revival of Weblogs in Education – A Literature Review

was doing some random search and saw that someone has actually linked our literature review back in 2005 in wikipedia. though it’s extremely outdated by now, thought it’ll be good to revive it (cos the old link to edumall1.0 is now dead) in case anyone’s interested to revisit it (:

so here’s it: Weblogs in Education – A Literature Review
to cite: Tan, Y.H., Ow, E.G.J., & Ho, J.M.P.Y. (2005). Weblogs in Education – A Literature Review. Originally published online via the eduMall portal maintained by Educational Technology Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore.

enjoy (:

Second life is getting a second life

just chanced upon this 4-mths old article by Owen Thomas, it appears that Second Life is ending it’s ‘original life’ in the business world:

We were primarily interested in Second Life as a business/commerce/finance phenomenon, covering it like we would any small but fast-growing economy in the real world. The bureau is now closed. Essentially the story we were there to cover has moved on. — Adam Pasick, as cited by Thomas

in short, SL didnt make MONEY as originally planned. so it’s getting a second life by “pitching itself as an online schoolhouse.”
good news for those of us in teaching isn’t it? (:

Free technological resources anyone?

believed this is not the first time i’ve seen this blog but this is the first time i create a post to remind myself of it in future:
Free Technology for Teachers
if you like to use animal photos in your lessons, you can read about it here;
if you like to see more examples of educators’ blog (a major reason is you cant find much of it here), you can read about it here;
if you like to find out more about copyrights and possibly teaching your students on the topic, you can read about it here;
… the list’s non-exhaustive. i believe you’ll find most, if not all, entries useful. enjoy (:

graduation, ma thesis, AUDIOblogs

nearly 1 month ago, 20th june marks the day that i’m officially graduated from my (1st) MA course and this is the envelope that flew all the way from singapore:

besides sharing the joy, here’s my research for sharing:
Title:
An Exploratory Study on a Metacognitive Approach to Teaching and Learning of Spontaneous Speaking in Chinese Language with Audioblogs
Keywords:
chinese language, speaking, audioblogs, metacognition, language learning, language teaching, educational technology, weblog, edublog, 华文, 口语教学,元认知,博客,信息科技,有声博客
Summary:

Language learning involves four areas, namely listening, speaking, reading
and writing. This study focuses on speaking, an area that is often neglected by
teachers for various reasons. In many Chinese Language classrooms, which are
teacher-centered by tradition, students have minimal opportunities to actively
participate in the negotiation of meaning during lesson. To develop students to
become independent learners of speaking in Chinese Language, a metacognitive
framework developed by Goh and Zhang (2002) was adopted in this study. Twenty-five
Secondary Two Express stream Chinese Language students, aged 13 to 14,
participated in this eight weeks study. Audioblogs was used as the mediating
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool through which the students
interacted as they developed their metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
awareness. Through the use of scaffolding questions, the students carried out self-appraisals to evaluate and monitor their oral performances and planned for their
future speaking tasks. The students were also tasked to provide comments for peers’ oral performances. Seven usable sets of data were analysed and based on inferential
statistics, the treatment may have led the students to improve significantly in their
pretest-posttest oral performance scores. Through peer commenting and self-appraisal
activities in the audioblogs, the students developed greater metacognitive
knowledge and metacognitive awareness.

and here’s the thesis in PDF format. you may need to grab acrobat reader 8 or above to read the content.
and last but not least, i would like to thank the following friends once again, as without their help and encouragement, this research would not have been possible:
Dr Tan Seng Chee (my sup), Dr Christine Goh C.M., Mr. Lim Sing Gee, Mdm. Tan Hiok Keng, Mdm. Ho Fui Ling, Ms. Hoe Joe Hwee and Mr. Amos Goh Yoong Shin, Mr. Darren Anthonio Marino Nonis, Mr. John Ow Eu Gene, Ms. Jeanne Marie Ho Pau Yuen and Dr. Chua Guat Kheng. and last but not least yh2, yh3 and yh4 🙂