chapter requests for books, article submissions for journals, conference requests, etc. that focus specifically on using the participative web for teaching and learning. Great stuff! (and welcome Gráinne!)