A One-Stop Class Blog to Promote Collaborative Writing Activities

Abstract

Blogs have been found to assist learners to develop their skills through virtual teamwork. This paper reports on a preliminary study on the use of class blogs to support collaborative English writing activities. Observation and evaluation were conducted in a second year writing class comprising 30 university students over a period of one semester. In designing the ICT-based learning, the process suggested by Oliver, Harper, Wills, Agostinho & Hedberg (2007) was followed: rule based process, strategy based process, incident based process and role based process. Further interviews on students’ interests, objections and constraints faced in using the class blogs were conducted to assess their functions in learning. The findings showed that blogs had encouraged collaborative writing activities, such as sharing knowledge and negotiation (Brown, 2001), support (Williams & Jacobs, 2004), consultation (Hedge, 2000) and appreciation (Yau, et al., 2003). Students’ grades in the writing tests increased and the content of their writings improved after this activity was implemented. The issue faced by teachers was typically on the validity of the post contents or comments as there was a possibility for students to post on behalf of their peers. For students, their primary obstacle was the accessibility to the Internet on campus.