Wikis

Discussing the factors contributing to students’ involvement in an EFL collaborative wiki project* by
HSIAO-CHIEN LEE and PEI-LING WANG

"The current study aims to examine what factors facilitated or hindered student collaboration when a wiki environment was used to engage 103 Taiwanese students from two universities in an online picture book production project. Divided into 17 groups of four to six members, the students spent approximately one academic year forming online communities, learning to conduct peer editing, and collaboratively completing a final learning product, an online picture book. A variety of data, including the electronically archived versions of the wiki pages, students’ responses to retrospective surveys, and focused follow-up interviews were collected and analysed. The findings suggested that the nature of the learning tasks, students’ constant communication and appreciation of different opinions, the difficulties they encountered when communicating asynchronously, and students’ expectations toward English learning affected to what extent they were involved in the online collaboration.

I usually post the core information from the articles and other resources read/heard, to remember what is the main point of this concrete post.
Wikis seam to be interesting resource to be used in classroom. HOwever, in my current situation with my students i am not sure i will use them. This has several factors:

• My Ss are adults most of who are attending general English and communication classes as per their managers' request. Most of them are quite motivated, but their biggest problem are already fossilized errors which they have due to their age and their time availability. They usually prepare for the classes during the working hours, which has some limitations. As per the policy of our company they we are not allowed to use any blogging resources at workplace. Therefore all such webpages are filtered by the IT security and we don't have accesses to them. However, i am also considering use of technologies such wikis and blogging to force my Ss prepare at home, assign more time for study. 
• One of the disadvantages of using wikis in my current classroom is that most of my Ss have families, and i am more than sure that they won't dedicate their time to any projects assigned. And even if they split into groups, it is obvious that as in any group my Ss won't be an exception and only few of them will really get involved in the project. But i have to think of some options of engaging Ss into projects online and using wikis. 

However, I consider wikis as a efficient tool for learning. Although, it has some disadvantages as any of the technologies, but wikis give opportunity to work online, edit and correct each others post. The most important thing is just to lead the Ss in a proper way, give very specific and concrete assignments, explain Ss why you are assigning it, and what final result you expect from them, as well as coordinate their work in the best way and lead and encourage their active participation. Participation of each of them. 

Podcasting_Recipe Exchange Podcasts for ESL/EFL Jeff Mehring

The first new thing learnt about the podcast is the origin of the word. As an apple user of many years, it's a shame i didn't know that:)

On my defense, i must admit that i am not a user of podcasts, have never listened to any if not forced by friends of links sent directly:) Well, this article/book made the topic more interesting for me. It revealed number of activities that can be used for students during the class. Moreover, it also gives tips how to shape the class with the homework assignments respectively :) encouraging:)

As we all know, nowadays we don't really imagine our lives without internet, which could seam strange 10 years ago. But now we use it everywhere, on every device we get, and we try to get respective devices which will allow us to be online 24/7. This aspect could be and should be used for various needs of the society, different parts of the society in fact. In our case we more concentrate on educational needs. And as I see the possibility to create a podcast, then share it with the means of internet, upload and make if accessable and downloadable for millions encourages youth mostly to do so. Specifically, it can be used for example for homework assignments, in this way: there can be group of students who usually work together. one of them takes his turn and reads the homework readings, makes notes and then he could record it and share with the rest. I am sure although that there are people who do so, well, I think this is perfect. But the most important part is that podcasting gives both the teacher and students to make efforts but at the same time create something useful for their peers and enjoy the process itself.

So, I have to figure out the ways i am going to use this possibility during my classes. Podcasting seams to be great tool and simply cool:)

Podcast in teaching pronunciation_Lara Ducate and Lara Lomicka_The University of South Carolina

I believe, that pronunciation and accent are very important aspects in learning a foreign language. Although, some might argue, that accents may vary from nation to nation, which is true, as different languages force for example students learning English as a foreign language to keep their own language accent. However, correct pronunciation and a little accent are the evidnce of efforts made when learning the foreign language. This is of course my personal approach, however, in my class i try to teach my students to speak the most closely to native speakers. Some teachers confess that they don't have enough time to teach pronunciation. But it is obvious to me and some of the researches done state that, that foreign language speakers can be undervalued because of their strong accents or not correct pronunciation of various words. And even that there are differences for example in British and American English word stressing or pronunciation, there is some golden middle that we should teach our students.
With the development of technologies teaching pronunciation has become an easier task i believe. One of the ways of speaking skills improvement is podcasting and the below mentioned paper states that. Using the means of new technologies may not highly increase the level of speaking skills or proficiency, but it can at least encourage the students to work on that specific skill and motivate them to develop.

The current paper reports on an investigation of podcasting as a tool for improving pronunciation skills in intermediate language learning. The authors examined the effects of using podcasts to improve pronunciation in second language learning and how students’ attitudes changed toward pronunciation over the semester. A total of 22 students in intermediate German and French courses made five scripted pronunciation recordings throughout the semester. After the pronunciation recordings, students produced three extemporaneous podcasts. Students also completed a pre- and post-survey based on Elliott’s (1995) Pronunciation Attitude Inventory to assess their perspectives regarding pronunciation. Students’ pronunciation, extemporaneous recordings, and surveys were analyzed to explore changes over the semester. Data analysis revealed that students’ pronunciation did not significantly improve in regard to accentedness or comprehensibility, perhaps because the16-week long treatment was too short to foster significant improvement and there was no in-class pronunciation practice. The podcast project, however, was perceived positively by students, and they appreciated the feedback given for each scripted recording and enjoyed opportunities for creativity during extemporaneous podcasts. Future studies might seek to delineate more specific guidelines or examine how teacher involvement might be adapted to the use of podcasts as a companion to classroom instruction.

The study sought to investigate the following questions:
1. Did students’ comprehensibility and accentedness improve from their pre-test to post-test?
2. Was there a difference in comprehensibility and accentedness between the extemporaneous podcasts and the scripted podcasts?
3. Did students’ comprehensibility and accentedness improve with each task?
4. Did students have positive attitudes

Procedure
After making their own recordings, students were required to listen to classmates’ extemporaneous podcasts and post comments on the content. The extemporaneous podcasts were graded by the instructor of each class using a rubric that took into account content, coherency and organization, pronunciation and fluency, accuracy, creativity, and impact on the listener.

Data Analysis
For the purposes of analysis, students’ podcasts (8 per student) were downloaded and stored on a computer or CD. They were assigned random numbers and then judged by two raters6 in each language, for a total of four judges in the study: one NS of the target language and one NNS (the NNS tested at or above an advanced low proficiency level) for each language. Two judges for each language were used to account for any possible variation between raters.

IN my personal opinion this method of using new technologies is an interesting and interactive, also creative tool given to the students. Most of the people, students like to share their opinions and especially knowing that it is going to be uploaded to an open auditorium and not only their peers and lectures will have access to it may motivate them to creativity.

Some of the students could react not very positive to this initiative. However, luckily during the above mentioned research students were eager to work on the tasks given. I will for sure take using podcasts in my classroom and hopefully it will contribute to the best development of speaking skills of my students.

Using blogs and twitter in an EFL class

How would you use blogs and twitter in an EFL class?

To answer the question, I will repeat myself and mention that at the moment the best purpose for using blogging and twitter in my class would be writing reflective journals and below i will try to point out some specifics:

• Identify you learners and setting - The learners are teenagers or adults, proficiency level - upper the pre-intermediate
• Explain how you will introduce blogging and twitter to you learners - I would present the main purpose of reflective journal writing, which is reflection of whatever learnt and discussed during the class, revision of the material covered, the learners attitude and perspective towards the material, their general impression from each class. 
• Explain a specific blogging and twitter assignment/task - Learners are asked to reflect as stated in the previous bullet point, as well as presented the general evaluation method
• Explain whether and how you will evaluate them - full and detailed evaluation criteria will be presented to the class: 1. comprehension of the covered material; 2. challenges during the class and during completing homework assignment; 3. accuracy in using terminology
• Predict challenges and propose solution - the main challenge may happen in the beginning, if some of the learners are not yet familiar with using the blogs, this is a matter of experience. the best solution would be to conduct one or two classes in the computer lab and guide the learners when starting using blogs. 

Blogging and Microblogging

Whether or not you are ready to implement blogging and/or microblogging in your own teaching. 

To answer to the posted question I have read the following research papers: 

Blog writing integration for academic
language learning purposes: towards an
assessment framework
Liam Murray, Tríona Hourigan & Catherine Jeanneau
University of Limerick (Ireland)

liam.murray@ul.ie, triona.hourigan@ul.ie, catherine.jeanneau@ul.ie

and 

Microblogging for Language Learning: Using Twitter to
Train Communicative and Cultural Competence
Kerstin Borau1, Carsten Ullrich2, Jinjin Feng1, and Ruimin Shen2
1 Distance Education College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
3/F No. 500 Jiangsu Road, Shanghai 20050, China
2 Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Hua Shan Road, 200030 Shanghai, China


IN the first research project is discussed how during the last years for learning purposes students were required to write and ‘complete’ their academic blog as it represents one compulsory element –with due weighting, given its importance– of a language module assessment. This compulsory blog writing task has raised a number of pedagogical questions which are explored in this study, such as: effective integration, assessing and rewarding student creative expression within the blog medium, self-reflection as a language learner and ultimately the role and value of academic blog writing in language
acquisition. Such resources as blogs represent the current proliferation of generic tools onto the
market which, if exploited appropriately, may provide learners with additional aids which can be integrated into their studies.The main challenge for teachers lies in identifying the L2 potential of these tools in order to create a meaningful context for their appropriation within the language learning
classroom. For a language learner examining such a generic tool, the difficulty in creating the necessary order and structure required for classroom exploitation is one of the main challenges associated with this approach.The most important factor for consideration here involves the establishment of an effective teaching approach which outlines the practitioner’s specific aims
and objectives. This should also present an appropriate assessment framework in relation to the task which is being set. Thus, the paper shall discuss specifically the question of outlining a viable pedagogical framework which proposes a set of guidelines for the assessment of L2 academic blogs.

The current wave of assessment (1986 to present) is by and large associated with portfolio-based work (Little, 2002;Hirvela & Sweetland, 2005). Indeed, this present trend is regarded as helpful for making learners more accountable for their own work (Herter, 1991) and as such, reveals a more detailed account of learner development and progression. Hence, writing assessment can be viewed in terms of measuring reliability and validity, with both concepts now dominating the current approach (Huot, 1996). In fact, this question will be discussed more specifically later in this section when we examine the impact of the process and post-process approaches to academic writing.

To summariz its worth to mention that the establishment of a viable blog integration framework is dependent on a number of different issues. Firstly, in terms of assessing academic writing, the teacher should be aware of the following:

•Issues of validity and accountability in evaluating the written
content.
•Their personal objectives and aims in terms of written skill
development.
•The specific aspect of writing to be targeted (for example, discourse
specific, self-expression, grammatical testing).
•The context of the task (for example single-authored (expressivist)
or collaborative approaches (socio-cognitivist)).

Accept from the above mentioned it is also important to consider a number of issues relevant to the integration of this generic writing tool which is being adapted for specific CALL purposes. These may include:

•Learning environment (classroom-based or self-study).
•Learner profiles (covering their previous exposure and experience to more general ICT use in their studies and in their online social networking, and of course their current language attainment levels).
•Creation of a relevant, meaningful and authentic context, including 
the justification for using the tool in question.

In the context of th research and assessment, the blog represents the academic writing process method in which the student composes in an admittedly enforced medium of self-expression and analysis. The blog writing also represents aspects of a post-process method with opportunities to rationalise and reflect upon the “expressions of the self”. The formal academic essay also corresponds to the post-process approach, offering to the teacher an academically-valid assessment framework for providing
effective feedback; and to the student an academically-endorsed acknowledgement of the quality of their self-analysis and possible discovery of their most effective LL strategies. From our data we have found that most students understood the potential of blogs as a reflexive tool on LL and the benefits thereof. Yet, some remained who did not. This may require an improved integration technique on our part. The main task for researchers interested in this LL approach will be to improve upon the pedagogical and writing processes involved in turning future “masterpiece[s] of scattered thought and random concepts” into better quality academic essays.


The next research analyzes the usefulness of microblogging in second language learning using the example of the social network Twitter. Most learners of English do not require even more passive input in form of texts, lectures or videos, etc. This input is readily available in numerous forms on the Internet.
What learners of English need is the chance to actively produce language and the chance to use English as tool of communication. This calls for instructional methods and tools promoting ‘active’ learning that present opportunities for students to express themselves and interact in the target language. In this paper we describe how we used Twitter with students of English at the Distant Col-
lege of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. We analyze the students’ messages and show how the usage of Twitter trained communicative and cultural competence.

Twitter was selected as a research experiment tool because it provides the Chinese students the opportunity to practice the target language as well as their communicative and cultural competence.

According to the authors of the second research paper, Twitter seems to be a perfect tool to support learning English, especially in blended classrooms, for the following reasons. First, Twitter is easily accessibly from almost everywhere, so the students can practice at any time by sending and receiving messages either on the computer or the mobile phone. They can also decide how much time they spend reading and writing these messages. This is an essential feature for busy students. Second, Twitter is suitable for any level of English because in writing the messages, the students can chose a topic and grammatical structure fitting their level. Third, the use of Twitter as an online learning community can help to integrate students in the community who could not attend classroom.

The suitability of Twitter for language learning was often postulated, but to the knowledge of the authors until now never investigated in detail. The second work explores Twitter as a tool for active learning in the EFL classroom and provides the first detailed analysis of how Twitter was used to learn specific aspects of language. The main finding is that it is suitable to train communicative and culture competence anytime anywhere with out face-to-face interaction. In a broader scope, this work contributes to the research on using Web 2.0 services and tools for learning, so called e-learning 2.0. We show that the social, collaborative principles of Web 2.0 are reflected in its usage by learners, if used in the appropriate way. In this case, students clearly like using the service; one student even asked to continue to use Twitter after the project: “Would you please

do not close the twitter online? It offers us a free space to put ourself in English.”

To finally answer the question, I would again state, that indeed, I would like to use blogging and microblogging as teaching methodology in line with other methods. "In any case, microblogging might seam and from my point of view is a little more narrow type of blogging, however, such tools as Twitter give the students room for communication, using the language for active interaction with the peers and the instructor. I might not be using Twitter, but maybe for the reflective journals which are more of my interest, LiveJournal would be the best choice. Otherwise, I will have to think of creating something new alike Moodle. 

RSS/useful and important

I remember the times when I was working for one of the most developed and modern online news resources in Armenia: A1+ TV Company. The webpage, which I had honour to be an editor for, was and is one of the fast developing sources for our community. However, 6 years ago, in spite of all my experience of activities in forums, chats and internet overall, I have pretty narrow understanding of how important can RSS feeds be for news. As my first education background is Journalism, and as my very loyal and strict teacher in profession, my producer taught me how to use the RSS. Although, I didn't really understand the importance of those. ANyway, I would subscribe for many webpages and would rarely read the information I received. Just like it is mentioned in the article by Will Richardson on RSS (Will Richardson, www.weblogg-ed.com
Ver. 1.5, Updated 3/29/05) I would continuously receive various non-useful information on my email which would draw my attention from the useful RSS feeds I received.
It is even more inspiring when thanks to this article i now know more about the use of RSS feeds and how to get them all together in one place. It is indeed useful in our profession as teachers to get the fresh ideas in one place and don't have to google them forever in the web.
It is also obvious that most of the nowadays information resources such as webpages of various newspapers, news agencies, etc, use the options of RSS and promote them for the readers. Almost all of them offer to subscribe to the most recent info they provide, not even by going to their webpages.
I consider this a real improvement of the information promotion in Armenia which is one step to development.
In the terms of education, I believe that most of the educational resources for teaching lecturers also give this opportunity which makes our lives as teacher easier and full of joy when we get all we need quick and fast. moreover, RSS gives the teachers who are using alternative way of teaching to share and associate with their students by not checking each of their weblogs but simply receiving RSS feeds on their newly posts and updates, which first of all saves the teachers time.

Thank you RSS:)
P. S. To those who would be interested: Read the article:

Weblogging in the classroom

"Am I ready to introduce blogging to my own EFL class? If no, why? If yes, what exactly would I like to do with it in my class, in terms of assignments, technology access, assessment, parental involvement, if any, etc?

I started my journey in the Internet back 11 years ago in 2001 in one of the popular forums in Armenia. Although there were people not only from Armenia but also from abroad. The forum gave all of us an opportunity to share our experiences and ideas freely and as Will Richardson states, there were people who actually were interested and were applying to our post. I personally was very much surprised as the author of this article when I received my first response to my post. 
Nowadays we are already familiar with blogs, which give us more interaction and room for online discussions. Blogs actually give as an opportunity to follow the developments in any area, getting hot "news" on its top with the recent developments by the author and the readers. Blogging is a great new start for networking, sharing news and ideas including education. 
We as Language teachers have much more opportunities to learn about the new methodologies of our colleagues from abroad or close ones. 
I will be honest and confess that I don't really like reading blogs, but I love keeping them.However, i must admit that reading blogs of let me say colleagues with bigger experience gives me thought, which I might not have myself, links i could have missed on important and interactive activities I might use during teaching. 
Blogs are also good in the terms of the opportunity of sharing other bloggers links, which may have been missed out, or photos, papers, etc. And the best things is that the use of the blogs is much easier nowadays that back 12 years ago the personal webpages were. We don'\t need any specific knowledge to run them. Which means that even older generation can make use of blogs, in their classrooms, which can help them not only in sharing information, but also giving an enormous amount of information without any big effort. 
According to Will Richardson, a big part of our potential students however use the blogs not for learning purposes but for journaling. It's worth to mention that one third of newly opened blogs are not being updated for months. Although, blogging ensure users to think in words, critical thinking, analytic thinking, promote creative, intuitive and associative thinking, as well as promote analogical thinking and increase access and exposure of quality information (according to Eide Neurol-earning blog, 2005).
However, to answer the stated questions I would say yes, I am ready to introduce blogs in my classroom. Moreover, I am aiming to use blogging and encourage my students to use blog writing during my internship project. First of all, It will be easier to follow the impressions, wishes and confessions of my students if they decide to be honest enough to share that information. Secondly, this is a very fast and easy way to share and exchange information with my students. Thirdly, this may be much easier for students to express their real understanding and comprehension of the content of the course. And finally, to learn about their concenrs. 
Reflection journals have been the most effective tool for my study during my year at AUA. And I am happy to know about this tool. I will try to involve my students into writing reflection journals online and sharing them with me and their peers if they would like to do so. I believe that sometimes it is easier for some people to express their feelings, as well as attitude and understanding of the covered material through written sources, and not face to face with their teacher. And this may be especially helpful in my case when teaching to my colleagues at my company. I am very proud that my company has expressed this wish to give me opportunity to gain knowledge and experience through teaching inside the company, which will develop not only my professional skills as a teacher, but also an HR professional for the best prosperity within the company.