Sunday, June 29, 2008
Blogs are online journals that many of us who have internet access keep. The minority of blogs a are popular, owned by who we know as 'Online Celebrities'. On the other hand, the vast majority of blogs are kept 'underground', meaning that they get little or no publicity and are kept as diaries to a personal level. On to the topic of whether blogs should be used as a teaching tool for students, the approval of usage of this internet-based tool would definitely be a way of how we, humans, welcome the twentyfirst century.
All blogs are created, maintained and customised on the world wide web, meaning that those deprived of internet access will be denied the ability to blog. Back to the topic, this means that students who are not granted internet accessibility will be unable to embrace this new platform for learning and thus cause them to be at the disadvantage. However, at a local context, we can access the internet with ease, given the magnitude of hotspots available and not to forget the librairies in our neighbourhood. This shows that it would be to no avail to say that using blogging as a teaching tool will be ineffective due to the lag of internet access.
The whole point of having a blog as a teaching tool, i suspect, is the convinience of having the world at your fingertips as you blog. At the end of the day, we will certainly have to hand up the work in which we have completed, so why shouldn't we simply clump our work up on a blog (as i am doing) and publish it as a post? Furthermore, submitting our works on a blog would also enable your teachers, friends and more or less everyone else to view what you have done. This would be where convinience would come into the picture. Posts on blogs are actually rather similar to essays we write on paper filled with potrait horizontal lines. Both allow you to have words on, both allow you to share your work among your friends, and both of them would obviously allow your teacher to go through your work. The only difference is that since majority of us Singaporeans have internet access, including our educators, they will no longer be required to thug a four-inched stack of paper home just to imprint red diagonal lines on. Of course, the use of blogs will also be proved beneficial to the ones being educated. Imagine having to borrow individual scripts from your classmates and compare that to having all your schoolmates' essays on the flat panel screen infront of you. Needless to say, the later would be more convinient.
In conclusion, i feel that it would be wise to use Blogs as a teaching tool and must not be subjected to a personal freedom of choice as we have already moved on to an era where bulky casette tapes have been shrinked to thumb-sized memory chips and we have to learn to adapt to the fact that 'analog' is the past tense of 'digital'. I am in full favour of using blogs as a tool for teaching as it will not only benefit students academically but also create a positive social impact.
-Darryl Ong
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