Thesis/Dissertation

Title:

Weblogs as a Platform to Enhanced Composition Writing in Malay Language

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Students today are the human capital in the twenty first century knowledge based market. As educators, we have to prepare our students for the twenty first century market. To be able to do that, we have to expose and provide our students skills in the web 2.0 technologies which allow them to collaborate in global environment. The rapid growth of Information Technology and Communication has changed roles of internet users in the World Wide Web. With the Web 2.0 technologies, most of the World Wide Web users are now not passive consume or retrieve information from the internet anymore. They can be active contributors and collaborate with the wide communities on the web. Web 2.0 technologies tools including podcasts, wiki’s, blogs, and Google docs. By using blogs, we will be able to read, write and publish our work online to a larger audience. The best part of it is that it is free if we are using the hosted blog software. A hosted blog is one where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, MySpace, greasy.com, LiveJournal.

Weblogs Definition

Blogs or Weblogs is a personal online journal or website which can be easily created using the Graphical User Interface provided by the blogging software without any programming knowledge or technical expertise. (Blood, 2002b:12) A weblog is best defined as “a website that is up-dated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page. Theresa Ross Embrey (2002) in Teacher Librarian December 2002 defined Weblogs as “a cross between a diary, a web site and an online community “. Weblogs – or blogs for short—began as websites that listed annotated hyperlinks to other websites containing interesting, curious, hilarious and/or generally newsworthy content located by the publisher of the weblogs ( Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). A typical blog site consists of “a single page of entries which are accessible by the public, arranged in reverse chronological order, containing hyperlinks to other blogs or web sites, and written by a single author” (Guenther, 2005) A blog is web publishing software which allows users to create and edit the content of a web page with a minimum of technical expertise (Holtz, 2006). Technically, blogs are also known as CMS or Content Management Systems. Being a CMS blog allow the write to easily publish to specific Web site and manage the content without the need to deal with the program code (Tan, 2008).

Blogs in Education

Web 2.0 technologies are the newest technologies, and it is important the educators understand what an impact these new technologies will have on society and the future. One of the Web 2.0 tools is Weblogs or Blogs. Blogs is a platform, a tool and a medium. As a platform, blogs can be used by educator to set up a space where students can post their work, assignments. As a tool, blog can be used in the teaching and learning process in school environment and extend it to outside the school environment. As a medium, blogs can be used to able the communication and interaction between teachers and students, or even the global audiences.

Blogs have a number of applications in education and particularly in the school context (Clyde, 2005) Educators have been slower to adopt blogs in education settings for a numbers of reasons. But as more and more people get on the blog bandwagon, more and more teachers and schools are starting to experiment with technology to communicate with students and parents (Richardson, 2004).

As Wiley and Martindale (2005) stated instructional blogging will provider learner with opportunities that have never been available before. Specialized skills are now not needed to create web pages, which allow more people everywhere the ability to create online content as stated by Maloney (2007).

Read (2006) explains motivation leads to enthusiasm which is turn lead to more effective writing experiences. In this study, Read analyses the blogs of six adolescents by using Maslow’s hierarchy needs. He states the following: By studying the blogs of six adolescents, Read discovered that the process of writing in blogs helps students grow as writers and improved their technology skills, even for those who have been historically reluctant to write.