apcampbell

Andrew Johnson just published a short piece in the Internal TESL Journal entitled Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs. It’s good to see another Kansai based colleague using weblogs in the classroom. The more practioners there are who share their work via publication (both in journals and weblogs), the more we can develop skillful applications of the technology for langauge learning. Other than Rudolf in Mie and Janina in Kobe, are there any other educators using weblog technology in EFL here in Japan?

Concerning the article itself, I advocate learning environments that encourage more open, free, and cooperative approaches to dealing with the subject matter. Andrew describes a class in which the individual student weblogs can only be viewed by the teacher and that student, thus closing that student’s work off from the rest of world and eliminating the possiblity of cooperative feedback and help from others online. Furthermore, how many of those students will continue to use the blog for writing and communication after the semester is over? How does this lead students toward greater autonomy and self-directed learning habits? I know this is not the point of Andrew’s well written article, and he may be practicing under strict institutional constraints, but I think it is something that ought to be considered with seriousness by educators who use the technology, otherwise the weblog becomes just another instructional tool in the arsenal of traditional, authoritarian, competitve educational models; doing nothing to lessen a student’s institutional dependency.

Also, the use of a free feed aggregator like Bloglines would save the teacher tremendous time by eliminating the need to visit each student’s blog to find out if they made a post or not.