Critical+View

 Critical views: How useful are Blogs and Wikis? How can Blogs and Wikis be applied to teaching and learning? How to implement Blogs and Wikis wisely to facilitate teaching and learning?

As stated in readings and lectures, blogs are good for both the teachers and the learners. As a teacher, he/she can keep track of the learners’ learning progresses while as learners, they can also reflect on their development and make appropriate adjustments. The interactive feature of blogs also helps learners to think further through online communication and form a community, sharing similar learning goals. On the other hand, wikis have the advantage of enhancing collaborative work. Other advantages include being open to public and being a platform for the growth of knowledge base.

Yet we think that both teachers and learners can’t rely too much on Blogs and Wikis in their teaching and learning progress, and some other criteria need to be fulfilled before teachers and learners can get desired outcome.

One of the considerations would be the stages of the learning task. Both Blogs and Wikis are constructive and productive tools. They are good for production through collaborative group work or peer enhanced reflections in a community. Therefore, they are suitable for application and reinforcement of knowledge. However, we cannot directly carry out reinforcement if we have not even built a knowledge base. If a lesson, or a learning task is divided into three stages, introduction, teaching part (presentation and explanation), and practise and feedback part, then these two tools will be perfect for the last part, but not so for the first two parts.

Even the two tools themselves serve different functions, so it is very important to be clear about the objectives of the task. Blogs are considered more private and are good for self reflection within a blog community. However, blogs are not that collaborative as only the owner of the page can edit the content, and what’s more, although there can be communication between the author and the visiters, the quantity and level if response from the audience are limited. One limitation would be that visiters themselves can hardly discuss with each other, and no author would welcome visiters to turn his blog into a chat room. Wikis, on the other hand, are good for collaborative work as a wiki page is edited by a large number of users in order to get a final product. It is called network literacy, which means 'writing in a distributed, collaborative environment' (Lamb_wiki). Also, wiki can read and edit at the same time which is important in learning that students can receive immediate response from peers or from teachers, so that wiki works well with weblogs and RSS feed that users will be notified when there is update. Using wiki for a writing assignment and giving feedbacks can be effective for writing because it is a kind of approach called 'process-oriented writing' which focuses on the steps of making a product (Lamb_wiki). Obviously, it will not be preferable for monitoring individual learning progress or enhancing feedback and reflection for self development. Some other inappropriate applications would be displaying factual information, through which no discussion is needed among group members. Also, with poor management group work can be meaningless, for example, when distribution of workload is uneven or when organisation of content is lacking. This may be a result of lack of guidance and prior IT knowledge, which will be discussed in the next paragraph.

Proper guidance is needed when conducting online tasks. The Internet is really well developed now, there are various kinds of resources, as well as different types of services and entertainment, all presented to users with attractive multimedia elements. It is easy, and actually common, for a user to serve the Net for a particular purpose, but ends up being distracted by unrelated websites like Facebook and Youtube. By the way, users can be frustrated and give up easily if they don't know how to search information effectively, especially when doing so through search engines, from which the number of results are often over 1,000,000. Therefore, the teacher must first make sure that learners know where they can find the relevant information. This can be done with the help of Diigo or Delicious. Second, the teacher must monitor the progress of learners' collaborative work. The teacher must give students his/her contact or ways to approach him/her so that students can get help and advice, otherwise they will get lost and unorganised work will be the result.

Copyright will also be another problem. As the user may be anonymous, then who owns the copyright (lamb_wiki)? In class wiki, some students may steal others work and claim that it is their idea. In this case, no one will be charged because no one has the right and prove of their words. And it leads to another concern, discipline.

Another concern would be discipline. Online task are often done outside the classroom, without seeing each other face-to face users online are often anonymous. Being anonymous, however, gives one an illusion of being less risky and responsible. He or she would try to attempt more aggressive behaviours. Discipline online would be a very challenging task for teachers as they can hardly control what others do. So, the first step to maintaining good discipline would be to set clear goals and instructions for learners. They need to know what they are going to do so that they will not end up doing nothing and attempt off-task behaviours. The second thing a teacher needs to do would be to learners be familiar with the IT tools they are going to use so that they will not mistakenly take disruptive actions. Also, the teacher needs to explain to learners clearly about the importance of showing respect to other users online. While doing all these measures, the teacher should also monitor the whole working progress, keeping records of what each learner has done and give learners ways of contacting him/her, so that learners can still "feel" that someone is supervising them even when they are doing online tasks.

After discussing on the usage of blog and wiki, this part will concern the pros and cons during implementation in learning. Blog and wiki are easy to implement. Users can own one just by registering an account in the host website. It is easy and fast that you can enter a name, password and email address. It is a software which usually does not require installation. Also, they are user-friendly that if you want to write a blog with fancy decoration like pictures and audio materials, you do not need to have much HTML or those complicated knowledge because the host websites usually pre-set all the buttons for easy-use, so students can easily write their blogs or work on a project collaboratively with many pictures or other sources which in result, facilitate their learning and work.

However, some weblog host requires fee to maintain the server system which reduces the willingness of students to register an account and share their experience of language learning with others. This will limit the access of online materials thus hinders students learning. Also, some wiki’s server will down if too many people access to it at the same time, just imagine it is in the night before the deadline of your millions words assignment! (Lamb_wiki) Moreover, if you want to transfer a file from Google Doc to Wikispaces which both of them maybe using a different system, you need to consider the format of you text, some will be moved after being tranferred. In terms of hardware, there will be some students who cannot gain access to internet after class, so teachers need to make sure the school has sufficient back up for these students before implementing a class or tutor blog for announcement or sharing important information.

After all, Blogs and Wiki are beneficial to learners when they are applied to productive or constructive learning tasks. These technologies provide great feedback function which foster the communication among students and make the tasks more meaningful; thus, it may help encourage students to produce work and arouse their motivation to learn and cooperate. Other teaching methods and tools, however, are still needed so as to constitute a complete learning lesson. On top of that, pre-teaching consideration, pre-task instructions and in-task guidance are needed so that students will be less likely to go off-task, and the teaching and learning will be the most effective.