Analysis of how educational leaders might use blogs........

The most obvious and essential format that educational leaders might be able to use blogs are through reflective journals or blogs/weblogs. To put easier terms, journals, blogging, web-logging provide research administrators a tool for reflecting on their own thought process. This method is a fast and effective way that practitioners or administrators in this case can publish and exchange thoughts and results from their own inquiry research findings. This format of network communication can also allow for administrators to provide each other feedback ranging from open-blog communities, or specific practitioner researchers who are made up closed-blog communities. So what better tool can an administrator have at his or her disposal than reflective feedback from other thinking minds alike from all over the world. You have the capacity to "borrow" information and or strategies as we educators like to say that can assist your research inquiry and hopefully find a solution to the problem at hand all from the stroke of a keyboard, internet connection and a collaborative network of action research practitioners at work.

A description of what I have learned about action research and how I might be able to use it

Dana pg. 6, summarizes action research as being intended to bring about change of some kind, usually focusing on a social justice theme. Dana pg. 5, in addition states that the practitioner inquiry movement focuses on the concerns of practitioners (not outside researchers) and engages themselves in the design, data collection, and interpretation of data around their question. Carr and Kemmis (1986) in addition described action research as possessing many benefits in the sense that theories and knowledge are generated from research grounded in the realities of educational practice. In essence, practitioners thereby also become collaborators by investigating first hand their own campus's and student population's issues afflicting at the time. Most importantly, practitioners play a part in the research process which allows themselves adjustment to any given circumstance the best way they see fit. Clearly one can depict the trend that is taking place in a learning and workplace environment that promotes and functions around action research. Its ability to provide a solution to issues arisen in an in-house setting are what makes this method so effective and less of a public relations outcry. As an administrator, I would apply the action based research approach to our campus's exceedingly high student truancy ratio and attempt in investigating the root of the problem the best way possible.

Works Cited:
Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming critical: Knowing through action research. Geelong: Australia: Deakin University Press

Dana, N. F. (2009). Leading With Passion and Knowledge: The Principal as Action Researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.