Principles and Criteria for English Learning Weblogs

Principles:

1. First of all, we should let every visitor know that the site is about ESL learning, so the blog should be titled with directly.
2. The visual designs of the site should be simple yet captivating. It should be manipulated by learners with clear directions.
3. The content of the blog should fulfill our target learner's needs, and the target learner's age, language ability and other descriptions should be placed under the blog title.
4. Since we are building a site with Web 2.0 features, we should make sure that learners are capable of posting feedback or their practice outcomes, or comments on their interested articles. Rss, permalink and traceback would also help learning in distributing and aggregate learning materials.
5. With the help of Web 2.0 features, we can also make evaluation a public activity, such as web pulls and comments.

Criteria:

We think that there are some essential features a ESL/EFL weblog should have to help develop learner's four skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening. In order to improve learners' reading abilities, the weblog should include hypertext in its articles for learners to link to more reading materials. This is really crucial because it offers learners multiple choices to link to other texts, so that learners will have more self-awareness about their learning process.

As for writing, we think it is important for the weblog to provide text-input features, so that the learners can submit their feedback to the site, such as comments. And other basic functions like spell check and grammar check should be provided. After writing a paragraph, it is better to provide learners a chance to find out their mistakes, and help them revise their original one.

Thirdly, If a weblog aims to improve learners' listening and speaking abilities, it will need more multimedia features to support their goal. To help improve the learner's speaking abilities, the weblog should be able to record learners' voice input then analyze them(such as accent, pronunciation, and intonation), so that it would generate comments and suggestions to the learners, and help them speak better.

Hypertext V.S. Print Text

Q1:
hypertext: more extensive than accessible, more convenient than comfortable, prompt.
print text :more accessible than extensive, more comfortable than convenient, healthy.

Q2:
Interactive text gives a stage for everyone to exchange their knowledge.
It's a place where readers = authors.
Wikipedia is a great example of interactive text.
Fair share between two sides.
But after, it's up to you to participate.

Q3:
In our opinion, multimedia provides many information instead of responding.
You can get different information from blogs or Youtubes. It's more interesting and more various than traditional print text.
Podcasting is a great example of multimedia publishing.

PBL/PBL/IBL

Inquiry-based learning:

Students participates in many types of inquiry activities, and through the process of discovering their goals, they go through repeated stages of questioning, reflecting, and research.

Problem-based learning:

"It is often viewed as a component of these inquiry activities. …Problem-solving is generally understood to include skills such as making accurate observations, finding and organizing information, predicting, synthesizing, and using other higher order thinking skills to find solutions.” (Subtract from Call Essentials)In short, two of them are difficult to define precisely, but in this author’s point of view, he thinks basically problem-based learning is just a component of inquiry activities because they share the same skills which are necessary for language learners, but inquiry-based learning involves more complicated stages of inquiries. Through the process of inquiry activities, they apply their problem-solving skills to find the result of their goals.

Project-based learning:

“Project-based learning might productively be considered as one useful subcategory of problem-based learning in terms of not only designing a specific focus and context for student projects but in terms of getting students themselves to also (a) identify project constrains and feasibility; and (b) to plan and apply a design approach.”(Subtract from The Design of Effective ICT-Supported Learning Activities: Exemplary Models, Changing Requirements, and New Possibilities)So in conclusion,Inquiry-based learning> Problem-based learning> Project-based learning:

Question 2.

“A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing.” We all agree WebQuest is a good way for learning; however, our group prefers a multimedia project for our final project. Because our target learners are young children, it will be more attractive if we use multimedia. Although WebQuest can give a lot material, it will be kind of boring for young kids to read words without any pictures or sounds. We decide to use some pictures, animation and sounds to make our project more fun!

Question 3.

Our Goal:
Building a multimedia website that would help primary school English beginners (age 9-11) to acquire the ability as such to pass GEPT entry-level test.
Our Method:
Since we have decided our target learners as primary school children, it would be necessary for the content and the representation of our site to be captivating and of interest for young children. After discussion, we agreed that the topic for our multimedia website would be “Holding a Birthday Party”, which would involve 3 parts: Invitation, preparation and hosting. Thus our young learners would learn proper dialogues about an interesting event, and may apply their learned skills in their daily-lives.
Presentation of Our Website:
Since we have decided to build a multimedia website, we must facilitate all possible multimedia means to create a learning environment that should not only be visually appealing but also rich with sound and interactive activities. Pictures must be abundant on our site, recordings and music clips would be used, and simple Flash component and games would also be featured in our project.

Group Discussion

1. What is Weblog?
According to Wikipedia, a weblog "is a website where entries are made and displayed in a reverse chronological order."

2. What are some popular weblog English learning sites?
I Talk Show English Zone seems to be a great English learning blog.
The English Blog provides information for both English learners and teachers.

3. What can the blog do compared to the traditional English Learning website?
It's has features such as RSS, permalinks and traceback that allow learners to participate in contributing content, just as the blog's builders do. Viewers of Traditional English Learning websites can only read and watch but has no authority to modify the content of the sites.

4. What is RSS/ permalinks/ traceback?
a. According to Wikipedia, RSS "is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts." Users uses this feature with their costumized RSS readers, which would prompt them to read the blogs they have subscribed if those blogs have new posts.
b. Wikipedia describes a permalink as "a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives." It's an abbreviation of Permanent link.
c. Traceback is a way to inform blog A that you would like to link it to blog B, and leave a link of blog B on the original blog A.

5. How can team blog functions (e.g. comment, moderation, traceback and pingback) support English reading and writing?
Blog functions such as the above use the concepts of Web 2.0, therefore uses of blogs can gain advantage in a way that it allows viewers to have more active relationship with the learning contents, therefore they are not passive receivers of information as in Web 1.0 websites anymore.

6. How can multimedia presentation help ESL learning?
Since language is not just reading, we can be fully positive about the impact multimedia presentation on ESL learning. Multimedia presentation exposes students to audio and visual information that puts language in its cultural contents, thus facilitate students to learn better.