Blogging and Microblogging

After reflecting upon the materials for the previous blog posts, I felt the need to more deeply understand the use of each technological tool for educational purposes. Thus, I had the chance to get more exposed to blogging and microblogging which affected my beliefs about teaching, learning, and schooling and gave me more confidence about how to implement them in my EFL classroom.

As Will Richardson states in his book “Blogs, Wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms”, there are still too many students for whom these opportunities occur only outside the classroom walls. The ways in which we connect and learn continue to look less and less like what happens in the classroom. I completely agree that kids continue to have very few people in their lives who are modeling and teaching the safe, effective, and ethical use of all the Internet has to offer. Therefore, in order to prepare our students for networked learning and fully understand the pedagogical uses of these tools, we must first experience those environments for ourselves.

The audio presentation “Weblogs in School” by Will Richardson offered me a helpful insight in blogging. The combination of the theory and the practice that I am doing now enabled me to see the rationale behind implementing blogging in my classroom. Blogging is a space where more learning and more investigation happens in contrast to an archive of ideas. It’s a hyperlink which requires more intellectual engagement in the content around which the interaction happens. I totally agree with Will Richardson arguing that although blogging is a writing tool, it starts with reading, what I am experiencing myself now. I read from different sources and put them together in my blog linking back to them in the post. Thus, this is a tool which enables learners to synthesize critical thinking and critical reading before they write, and allow for continual learning. It’s necessary to know about blogging policy and guidelines on how to use this tool well, about what successful bloggers do, and what is a good post.

Having gained information about the use of blogging, I became more curious about the assessment of blog writing. Murran Etal’s research paper “Blog Writing Assessment” enabled me to draw some parallels between our course and the researched course in terms of the provided framework for blog assessment. The article revealed certain important issues for me: process and post-process approaches were considered in the assessment of writing. Learners had to produce content that was both personalized and reflective. They wanted the learners to personalize their content in order to place more emphasis on their roles as learners in the language learning process, to allow them to become more creative and reflective. It was hoped that the post-process reflection would help learners to monitor their sense of focus and commitment. Another point that I found important in the article was the list of criteria used in the assessment of blog writing. It includes: evidence of supplementary reading, style transference, self-quotation for clarification, discourse, and organization of content. With all this in mind, I feel more confident to say that I will implement blogging in my EFL classroom which will make the distinction between ‘recreational’ and ‘academic’ blogging where the student self-expresses and reflects upon self-expression.

I will definitely try using Microblogging tools, such as Twitter, which enable users to post short messages that are distributed within their community. As it is stated in the research article on microblogging by Kerstin Borau, microblogging allows for a chance to actively produce language and the chance to use English as a tool of communication. The study found out that it is suitable to train communicative and cultural competence anytime anywhere without face-to-face interaction. I believe that online communities enable the exchange of information and motivate the individual to conform to the community’s learning behaviors.