BLOGS

Blogs are one method of effective communication in online environments, and innovative ways to use them in education are frequently appearing nowadays. Originally, a “Blog” was an online diary posted on the Web that included the publication of personal thoughts, feelings, hobbies, and experiences in a chronological order.
Blogs can also be defined as online writing tools that help their users to keep track of their own online records (Hsu & Lin, 2008). Anyone who doesn’t have advanced computer and Internet usage skills can still create such Web pages, and express their feelings to others with the help of Blogs. Furthermore, Blog users and non-Blog users can post their comments on the written issues easily. Depending on the authors’ preferences, these online writing tools can include features such as links to other Blogs, the author’s detailed profile, and most importantly feedback from readers (Ellison & Wu, 2008). Blogs can be used for many purposes, but when they are used for educational goals, they can enrich the classroom environment and facilitate social interaction among students. Educators can integrate Blogs in blended and online learning to facilitate specific strategies: posting student work, exchanging hyperlinks, fostering reflective approaches to educational genres, forming and maintaining knowledge communities (Oravec, 2003).
Moreover, usage of Blogs can address some of the theoretical underpinnings that are summarized below (Glogoff, 2005):
• In instructional Blogging, as a knowledge-centered instructional tool, the instructor designs research activities that engage students in discussions with practitioners, and lead them through developmental concepts of the discipline’s knowledge domain.
• In learner-centered Blogging (that acknowledges the important attributes of learners as individuals and as a group), the instructor gives positive feedback to students regarding their comments and by posting comments for discussion. In this way, learner-centered Blogging offers particularly useful opportunities for learner-centered feedback and dialogue.
• For providing community-centered instruction, Blogging supports the importance of social and peer interaction.
• As a receptive learning tool, Blogging can encourage students to acquire information from resources and reflect on what they have gathered.
• In a directive learning environment, Blogs provide students with equal access to information, to expand students’ understanding of specific issues, and to direct students to explore additional material.
• As a guided discovery and knowledge construction, Blogs can also be used to present information architecture and explore more from Web sites for other content.

WIKIS

A Wiki is a collection of Web pages linked to each other which reflect the collaborative effort of many students working together. “Although not known as content management systems, Wiki systems are another approach to publishing on-line information and a different way to collaborate” (Pereira & Soares, 2007, p. 88). Unlike Blogs, which are chronologically reverse-organized, Wiki pages are loosely structured but are linked in different ways. (Beldarrain, 2006). In other words, “a Wiki is a Website in which users can create and collaboratively view, edit, track changes, and save information by using a Web browser” (Butcher & Taylor, 2008, p. 5). In these Wiki pages, while students in a team can revise-edit, comment, contribute, reference or study, the instructor can also assess, edit or delete the information posted by the students.
One of the most well known examples of a Wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with entries authored and edited by different people from around the world. “Wikis are useful for education in that they help to promote student participation and also a sense of group community and purpose in learning. Indeed, an important element of this is the relaxed sense of control over the content, allowing students to have a greater role in managing its focus and direction” (Hsu, 2007, p 11.).
The attractive characteristics of Wikis can be summarized as follows by Shih, Tseng and Yang (2008).
• Rapidness: The Wiki pages can be rapidly constructed, accessed and modified, in hypertext form.
• Simpleness: A simple markup scheme (usually a simplified version of HTML) is used to format the Wiki pages, instead of the complicated HTML.
• Convenience: Links to other pages, external sites, and images can be conveniently established by keywords. Moreover, the targets of the keywords, links, need not exist when the links are built. They can be appended later.
• Open source: Each member can create, modify and delete the Wiki pages. Wiki content is not reviewed by anyone before publication, and is updated upon being saved.
• Maintainability: Wiki maintains a version database, which records its historical revision and content, thus enabling version management.