Thank you students!

Yahoooooooooooooo! Janet and I just finished our presentation in San Antonio Texas all about the blogs we did with our students last year. It's amazing, Janet and I have been thinking about this project and what we were going to do for over a year, and finally we have made our presentation. It was such a wonderful experience. There were a lot of people in the audience (at least over 50), and many people asked some very interesting questions. I hope more people will start blogging with their students. It seems like this blogging thing is just growing and growing.

Janet and I also met a reporter from China. She took our pictures, and she is going to write an article about the TESOL conference. Wow, I feel kind of famous :-)

Anyway, tomorrow, Janet and I have to host a "post presentation discussion". I'll let you know how that goes!

For any teachers out there who may read this blog, here are some ideas I have about Vygotski and blogs. All of the page numbers are from:

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is just a rough copy of my ideas . . . any comments?

The work of L.S. Vygotski can contribute to a theoretical basis for using blogs in teaching ESL or EFL. Vygotski stressed the social origins of language and thinking (page 6), and blogs provide a virtual social community in which students can communicate, think and learn from others in the target language of English.

Vygotski believed that learning should be matched with a student’s developmental level (page 86). Blogs are able to do this as the students set their own level of difficulty in their blogs by writing freely about topics that they choose themselves. For Vygotski, there are two levels of development. These levels of development are demonstrated by two groups of functions: those a student already possesses, and those he or she can perform under guidance, in groups, and in collaboration with other students (page 87). As a student initially creates his or her blog, the entries demonstrate the language that the student already possesses. This is the student’s actual level of language development. However, as the student interacts with other students in the blogging community, he or she begins to be able to preform at a higher level of language because of what he or she is learning from his or her peers in the blogging community. This learning takes place in the zone of proximal development, which is defined by Vygotski as being

. . . the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidence or in collaboration with more capable peers (page 86 – italics mine).

The key to this definition in this discussion of blogs, is the idea that the students are learning from their peers within the blogging community. As the students see other students using new words, or grammatical structures, they can begin to use them in their own blogs. Vygotski saw this process of imitation as being very important within the zone of proximal development as it leads to greater developmental levels. For Vygotski, students can imitate a variety of actions that go well beyond the limits of their own capabilities. By using imitation, students are able to do much more in collective activity (page 88) and thus reach towards higher developmental levels. This is reflected in the blogs and the way that students are able to copy the grammatical structures and new vocabulary they see in other blogs. A zone of proximal development is set up in the blogging community, and learning can take place as the students constantly move toward higher and higher levels of language. The students are learning from each other. Vygotski asserts that an essential feature of learning is that it creates this zone of proximal development and that the learning process only operates when students are interacting with people in their environment and in cooperation with their peers (page 90). Blogs provide an ideal environment in which students can interact with people and learn in cooperation with their peers. For Vygotski, human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which students grow into the intellectual life around them (page 88). Vygotski saw learning as a profoundly social process, and because of that he emphasized dialogue, the need for students to collaborate with their peers, and the role that language plays in instruction and cognitive growth (page 131). Blogging can provide a vibrate place for students to socialize and improve their language as they grow through the sharing of their own personal stories and ideas.