Many educators have attempted to implement a blog in educational contexts to enhance the communication environment among students and teachers. However, it is uncertain as to why traditional computer-mediated communication (CMC) applications should be replaced with blogs. It is time to comprehensively explore the effects of educational blogs by considering the CMC tools. This paper reviews prior studies and develops a model for the use of blogs in educational contexts by taking into account socio-technical systems theory. The model contributes to interactivity, an open system, a visualization tool, and a decentralized environment of online communication circumstance.

The phenomenon of blogs and theoretical model of blog use in educational contexts

The major challenge of marketing education is that the discipline continually reinvents itself. Marketing approaches and practices once new rapidly become old and many texts grow outdated in a short period of time, increasing the pressure on the instructors to provide the students with the latest knowledge. The changing environment of business necessitates the integration of innovative tools into the curriculum to enhance experiential learning and develop soft skills. This article presents the adaptation of blogging as an innovative approach for building and improving necessary marketing skills. This approach requires the students to maintain blogs where, as part of the Marketing Management course, they can write about “anything marketing,” such as recent campaigns, commercials, new products, or their own marketing-related experiences to provide an experiential exercise in marketing and produce significant improvements in students’ soft skills. This article offers a detailed discussion of such outcomes ba...

Educational Blogging: Integrating Technology into Marketing Experience

This paper systematically examines conditions associated with continuation of e-learning initiatives in universities. Conditions associated with institutional, developer, instructor, student and technology issues were identified from a review of the literature. Authors of 64 empirical papers describing e-learning initiatives (20 of which had not continued) published in the peer-reviewed literature rated and explained the role of each condition in continuation of their initiative to the time of the study, which was at least three years after all the papers were published. Initiatives reported on at three different times in the development of e-learning between 2000 and 2008 were represented among continued and non-continued initiatives. Conditions associated with learning and student response were well met in both cases. On the other hand, neither continued nor non-continued initiatives were seen to offer much financial advantage to the university. The conditions that distinguished between continued and non-continued initiatives were dominated by characteristics of the technology and institutional support for the initiative, especially financial support. Technology needed to be up to date, but also sufficiently mature or stable, to support continuation. Continued initiatives were also more likely to have involved other people in development and diffusion following the initial implementation.

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Critical success factors for the continuation of e-learning initiatives

Over the last few years, “web 2.0” or “social computing” applications like blogs, wikis, photoand video-sharing sites, as well as online social networking sites and virtual worlds, have seen unprecedented take up. This has changed the way people access, manage and exchange knowledge, and the way they connect and interact. Younger people especially are using these tools and services as a natural way of extending their personal relations and as a means of keeping in touch with friends. This trend is accompanied by the emergence of structurally different learning styles, especially among young people. As a result, living, learning and working patterns have already changed significantly and are expected to change even more dramatically in the future. Education and training systems need innovative ways of fostering new skills for new jobs, taking into account the changing living, working and learning patterns in a digital society. So far, however, education and training systems have not, on the whole, reacted to these changes. Neither schools nor universities have seized the potential of digital media for enhancing learning and addressing their learners’ needs. Due to the novelty of social computing, take up in education and training is still in an experimental phase. There are various diverse small-scale projects and initiatives all over Europe, which try to exploit social computing for a multitude of learning purposes, but research on enabling and disabling factors is scarce. This study is part of a collaboration project between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC-IPTS) and its Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC). The objective is to investigate the innovative and inclusive potential of social computing applications in formal education by reviewing current practice. The report identifies, structures and analyses existing Learning 2.0 practice in Europe with a view to generating evidence on the impact of social computing for learning and its potential in promoting innovation and inclusion. It combines a review of research on Learning 2.0 with the collection of experience and good practice from a broad variety of cases. How to obtain EU publications Our priced publications are available from EU Bookshop (http://bookshop.europa.eu), where you can place an order with the sales agent of your choice. The Publications Office has a worldwide network of sales agents. You can obtain their contact details by sending a fax to (352) 29 29-42758. The mission of the JRC is to provide customer-driven scientific and technical support for the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of EU policies. As a service of the European Commission, the JRC functions as a reference centre of science and technology for the Union. Close to the policy-making process, it serves the common interest of the Member States, while being independent of special interests, whether private or national.

Study on the Impact of Web 2.0 Innovations on Education and Training in Europe

The aim of this study was to apply the flipped classroom strategy in teaching English grammar to examine its impact on secondary school students’ performances, perceptions, and attitudes toward learning English independently. The researcher implemented the flipped classroom strategy by selecting videos based on the students’ textbook and uploading those videos on the Edmodo site before each lesson to provide opportunities for active learning interactions. The students of the experimental group (n = 20) were required to watch the videos to learn by themselves and to come to class prepared to ask for clarification, if needed. They also practiced what they had learned under the teacher’s supervision by completing collaborative and competitive tasks in groups or pairs. Meanwhile, the control group students (n = 23) received in-class only traditional teaching. They learned the grammatical lessons without the help of any videos. The statistical analysis of the post-test results showed that adopting the flipped classroom strategy appeared to play a role in enhancing the students’ grammar performances, as the mean score of the experimental group was higher than that of the control group, but this difference was not statistically significant. The students’ responses to a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews indicated that their attitudes’ towards using the flipped classroom strategy in the EFL class were positive.

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The Flipped Classroom Impact in Grammar Class on EFL Saudi Secondary School Students’ Performances and Attitudes

This paper describes the implementation of blog system in an international distance course between Japan and Taiwan. In the study, blog was used as a tool to encourage students' reflective learning and communication. Findings suggested that blog was effective for students to document their learning, share experience and knowledge, have direct interaction with peers especially internationally. Students preferred blog over the LMS where this course builds an course Web site and they proved to use blog in developing their e-learning experience. We proposed the use of blog could lead to a technologically enhanced support for instructional strategy that serves as an informative model for other Web-assisted international courses

http://www.mm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/old/research/doc/711/344lin.pdf

Blog as a Tool to Develop e-Learning Experience in an International Distance Course

Computer Programming Course Materials for Self-Learning Novices

Development and Assessment of Learning Materials for Computer Programming Focusing on "Visual Manifestation"

Evaluation of distance learning system by the student in Japan and USA

Active learning classes, which aim at increasing student participation in class, demand more management skills from the instructor than a conventional lecture class does. However, the instructor rarely recognizes how his/her lessons are different from those of others. The instructor cannot know exactly how one of his/her lessons is different from his/her previous week's lesson. This class-to-class comparison is effective in improving classes. This paper proposes a method for automatically visualizing the process and content of classes. Although there are ways to visualize the contents of classes manually, these approaches involve considerable investments of time and money. Machine learning techniques can automate the visualization. Our method estimated content with an average accuracy of 72.4%. Through our visualization, we confirmed that individual instructors use time differently from others and use their own time differently from lesson to lesson.

Masayuki Murakami

Papers

Blog as a Tool to Develop e-Learning Experience in an International Distance Course

Computer Programming Course Materials for Self-Learning Novices

Development and Assessment of Learning Materials for Computer Programming Focusing on "Visual Manifestation"

Evaluation of distance learning system by the student in Japan and USA

Visualizing the lesson process in active learning classes