Using blogs to help language students to develop reflective learning strategies: Towards a pedagogical framework

Abstract

Due to the social changes brought about in no small part by Web 2.0 tools, the potential impact of the blog writing phenomenon upon teaching and learning contexts reveals an important area for consideration for all university educators, and in particular for e-learning practitioners. Today, web users may access a wide variety of media to express themselves and to communicate with others. These may include conventional blog websites such as blogger.com or indeed social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook or Bebo, which continue to integrate blog tools and which also encourage self-expression on the part of the users. Moreover, the application of such written expression tools into a language learning context requires further investigation by the computer-assisted language learning (CALL) community, most notably in the field of exploring the distinct pedagogical environment which emerges within such a context. This paper shall detail the pedagogical and support role of the teacher as well as considering the content of learners' reflective output throughout the course of the semester. Our analysis will consider the overall teaching and learning environment, with additional qualitative examples from the learner blogs and essays in order to define clearly emerging roles and activities with regard to future classroom practice. Introducing blogging and CALL researchBerners-Lee's original web weaving in 1990 is now generally accepted as a radical catalyst of self expression and global connectivity (Butler, 1998). Since then, additional upheavals have occurred: from search engines such as Altavista, Google, Cuil and WolframAlpha, to podcasting, RSS feeds and Twitter, to name but a few components of the Web 2.0 social software revolution. Uniquely bridging both these evolutions stands blogging. Blogging, as Hill states: "is throwing the Internet forward and backward at the same time. Forward into a new era of consumer empowerment, and backward to the grass-roots spirit of the early Web" (2006:19). As we shall see in this paper, the consumers are also the producers of content and if blogging for language learning (L2) purposes is to be both empowering and engaging, it must first be integrated efficaciously into current modern foreign language pedagogies. Indeed, the recent impact of Web 2.0 tools on education clearly represents important developments in terms of current pedagogical practice. The introduction of a wide range of such innovative new technologies into teaching and learning contexts underpins the necessity of reflecting upon their proposed role and contribution within this distinct environment. Examples of such Web 2.0 tools which have recently been evaluated as potential learning aids include: podcasts (Lonn and Teasley 2009;Walls et al., 2010); online games (Paraskeva, Mysirlaki & Papagianni, 2010); smart phones (Cochrane & 210 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2010, 26(2) Bateman, 2010); wikis (Elgort, Smith & Toland, 2008;Zorko, 2009) and social networking sites (Vie, 2008;Lockyer...

Reflective Blogging: Education in a Social Constructivist Environment – A Case Study

“…These comments contradicts [15] statement that blog's "underdetermined" design, where the system is engaging, yet intuitive and easy to learn makes it equitable for many age groups and both genders. However the results of this study align positively with [16] who mention that the basic mechanics of blogging was a challenge for students in their research as well. Some preferred traditional pen and paper environment compared to the online learning.…”

Blended learning using video-based blogs: Public speaking for English as a second language students

“…Some scholars indicated that blogging enables students to achieve a range of cognitive and social learning outcomes, as well as to develop reflective learning strategies (Birch & Volkov, 2007;Hourigan & Murray, 2010;Tan, Ladyshewsky & Gardner, 2010). Alm (2009) also concluded that blogging can positively affect learners' willingness to communicate by providing them with a personal space where they feel safe to express themselves and to interact with others.…”

Understanding student perceptions and motivation towards academic blogs: An exploratory study

“…They are now a well-established and widely recognised form of digital communication and should thus be taken seriously in educational settings (Davies & Merchant, 2009). There is a growing body of scholarly work on the application of blogs in various academic disciplines such as teacher education (Deng & Yuen, 2011;Hernández-Ramos, 2004;Hourigan & Murray, 2010;Ray & Coulter, 2008;Stiler & Philleo, 2003;Wopereis, Sloep & Poortman, 2010;Yang, 2009), business (Williams & Jacobs, 2004), and language learning (Ducate & Lomicka, 2008;Mompean, 2010). Blogging is acclaimed as a flexible tool that can be used to support both individual and community learning.…”