The Summary/ Reflection 6

The Summary/ Reflection of Creating Blogs and Wikis

The point of this writing is about creating blogs and wikis in terms of second language teaching and learning, and I will summarize and discuss an article named Emerging Technologies, Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-Line Collaboration.

(http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/pdf/emerging.pdf )

At the beginning of the article, Robert Godwin-Jones from Virginia Comonwealth University introduces the topic to the reader, and mentions how much the language professionals have seized the opportunities of the Internet and many things in related to Internet such as “e-mail, discussion forums, chat” and “blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds”. Then, he has made a classification about Web to express the importance of the today’s situation about the tools in concern with the language education. His classification is as following: First-Generation Web including asynchronous tools and synchronous tools, and Second-Generation Web including blogs, wikis, and RSS.

In First-Generation Web, asynchronous tools are about to disappear, but e-mails have been protecting their usability in classroom exchanging and tandem learning. Later, in the article the author goes on with the facilities of e-mails and has told about how it can work, then he mentions why many instructors preferred discussion forums to e-mails. According to the author, most of the instructors start to use discussion forums because of their facilitation properties. After that, he has talked about some discussion forums used in the past. As for synchronous tools, the author continues with the use of instant messaging on Internet by the instructors and the learners. The instructor started to incline the use of chat due to its being more practical and effective tool. Then we see some types of instant messaging tools on the article.

In Second-Generation Web, the author mentions how blogs were composed, and continues with the beneficial, extra and useful sides of the blog for the individuals in terms of their educational senses. He also mentions what the blogs are for and what we can do by using blogs. As for RSS and Wiki, blogs have some limitations in contrast to RSS and Wiki; in other words, blogs are organized in a chronological way, but not in content, and it is a limitation. Then, some actions to enhance the abilities of the blog are among today’s interests. After that, RSS is mentioned in terms of what it means; it means "really simple syndication" and it helps sort of info coming from multiple blogs and alters the users about the coming messages and new postings, and RSS is an application of XML and firstly introduced by Netscape. If we come to Wikis, it is another collaborative environment. It means “quick” in Hawaiians. Originally, WikiWikiWeb project is devoted to software programming but expensive. Contrasting to Blogs, Wikis are highly collaborative but blogs are personal. In other words, everyone can add something the collection of the web pages and can edit them. By this way, it creates collaborative community. To sum up, Wikis are a simple data base of the information on Internet.

In the conclusion part in the article, the author gives the reader some collection of resource list (Computer-Mediated Communication, Chat and Discussion Forums, Blogs, Wikis and RSS lists).