Let me introduce you in my environment, a professionnal ePortfolio where I publish what I learn.
I started blogging in october 2002 as principal of a school. At this moment, I was looking for a tool that could improve learning for a group of students in a new program I founded. They were equiped by laptops and when they began in september 2003, each of them had a blog transformed in a ePortfolio perspective. When they began to blog, we realised that laptops would be a great opportunity but their blog was the most impressive tool they had to learn. Stephen Downes wrote a paper about that. I reported on that edublog of certain step of my experiment; since I am a french-blogger of the province of Québec, most of my blogging is in french, but I was inspired by the work of lots of edubloggers in USA and around the world connected by blogs. For students and for me, blogs changed the way we learn, gave us a tool to write in a real context. Because we publish what we have done and what we think about what we have done, learning is improved. Furthermore, we developped a learning community; that change our position about the learning process.
Since that time, I experiment success with our approach in «my school» and lots of people demand to give more information about it. I left my job in june 2005, I joined a company who help me to influence more schools and organisations to consider blogs and social tool (wiki, site like del.icio.us, etc.) to improve learning. I blog more than ever on my personal and corporative sites and I coach actually about fourty schools, public institutions and companies in that way. Blogging change my professionnal life and help me to pass from principal of a school to a coach working with more people in the same goals : make learning happen!
Here is some posts with english content. It will be a great opportunity to meat you in Paris next december…
See you there !
N.B. If you want to read more about edublogging, this can be usefull (pay attention to part three of the trio, if you just have few time to spend there)…
