Join the Learning Community

“As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance—the boundary between the known and unknown. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination—whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyways—but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.”

There is no doubt about the educational value of blogging.

A knowledge island is not necessarily an island surrounded by water, but is a space, isolated by natural or artificial means from the surrounding land, where a distinctive space exists amidst a larger differing 'social sea'.  For example, a knowledge island can be a plant, a grassy patch or a local nature reserve.  As spatial arrangments each space can be described as a cosm, from Greek, where it has the meaning "world, universe; order, arrangement. This meaning is found in such words as: cosmic, cosmopolitan, cosmos, microcosm.

Thus the world is a vast mosaic of cosms with a variety of embarkation points and landings offering the inquiring mind a menu for self-learning; a structure for individuals to come to understand by building a personal body of knowledge and passing it on to others for feedback in a global learning community.  This is the essence of a humanistic education. In this connection 'Belonging Place & Change' is an IT experiment in distance learning.

The structure of a blog allows the blogger to be creative, using either a page, a post or a combination of both, to present a story.  Pages contain deep text with few pictures.  Posts consist of a picture with shallow explanetary text  with a hyperlink to a deeper explanation

It is in this context of a knowledge community studying cosms that 'Belonging Place & Change' is being promoted by 'International Classrooms On Line' for people to make presentations of a knowledge island they feel passionate about with pictures, texts, videos and audio files to share with others. 

To join this expermental self-education network, create a themed blog in Google Blogger which illustrates the topic of Belonging Place & Change and send the blog address to corixus@gmail.com. It will then be added to the public Place & Change' directory .  At the end of the year the community of bloggers will be asked to judge all blogs and select the one that best expresses its theme.

Google Blogger has been chosen as the communication platform because it is simple to operate and is totally free.  Also, everyone has the same toolkit to make sure that all participants start from the same IT platform.

 Skomer Island National Nature Reserve was chosen as the knowledge island to start the project. Being an island surrounded by water, some obvious themes for blogging the topic of Place & Change are, 'Evolution Islands, 'Human Settlement and Sustainability'. 'Biodiversity', 'Puffins'  and 'Nature Conservation.

Because the Island is now closed, a virtual island is available for bloggers to explore. 


Also there is a long history of blogging from the island.

And a Facebook packed with pictures and videos

It is a Featured Location for photographers























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