Communities of Learning towards constructing and engaging learning in the Blog-world

Lecturers from higher education institutions face difficulties in adopting and implementing the most apt tool for active and engaged learning in order to produce learners who know how to think while balancing it with other uphill administrative tasks. They are surrounded by demands and challenges such as covering the syllabus (subject oriented learning), cramped teaching schedules, large class size, and limited class time, which also occur frequently in a Malaysian classroom environment. “Maintaining control in the class” would also be included as one of the challenges as we have students with each having their own personality and beliefs. Lecturers need to cater to various preconceived ideas and questions on the courses which students are about to embark upon such as “Is it difficult?”, “Will the course be too hectic?”, “Hope the class will be enjoyable and fun.”, “What will we gain from the course?”, “Will I be competent in the course?” In order to answer the challenges faced by the lecturers and to close the gap in producing life-long learning students, this study illustrates how web-blog was adopted and applied to create communities of learning in a course in a higher education institution. This research discusses how “communities of practice” concepts are applied to create significant learning among students. Thanks to the technological options available today, students can enhance the opportunity to engage in learning through the use of online communities. The instruments used for this qualitative study are content analysis on web-logs, and interviews while sampling of the study is six third year students (pre-service teachers) enrolled in the course. From the analyzed data, it was gathered that a community of learning was formed from six different student-individual, with common goals which they aimed to achieve. This study has illustrated that the communities of learning which formed among the individual- students can result in significant learning. The student took on the roles of teachers and comrades, pushing each other to strive for the common goal. It should be cautioned that due to the limitations and delimitations of the study, the data cannot be generalized to a wider population.

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