Electronic professional development, action research and blogging: An ideal combination

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provides tools for electronic interaction that enables global dissemination of information and inter-personal connectivity. An internet-based electronic professional development course for English language teachers can allow any teacher with access to a computer and the internet to participate. Electronic professional development that utilises the Action Research (AR) paradigm allows the design of a pedagogically culturally sensitive course. Although AR has been effectively utilised within teacher professional development for over forty years (Zeichner, 2001; Parsons & Brown, 2002), it has not been widely implemented in English language teacher development (Richards & Farrell, 2005) or within electronic professional development (e-PD) courses. This paper introduces an electronic. professional development course for English language teachers (e-PD4ELT), discusses how AR can be implemented within an e-PD course, and provides an appropriate AR model for the course using a blog within a personal learning electronic environment.