Thursday 4 September 2008

Developing personal learning environments using web 2.0 tools

The new distributed social web has the potential to be an effective environment for formal and informal language learning. It offers opportunities for students to participate in a space that is more personalized and student owned. Sara Guth presented an ongoing project, BloggingEnglish, where an EFL course used a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as an alternative instead of a learning management system. Students were presented with an ‘e-tivity’ every week from exploring the blogosphere to developing their own blog with rss-feeds, social bookmarking, producing podcasts and also YouTube films. The outcomes of the study show that students were very positive to this way of learning English. It increased their interest and motivation. Various aspects of reading, writing and listening were practised, though not so much speaking. Pedagogical challenges were brought up too, for instance assessment: How and what is assessed in such a course environment?

1 comment:

Prof. Nelba Quintana- La Plata- Argentina said...

Hello, my name is Nelba Quintana from Argentina. I would like to contact Sarah Guth because I also work with e-tivities in blogs with two groups of students : one is an group of adults and the other on of teenagers. Both have an intermediate level. This is my second year working with blogs and it has been a very interesting experience. At the beginning, the school of languages where I work asked me to use blogs as a kind of "workbook" with extra activities for practising the language, but Students did not really get engaged. So this year I have proposed to do something different because it is not a question of using web2.0 tools to do more or less the same. I am trying to offer different activities, not completely different because students are not used to completely online tasks. I am introducing them little by little to the web 2.0 world.
These are the blogs I manage:
http://jovenes4ma.motime.com ; http://adults5.motime.com
I invite you to visit them and you can contact me for feedback at
nelbaq@gmail.com