January 12, 2005

COMMUNITIES: Blogging to Performance

sustaining.gif While I've been struggling just to start up some basic collaborative projects with past and current students, my husband George is, as usual, way ahead of me.

George and his fellow theater and music bloggers have been building a vital and articulate arts community where they not only blog their experiences as writers, actors, directors, and performers, but also share drafts of works in progress, engage in cross-arts discussion and debate, get together and attend one another's performances (when time and geography permit), and now even collaborate on performance.

George and director Isaac Butler, of the arts and politics blog Parabasis, are about to stage a workshop production of George's new play Sustaining. George has been regularly blogging both the writing and rehearsal process on his arts and culture blog Superfluities, and Isaac has posted his take on the challenges of directing this production - and workshops in general - on his own blog.

If you're in the New York area, you can see the result for yourself this weekend:
Sustaining
Manhattantheatresource
177 MacDougal Street, New York, NY 10011
Sunday-Tuesday, January 16-18, 2005, at 8:00pm
For reservations call (212) 501-4751
All tickets $12.00

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2004

ARTICLE: Learning Communities

The article Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technologies - Part One in the September 2004 T.H.E. Journal provides a nice definition of learning communities, as well as a couple of illustrative examples of distributed learning strategies for teacher education.
(Link via Collaborative Learning Environments)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

COMMUNITY-BUILDING: Blended Learning

From the August issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Blended Learning and Sense of Community: A Comparative Analysis with Traditional and Fully Online Graduate Courses reports the results of a very small but interesting study on how "sense of community" differed across fully traditional, blended, and fully online courses. (As you might have guessed from the title, the study's findings suggest that blended courses produced the strongest sense of community.)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)