No abstract

No abstract

Weblogs are a popular form of easy-to-use personal publishing that has attracted millions of bloggers to share their personal thoughts, opinions, and knowledge on the web. The versatility of weblogs as a communication medium has attracted interests from educators. Educational applications of weblogs have so far included journals, e-portfolio, learning diaries, and logbooks. As in the case of other educational technologies, the perception of students is a determinant factor of whether weblogs are used in a way that elicits educational values. This paper investigates student perception towards the purposes of blogging. It reports an experience of introducing blogging tasks to third year computing students, and compares their perception with students not participating in the blogging tasks. A student perception model is proposed to explain the difference in the perception due to the experience in blogging. The paper concludes that mandatory use of weblogs in a course can gradually cultivate educationally sound perceptions in students despite of the observed misuse.

The Perform approach aims to improve the success rate of weak students in a first programming course. The approach, based on constructivism, takes a tight control on the mental model construction process in the weak students, and allows the students to navigate through many conceptual pitfalls in programming fundamentals. The paper covers a discussion of applying constructivism in programming, exposes common hazards in the learning process, illustrates why weak students are weak, and then suggests several guidelines that can help the weak students to attain at least foundation level programming. The paper ends with a summary of our experiences in the effect of the Perform approach.

No abstract