"Knowledge Forum" Classrooms, Blogging, and the Goal of Education

Even with the rather large reading load for this week, there was one specific article that truly impacted me and my ideas of education—the Hewitt reading titled “The Exploration of Community in a Knowledge Forum Classroom: An Activity System Analysis” opened up my eyes to the pedagogical positives of using blogs in the classroom. When flipping through various educational blogs onTwitter, I came across “The Concord Review”, an awesome blog written by Will Fitzhugh—in his most recent post, Fitzhugh discusses the fact that we, as the educational community, have misconstrued the overall purpose of schooling. He states, “The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement.  I argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work”. He later goes on to discuss the fact that, although we are often concerned with meeting specific, state mandated standards, what we should be focusing on  is the “basic purpose of school, to have students actually do academic work”. In Fitzhugh’s opinion, students should play a primary role in their own learning, and instruction should not be limited to only meeting state curriculum standards and expectations.

How do Fitzhugh’s ideas regarding what is really important in the realm of education relate to the constructs of “knowledge forum” classrooms as discussed in Jim Hewitt’s article, “An Exploration of Community in a Knowledge Forum Classroom: An Activity System Analysis”? We must first discuss the aspects of “knowledge forum classrooms”—a “knowledge forum”, as described by Hewitt, is a component of a “knowledge building community”, an instructional construct which focuses on specific “knowledge creation among and between members of the classroom, rather than the completion of specific products or tasks (worksheets, projects, exams) by individual students”(3,4). In order to establish and develop knowledge, the primary medium of communication in a “knowledge forum” classroom is a blog (which is literally called the ‘knowledge forum’)—on this blog-like forum, Hewitt states that students “publish multimedia "notes" in a collaborative, supportive space” which works to push all learners towards a shared, communal goal of increased understanding of complex ideas and concepts (4).  

Can we find a correlation between Fitzhugh’s idea of the true goal of education (that students “do” work, instead of being fed disconnected facts and information) and the construct of a “knowledge forum” classroom? I believe that we can. The use of blogs within the classroom presents an extremely substantial pedagogical positive—through serving as the primary communication tool between members of a classroom community, students are guided towards collaboratively establishing both patterns and explanations regarding research content on their own, causing them to contribute and take hold of their own learning and become connected with it. The use of blogs within a “knowledge forum” classroom causes students to actually “do” work that is meaningful and relative to their own lives, which, in my opinion, is more valuable than the completion of projects and assignments that are not applicable to the outside lives of the students. Although I am still learning how to use and appreciate blogging and similar technologies,  I believe that the use of blogs in the classroom does present opportunities for students to create content-based explanations on their own that are central and comprehensible to them, which is the ultimately the overall goal of education.