References

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Borau, K. et al. (2009). Microblogging for Language Learning: Using Twitter to Train Communicative and Cultural Competence in M. Spaniol et al. (Eds.): ICWL 2009, pp. 78–87, 2009. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

De Bruyn, L. (2004). Monitoring online communication: Can the development of convergence and social presence indicate an interactive learning environment? Distance Education, 25, 67–81.

Divitini, M. et al. (2005). Blog to support learning in the field: Lessons learned from a fiasco. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05).

Dunlap, J. & Lowenthal, P. (2009). Tweeting the night away: Using Twitter to enhance social presence. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20, 1-8.

Ebner, M. et al.(2010). Micro-blogs in Higher Education – A chance to facilitate informal and process-oriented learning? Computers and Education, 55, 92-100.

Grosseck, G. & Holotescu, C. (2008). Can we use Twitter for Educational Activities?” Paper presented at the 4th International Scientific Conference, eLearning and Software for Education (ISCEASE 0’5).

Johnson, H. (2007). Dialogue and the construction of knowledge in E-learning: Exploring students’ perceptions of their learning while using Blackboard’s asynchronous discussion board. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. 2007, (1).

Junco, R. et al. (2011). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27, 119-132.

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King, K. S. (1998). Designing 21st-century educational net-worlds: Structuring electronic social spaces. In C. J. Bonk & K. S. King (Eds.), Electronic Collaborators: Learner-centred technologies for literacy, apprenticeship, and discourse. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Ocker, R. & Yaverbaum, G. (2001). Collaborative learning environments: Exploring student attitudes and satisfaction in face-to-face and asynchronous computer conferencing settings. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 12, 427–449.

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Treese, W. (2004). Putting It Together: Open systems for collaboration. Networker, 8, 13-16.

Conclusion and Evaluation

This essay reviewed a variety of studies, research papers and findings published by scholars (Blackstone et al. 2007; Divitini et al. 2005; Lin et al. 2006; De Bruyn 2004, Treese 2004; Pena-Shaff et al. 2005; Junco et all. 2011; Ebner et al. 2010; Borau et al. 2007) which dealt with web-log and micro-blog usage in educational settings, particularly involving students from secondary schools, colleges and universities. Students’ attitudes towards blogging and micro-blogging, their engagement and participation, effective communication between students and faculty were some of the main features and findings by the scholars. Consequently, based on the research, a discussion and evaluation was made that explored the uses and limitations of blogging and micro-blogging, respectively.

Despite possible drawbacks such as those mentioned in the discussion, the instructional benefits encourage educators to continue to incorporate blogging and micro-blogging in education and look at other Web 2.0 tools that may help in extending the instructional power of a Learning Management System (LMS) and further enhance the social presence potential of the learning opportunities which educators design and facilitate (Treese 2004).

Essentially, What was clearly evident after analysing the various studies and research is that the uses and limitations arise and occur according to each individual user, how he or she would use it and to what purpose. Therefore, it is arguable as to which medium (Blogging or Micro-blogging) is more productive in an educational setting and hence, an adoption of both simultaneously to serve the particular purpose may it be a project or a quick assignment query, would be more beneficial.

Discussion: Exploring Uses and Limitations of Blogs and Micro-blogs

It is evident that both blogging and micro-blogging, as Web 2.0 technologies, are useful for educational purposes in their own way. In terms of effectively managing communication, establishing ownership and a centralised learning experience, both mediums can argumentatively compete against one another. However, it would be constructive to explore the uses and limitations of each medium in an educational setting respectively, as it is not exclusively determinable whether one medium is better than another.

Blogging for instance, has a number of benefits for its users. Firstly, it improves interactivity among students and educators by allowing feedback through blog posts which consequently increases motivation alongside the number of increases in feedback. Secondly, because a blog is inherently designed to be compatible with other social software and websites, instructors and students can seek relevant information from other websites, regardless of information format, and share the information on a blog. The information could be text, video, or audio-based materials through other social software such as a Wiki, YouTube.com, and Podcasts. Thirdly, with the RSS system embedded in most educational blogs, it would help students save time and effort on retrieving information, even from fellow students’ blogs, since RSS automatically informs students of ongoing discussions they are interested in (Maag 2006). In addition blogs can be used as e-portfolios where each student has a blog and posts photos and written content from projects and class work they are involved in. Project based learning can often benefit from having a blog as a place to display the final product. Moreover, the appealing factor of seeing one’s work on the internet would essentially excite students, as well as providing them the ability to share their work with people all over the world. In this process, students will also be able to practice computer skills that will be very constructive for them in life and in their careers (Kim 2008).

It is also evident that there are certain shortcomings of blogs in educational settings. Although blogs from external environments can be linked to an educational system as supplementary resources, a question still remains as to whether it is easy to obtain relevant information. Blogs in general, consist of multiple components such as entries, comments, tags, blogrolls, permalinks, podcasts, images, and so on, all of which includes a large number and variety of keywords (Montanez, 2006). Thus, a single search query could result in many hits from the components and may even lead to confusion. Furthermore, there is an evident delay between blog posts and feedback which may de-motivate educators and students alike (Kim 2008).

Micro-blogging on the other hand, has also proved to be beneficial amidst faculty and students through real-time notifications. Twitter, for the most part has become one of the highly popular micro-blogging services to the extent that scholars have begun exploring its uses in the classroom (Parry 2008a). Parry explains that despite his initial scepticism, he found that Twitter could be an effective tool in the classroom because of its ability to “blur the lines of the classroom” (Parry, 2008b). Twitter and other micro blogging services such as Jaiku, Tumblr, Cirip etc. provide the following benefits in an educational setting:

• Exploring collaborative writing: it promotes writing as a fun activity, it fosters editing skills, develop literacy skills (Grosseck & Holotescu 2008)
• Reader response: students can use tweets or status updates to send out questions and observations to the group while engaged in classroom activities (Dunlap & Lowenthal 2009)
• Explore the potential of micro-blogging in formal and informal settings: e.g. Twitter linked to a course/class blog can offer students opportunities to discuss different kinds of asynchronous online discourse, considering voice, purpose, audience, to organize ideas, reflect, send notes, manage meet-ups, promote serendipitous discovery etc. (This is evident in our very own course of CMC here at Cardiff University, where our lecturer – Dr. Fontaine has provided us the freedom to communicate with her on Twitter regarding latest developments of CMC, course work and course concerns in general, which has ultimately resulted in the production of this blog).
• As a tool for assessing opinion, examining consensus, looking for outlying ideas (Junco et al. 2011).

However, as diverse as micro-blogging may be, it comes with shortcomings as well. Although micro-blogging promotes writing and editing as fun activities, there is many an occasion when students get distracted and carried away during ongoing lessons due to micro-blogging with their mobile phones. Not only is this addiction harmful to their education but it is also disrespectful to the teachers and lecturers who have prepared the lesson or lecture with a great deal of effort. Further, educators insist that due to micro-blogs being limited to adopting 140 characters for message updates, it could potentially lead to bad grammar usage by students (Grosseck & Hollotescu 2008).

A review of literature that explores web-log usage

Blogging in Educational Settings

In this era of education many academic bodies have attempted to implement a blog in educational contexts to enhance the communication environment among students and teachers. This is due to an emerging dissatisfaction of CMC technology such as the blackboard system and Wikis (Johnson 2007). Shortcomings include lacking management of communication (De Bruyn 2004), lacking ownership (Penna-shaff et al. 2005) the lack of posting referred to as ‘lurking’ (Ocker & Yaverbaum 2001), being an instructor-centred system rather than a learner-centred system (King 1998) and having no archives where email users have to view long threads of discussions that are poorly organised (Treese 2004).

Through the emergence of blogs, educators and students alike, were able to overcome such limitations of CMC technology having the ability to: manage communication effectively (De Bruyn 2004), have a sense of ownership and control over postings, create a centralised learning experience where students were given ample freedom to discuss any issues concerning academia (Treese 2004) and view the histories of posts and discussions due to a chronological archiving system (Divitini et al. 2005; Lin et al. 2006; Penna-shaff et al. 2005). Further, the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) System included as a feature of blog spaces, no longer requires blog users to regularly visit any other blogs to check for updates because RSS technology automatically delivers a list of updated information to other bloggers that are subscribed (Montanez, 2006).

A study by Blackstone et al. (2007) reports on an innovative approach to the implementation of a cycle of blogging activities within different levels of courses in an English medium university in Japan. The study specifically focused on how a “blogging buddy’ system can be an effective means of facilitating greater learner interaction and reflection on development of skills. A Blogging buddy system is one which assigns each student a peer review partner to help with editing before a piece of writing is uploaded (ibid). Their findings from an attitudinal survey conducted over two semesters with eleven classes of 145 students demonstrate that the university students had extremely positive attitudes toward both blogging and the blogging buddy system.

There are also contradictory results associated with the effectiveness of blogs to enhance communication among students. For instance, a study (Lin et al., 2006) indicated that a blog technology successfully enhanced interactivity among students. Here, 31 students posted over 700 entries on the course blog, and the top 40% of active blog users shared approximately 80% of the total blog entries for the three-month curriculum. On the contrary, another study (Divitini et al., 2005) revealed that the blog implemented in the course was unproductive in terms of interactivity among students (e.g., total nine entries were posted on the blog for a one-year course). The only different condition between two studies was that Divitini’s study provided students with a communal blog in which everyone was allowed to post a comment or entry. It was expected that the shared-blog serves as a centralized system where students are required to go to the shared blog (i.e. hub site) to communicate with their peer students (Ibid). As a result, students in Divitini’s study may have become dissatisfied with the centralized system and less engaged in blogging activities as compared to the students in Lin’s study. Although both studies did not further investigate the effect of the shared blog, the shared space might be the determining influence for the students’ engagement.

Micro-blogging in Educational Settings

With the widespread use of social media by students and educators, micro-blogging has become one of the latest trends currently followed in educational settings. To explore the extent of micro-blog usage in education, a variety of studies have been carried out by many scholars.

For instance, A semester-long experimental study to determine whether using Twitter for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades, was conducted by Junco et al. (2011) which involved the participation of 125 first year college students. While using a 19-item scale to quantify student engagement based on the National Survey of Student Engagement, they used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models to assess the difference of students’ engagement and grades (Ibid.). The analyses of the results which were further supported by content analysis of the students’ twitter exchanges indicated that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities (Ibid.). Essentially, providing experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role.

Ebner et al. (2010) conducted a research study that was carried out on the use of a micro-blogging platform for process-oriented learning in Higher Education. Students of the University Of Applied Sciences Of Upper Austria used micro-blogs throughout their course. All postings were carefully tracked, examined and analyzed graphically and in tabular form in order to explore the possibilities offered by micro-blogging in education. The findings indicated that It is not the transfer of information or status messages that are crucial factors, but rather, the opportunity to be a part of someone else’s process by reading, commenting, discussing or simply enhancing it (Ibid). This also enabled them to conclude that "micro-blogging can help users to partially and virtually present and to be part of a murmuring community, that is working on a specific problem without any restrictions of time and place" (ibid: 98).

Similarly, a study conducted by Borau et al. (2009) analysed the usefulness of micro-blogging in second language learning using the example of the social network Twitter while describing how they used Twitter with students of English at the Distant College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They also analysed the students’ messages and show how the usage of Twitter trained communicative and cultural competence.

Introduction and Aim

Blogging, a term originated from the act of "Web-Logging", is a popular medium of communication that “can be initiated by anyone with a computer and internet connection” (Myers 2010: 263). Blogs (such as Blogger, WordPress, Blogsome etc.) enable users to share or "log" any of their thoughts, ideas and experiences with the rest of the world. Micro-blogging on the other hand is the latest variant of blogging which allows the user to publish very short messages approximately 140 characters in length and enables the user to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links (Kaplan and Haenlein 2011). Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku are some of the popular micro-blogging services that have received much attention recently. Due to advances in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), many scholars have now come to believe that the uses and implications of such web-logging services are limitless to the extent that a large number of studies and investigations are carried out in different fields and genres to evaluate the functionality of blogs and micro-blogs.

In this light, the aim of this essay is to critically review prior studies and research papers on web-logging and comparatively analyse the uses and limitations of blogs and micro-blogs in educational settings.

WELCOME

Hello Everyone. Welcome to my very first academic blog. I thought it would be a good idea to welcome you in this fashion; firstly because it's always nice to be welcomed by someone, secondly because I thought it to be quite polite and thirdly because this way, I can actually test and see how a blog really works and how the data is in fact recorded along side time. So here goes my first attempt...