Blogs : web journals in language education

Abstract

This publication is the outcome of an ECML project which, over the course of three years, investigated the design of educational blogging platforms and their use in the language classroom. The accompanying CD-Rom includes the entire corpus of blogs produced during the project – the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent. Mining this heap of verbiage turns up many fascinating gems. This booklet describes our experiences of working with language teachers and students taking their first steps in blogging, and should be of interest primarily to teacher trainers and language teachers who wish to harness the educational power of the “writable Web”. There are many excellent free blogging hosting services available to the adventurous teacher – Blogger, WordPress and Class Blogmeister all welcome educational users. If the teacher can rely on technical help and the school has access to its own Web server or has shared server space, then the blogging platform included on the CD-Rom can be freely installed for use by any number of teachers and students. The software runs on an IIS-based server (IIS 5 or above with ASP, MS Access and certain other optional modules that are documented on the CD-Rom). Since the installation itself is not just a point-and-click affair, some degree of configuration is necessary to suite the server set-up, and therefore some technical expertise in Web server administration and scripting is required. Once set-up, of course, the platform is accessible using any Web browser and should require little or no maintenance. Although fully functional (it has in fact been in use for over a year by more than 600 teachers and students), the platform is still in the early stages of development. It is released under a GNU General Public License1 to encourage software developers to extend and enhance it. Foremost in the development road map for this platform is the design of a proper data abstraction layer, integration with a variety of popular DBMS back-ends (especially MySQL), implementation of a proper blogging API, and porting the platform over to PHP. Finally, thanks are due to all the teachers and hundreds of students, both in Europe and Brazil, who bravely struggled with the idiosyncrasies of the software as it underwent one revision after another. Thanks are also due to the ECML for their support throughout the project, and especially all the staff at the ECML for always making us look forward to our next visit to the wonderful city of Graz.