Blog as a tool to develop e-learning experience in an international distance course Wei-Jane Lin Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Kyoto University
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Hsiu-Ping Yueh Department of Agricultural Extension, National Taiwan University
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Yi-Ling Liu Department of Agricultural Extension, National Taiwan University
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Masayuki Murakami Research Center for Multimedia Education Kyoto University of Foreign Studies
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Koh Kakusho Academic Center for Computer and Media studies, Kyoto University
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Michihiko Minoh Academic Center for Computer and Media Studies, Kyoto University
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Abstract This paper describes the implementation of blog system in an international distance course between Japan and Taiwan. In the study, blog was used as a tool to encourage students’ reflective learning and communication. Findings suggested that blog was effective for students to document their learning, share experience and knowledge, have direct interaction with peers especially internationally. Students preferred blog over the LMS where this course builds an course website and they proved to use blog in developing their e-learning experience. We proposed the use of blog could lead to a technologically enhanced support for instructional strategy that serves as an informative model for other web-assisted international courses.
the traditional ways such as emails, discussion forums and instant messaging. A particularly salient affordance of blog is its propensity for effective and easy personal publication in which manipulating its motivational or affective content can also dramatically impact users’ beliefs and attributions [2]. When thinking of integrating technologies to improve collaborative knowledgebuilding, the most insidious concern is whether most students have the motivation and ability to construct their own knowledge. The blog provides the field where the decentralized authorship can be realized, and creates more comfortable environment where students can be motivated to make reflections and comments. With the appropriate design and guiding strategies, blog has great potential to become one of the effective groupware in education and work projects [5].
1. Introduction
2. The context
The weblog (blog) emerged rapidly as a popular application and has been widely adopted in use in higher education has during the past three years. This growth reflects attempts to circumvent the constraints of centralized authorship [4] and increased needs for instant communication on knowledge-building community [5], as it allows alternative forms of selfreflection, student-student and student-tutor contact to
2.1 Designing the international distance course This course was conducted between two universities in Taiwan and Japan as a distance course that entitled as “Introduction to e-Learning” and was offered to undergraduate students in the semester of fall 2005. The course was delivered via video conferencing system synchronously every week
accompanied with a LMS with learning materials and communication tools for students to actively participate in the distance learning course. This course is at the introductory level, the instructors encourage students to actively explore and find out many cases of their interests in e-learning related issues [8]. Reviewing and discussing of these examples are one of the main instructional activities during every class meetings. Students are required to collect as many resources as possible and analyze those with theories and practical cases so that they can learn to define elearning on their own as a process of knowledge construction.
2.2 Constructing the blog As to advance students’ learning experience, a blog system was selected and constructed so that every student can have his / her own blog to document their learning. The software used for personal weblog is an open-source package, b2evolution, which runs on PHP and MySQL. It features an integrated XHTML validator, supports recursive subcategories and cross posting, and has an integrated layout skinning system [1]. The main considerations for selecting b2evolution rather than other various blogging systems are: 1. All blogs would be listed significantly as the links, pressing stronger image of a small community, which is different from most commercial blogging systems. 2. The b2evolution is available in 13 languages including Japanese and Traditional Chinese. Not only the blog entries but the whole user interface could be displayed in native language that matches students’ preference. 3. Effective management of blog entries, categories and users: Instructors can easily view the database it provided with log files that contains details of all actions and interactions between students.
2.3 The study As instructors and tutors of the class, researchers of the study serve as facilitators to help students learning as well as to solve the problems they encountered while using the blog. Besides, we collect the blog content and usage logs as important data, and developed a questionnaire distributed to the students at the end of the course for analysis.
3. Selected results 3.1 Blog analysis There are 31 students participated in the course blogging activity, contributing over 700 entries during the three-month curriculum. Among those entries, 535 are directly related posts that include assignments, lecture notes and reflections, and others are resources or discussion for students’ learning in other related courses. Entries and categories that students created could be roughly categorized into 5 types: notes, logs, reflections, organization of learning and social conversation. Top 40% active blog users shared almost 80% of the total blog entries. Besides, the active users in blog and active learners in class were significantly correlated. Although students have no obligation to write down their reflection every week, we found that students worked on those reflections spontaneously and updated them on a regular basis regarding the course, assignment, and experiences. Also, students explored a variety of examples, trying to align these practical cases with the course objectives, and form their own understanding toward e-learning. Several students were able to explain what cases or implementations are and what are not e-learning with their own criteria at the end of the semester. These kinds of learning explorations and case comparisons were practiced in students’ blogs over and over, which facilitated their understanding as well as knowledge construction. According to several reflections from the top 20% active blog users in this course, “seeing” what happened by blogging posed a great advantage on helping them integrate their learning in relatively a long term. At the term questionnaire of course blogging experience, several students reflected that blogging itself, can be viewed as one of the e-learning formats. Also, blogging could be viewed as one of the communication means by which students could take other’s comments as important feedback, which also served as critical motivation for students to keep blogging continuously. [7]
3.2 Self-report in questionnaire Over 80% of the students reported that this is the first-time blogging experience for them. After overcoming technical problems, the other concern came up and reported by students was the difficulty to
express themselves and discuss with others in English. This result was interesting because actually students do not necessarily have to compose their blog entries in English. Using native language was recommended first to make students feel easy, however, it turns out that all students devoted their efforts in blog with English authoring because they want to communicate with others, especially those international partners. From our observation we found that learners are actually taking the initiation authority in the blogging activity of this course. This result not only echoed previous researches about blog’s decentralized authorship [5][6], but also suggested that students’ learning might as well be explicit by given the emphasis on learners’ control over blogging.
5. Conclusion In the case this study reports, blog proves to be an effective tool that enables students learning in an elearning environment, also foster the atmosphere to make these conversations happen and grow. It is observed as a very important factor for motivating students’ continuous participation and to build their elearning experience in the international distance education course.
6. Acknowledgement
4. Discussions
The authors would like to thank Shoji, T. and Watanabe, S. from KU, and Wang Y.W., Chiu, C.Y, and Tien, M.Y. from NTU for their great help in supporting this distance course. The work presented in this paper is supported by NTU-KU distance learning collaboration project.
4.1 Blog as a good tool for e-Learning
7. References
Comparing with students’ discussion on course forums in the course website, talking something in their own blog was more a personal thing, which broadened the flexibility and space for them to reflect and discuss in an easier way. Besides, it also motivated them to be willing to express their opinions more profoundly. Perceiving the authority of personal blog is a critical turning point that motivates students’ devotion into their learning reflection in blogging. Moreover, students in some groups were actually utilizing this medium to build their shared knowledge. Blog created the field where individual and social learning could be both supported, but also highly stressed the personal authority over the publishing. With these features, blog could more effectively visualize and represent student’s learning, as well as communicate with others than other applications.
[1] b2evolution Features / Specs. Retrieved 2005/10/02 from http://www.b2evolution.net
4.2 How did blog function in distance courses Course blog site was originally designed for one of the learning activities in this class. Comparing to the course website, blog site was expected to be just one of the assignment links. However, after the first two weeks blogging activity, we compared the access logs and found blog site had almost double access logs over the course website. The feedback of the students reported that they would like to have more opportunities of direct interactions with each other especially with international peers and apparently they viewed blog system functioned better for that purpose.
[2] Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright. “Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs”, Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Science, 2004, pp. 101-111. [3] Introduction to e-Learning – Course Website. Retrieved 2005/12/02 from http://ceiba.ntu.edu.tw/941elearning [4] Karger, D. and Quan, D. “What would it mean to Blog on the Semantic Web”, Proceeding of International Semantic Web Conference 2004, pp. 214-228 .
[5] Divitini, M., Haugalokken, O., and Morken, E.M., “Blog to support learning in the field: lessons learned from a fiasco”, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2005, pp. 219-221.
[6] Nardi, B.A., Schiano, D.J., Gumbrecht, M. and Swartz, L. “Why we blog”, Communications of the ACM, 47 (12), 2005, pp. 41-46.
[7] Ward, J. “Blog assisted language learning (BALL): Push button publishing for the pupils”, TEFL Web Journal, 3(1), 2004. [8] Yueh, H. and Lin, W., “Classroom management of Project-based Learning in web environment”, Proceedings of the world conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia, and telecommunications, EDMedia 2005, pp. 4711-4716.
