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).
No comments:
Post a Comment