Connectivism

Learners are like sponges. They can soak up and acquire knowledge readily, or the information presented to them can go "in through one ear and out the other." This is similar to the two different states of a sponge. If it is wet, it easily soaks things up. However, it does not soak things as easily when it is dry. Depending on how the information is delivered to the students, greatly determines to what extent they actually acquire the knowledge. It's not so much the value of what's being learned, but how the learning is being conveyed to the learners.
The article "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age" explains how learning theories are shifting from learning being an internal, individualistic activity to it presently being more of a networking activity. We now depend on others. Karen Stephenson said, "Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people's experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. " This principle of networking is an important aspect of connectivism.

Blogging in the LOTE classroom

There are a variety of ideas that I could easily implement into my Spanish III & IV classes. Here are four ideas that I plan to try this year:

• Post assignments based on news articles and have students respond on their own Weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work. Students can create their own blogs, find articles, complete the article assignments on their blogs, including their reaction, and paste the link of their blog into mine.
  
• Provide online readings/articles for my students to read and react to. This is similar to the idea mentioned above, except students will respond to the given article instead of finding their own.
  
• Invite student comments or posting on issues in order to give them a writing voice. My Spanish IV students can discuss and react to various issues we will cover this year including political unrest in Latin America and global warming.
  
• Post prompts for writing. This could be an alternative method for practicing writing for the Regents Exam.