Blogs: web journals in language education
5 MB
Camilleri, Mario / Ford, Peter
Weblogs (or blogs) are possibly the most visible of the Web 2.0 technologies, described by some as “push-button publishing for the people”. One commentator describes blogs as “impressive spontaneous acts of decentralised journalism”, while another talks of the power of blogs to “transform both writers and readers from audience to public and from consumer to creator”.
This publication is one of the outcomes of an ECML project which, over the course of three years, investigated the design of an educational blogging platform and its use in the language classroom. It is intended for the adventurous language teacher who wishes to harness the potential of the writable Web in his or her language class, the teacher trainer who promotes a social constructivist paradigm, and the educational software designer who seeks to create flexible educational tools which incorporate “subversion”.
The accompanying CD-Rom contains the entire corpus of blogs – warts and all – produced by project participants (over 4 000 posts and 9 000 comments), as well as the educational blogging platform prototype developed for this project, which is an open-source release under the GNU General Public License.
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