Reflection #1 on a language tech article

Leverett, T. (2006). This is your class on weblogs. Teaching English with Technology, 6 (3). Available online: http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_tech25.htm

Since I am kicking off our creation of blogs at the same time that I am modeling for you the type of reflection that I would like you to write about the articles that you find, I thought it would be interesting to begin with an article that discusses the use of blogging with our students. The citation for the article by Thomas Leverett is above in APA. (Try your best to follow this model.)

The author of this article is reporting on the use of blogging with ESL/EFL students at the university at which he is located--Southern Illinois University.

The author reports that blogging with language learners brings about three positive effects. First, he says that by blogging, students gain access to the 'real' authentic English-speaking communities that they wish to be a part of. This is far more authentic than simply having their essays read by the teacher of a course. Second, he reports that students gain an understanding and comfort with the connectedness of the new media. Students learn to easily access new information to link to on their blogs and to skim large amounts of information and then synthesize it for inclusion in their blogs. Finally, blogging improves the relationships between students and teachers. How? When students write for teachers, they are really writing for the grade they can 'win' from the teacher. This sets up an adversarial relationship, according to the author. However, when students are writing for a larger audience, the teacher becomes a support person whose comments and suggestions might be more likely to be seen as helpful rather than critical.

The author states that weblogs are used in many ways in the program. For the lower levels, students gather information from a variety of sources about a topic and then publish what they have found on a weblog. In addition, the program newsletter is now a weblog. The newsletter was always meant to be accessed by friends and family of the students in the program; it is now accessible by everyone. At the higher levels, students publish their final writing products for their portfolios on their blogs.

As I mentioned in class, I subscribe to the 'critical approach' to language technology (Warschauer's term). For this reason, the most interesting elements in this article are about the changes in relationships and the changes in processes that come about through blogging. The author states, "...the most profound change in their learning is simply that they are opening themselves up to public scrutiny at the same time they are learning English..." (n.p.) I am extremely interested in how the language learning process is made visible or invisible through the use of technologies. What follows below is an excerpt from an article that I wrote in which I talk about this phenomenon.

"The 1990s movement to publish student work on the Internet and use the Internet for group collaboration brought new levels of publicness to language learning. Even now educators are reconsidering the effects of language teaming in a public environment. What do learners experience when they produce language in a venue open to the entire class or to the public? Sengupta (2001) found that Taiwanese EFL students discussing course content on an electronic bulletin board were uncomfortable with the knowledge that anyone in the course could read their writing and would be able to for some time. The public and stable nature of their writings affected what and how they wrote online. Aware that the public nature of the online arena may affect students, language teachers need to take closer note of the cultures they create in their online classrooms. CALL professionals must become sensitive to issues of publicness, rethinking which traces of language learning they leave for the public and which they erase. Effective teachers keep in mind that learners need time for reflective language development and are wary of online discussion technologies that allow learners very little privacy such as those that show everything learners type as they are typing it (see Pellettieri, 2000). Inequalities, such as the teacher's being able to delete threaded messages whereas students cannot, should also come under scrutiny. Another consideration about the public nature of online language development is the limelight it puts on our students. Some aspects of their identities may be highlighted; others may recede into the shadows, leaving our online communities poorer for the loss."

Now that those of you in the ChileTeach program have read my response to Leverett's article, I would like you to think about how you might use blogging in your classrooms in Chile and what the impacts (intended or unintentional) might be.