Welcome to Sydney Institute’s Learning Blog

May 3rd, 2008 by jcollareda in Learning and Innovation

Hi, my name is Julie Collareda and I am the Manager of Learning and Innovation at Sydney Institute. We have developed this blog for teachers and staff to use in teaching and learning. Blogs are a great tool that allows you to make comment on different issues and to build your knowledge and understanding. So you may be wondering what is a blog?

A blog is an online presence in the form of a personal diary or collaborative space. Since blogs were launched (only about 7 years ago) they have reshaped the web, impacted on politics and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others. It is believed that over 50 million people are Blogging worldwide and this is increasing. Perhaps the reason for this is that they are very easy to create, and edit. In teaching and learning they can be used to create a virtual classroom very simply without having any skills in web development. Blogs were one of the first tools in the Web 2.0 revolution.

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and applications such as wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (Wikipedia2008). Web 2.0 has changed how people use the web making it so easy to use with tools such as blogs and wikis. All you need is to be creative!

I hope you enjoy using this blog site and I look forward to watching how people use blogging as a teaching and learning tool to engage and stimulate learning.

Julie