Article ReviewSaiful Hairin B. Rahmat2013730423

Article review no. 1:To use or not to use web 2.0 in higher education?Gabriela GrosseckThe emergence of Web 2.0 in Education has been an obvious approach by many educators. The current educators are the breed of Web 1.0 and may feel that the incorporation of Web 2.0 and its functionality will bring a lot of benefit to the learners.

In this article, the author is focusing on several key issues. First and foremost is, what is Web 2.0? According to the article, Web 2.0 has been understood to mean the social use of the Web which allow people to collaborate, to get actively involved in creating content, to generate knowledge and to share information online. Beneath all the hype, Web 2.0 platforms are seen to have an emerging role to transform teaching and learning (Alexander & Levine, 2008). The author describes the important description and descriptors for the use of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has been emerging since the year 2007 which web users are now able to have a two way communication on the wide world of web instead of the traditional one way communication with the Web 1.0. There are many important aspects of Web 2.0 in the relation to Education. Blogging has become a worldwide phenomenon. According to (Grosseck, 2009), users of Blogging write for the purpose of real-world writing experience (Barnard & Meehan, 2005). This authentic approach can be used for language learning as it gives satisfaction to the writer, rather than writing for no intended audience. In Blogging, the teacher can response instantly to the writer and give appropriate response. This response could help the student writer with their level of confidence and self-esteem in writing. Students also build their own peer network to develop their own knowledge for writing, and also in the blogging, audience can help the author of the blog to improve their writing by giving comments and point out mistakes made. Other recent developments in Web 2.0 has also seen a massive contribution of knowledge to the web through the use of Wikis or Wikipedia.org. It is basically a collection of definitions or terms known by contributor to collaborate ideas and to organise data collected from individuals. This is significant to the development of Web 2.0 being a tool of Education as knowledge about certain subject keep on growing, with the contribution from knowledgeable parties. Wikis can also be used as a class portfolio ((Grosseck, 2009) as groups create a group project for a specific idea, create a classroom documents as a collaborative handout for the lessons and also for journal writing.Another massive contribution of Web 2.0 to education is Social Networking. According (Cobbs, 2008) Social Networking is event support and continuation and social learning environments. This coincide with the Social Cognitive Theory by Albert Bandura (1982) who believe that the information-processing theory, that connects the individuals perform a series of discrete mental operations on incoming information and then mentally store the conclusion that they have come up from the process. He also emphasizes on the way that children and adults processes the mental operation and how this would then give effect on their behavior.

Article review no. 2:Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and LearningBryan Alexander

The second chosen article deals with Web 2.0 on a different level. The first article basically touches on the establishments of Web 2.0 for higher education. In this article by Bryan Alexander (2006), is going to the depth of the purpose of the creation and the impact of Web.20 in the perspective of education. The author is talking about another feature of Web 2.0 that is important, which is Social Bookmarking. According to Wikipedia.org, Social Bookmarking is asocial bookmarkingservice is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and sharebookmarksof web documents. While a another definition from Whatis.com is thatSocial bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy system forbookmarks. Such a taxonomy is sometimes called a folksonomy and the bookmarks are referred to as tags. Unlike storing bookmarks in a folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and can be accessed from any computer. Technorati, a blogging site, describes the system as "The real-time Web, organized by you." Web sites dedicated to social bookmarking, such as Flickr and del.icio.us, provide users with a place to store, categorize, annotate and share favorite Web pages and files. Margaret Rouse, 2006.From these two definition we can conclude that Social Bookmarking is another tool for socializing and sharing of interest. This is an appealing feature of Web 2.0 as educator can adapt this feature into their teaching and for the learning of their students. Educators can manipulate the pedagogical applications that stem from the affordance of collaborative information discovery (Alexander B. , 2006). From my own personal point of view, I find this new advance in technology could be utilized in teaching as the technology is cheap and abundance, available to the students. Sharing is the new norm among students or teenagers. They like to share most details with their peers or colleagues. However, there is a certain limitation educators have to face in bringing this new technology to the classroom. The lack of facility to cope with such demand would hinder the progress. Nevertheless, if educators and administrators could together come up with a solution to this hurdle, then the students would surely benefit from it.The author of the article also highlighted another feature of Web 2.0 that is beneficial to the teaching and learning is the social interaction through Wiki. Wiki pages allow users to edit the content from within the browser window (Alexander B. , 2006), this draws users intelligence (Karapanos, 2013) which call for other collaborators to share their ideas, correct mistakes or facts. This is a great opportunity for learning process to take place as social interaction is happening together with exchanging knowledge. On a smaller scale, users can narrow down their audience by using JotSpotlive where users can create a specific webpage or by using Writeboard (http://writeboard.com/) which creator of Whiteboard would invite audience by emails. This would give freedom and choice for students who are ready to share with a large audience or a selected audienc only. The last keynote that the author of this article mentioned was the use of Blog. According to the author, Blogging has become a signature item of social software (Alexander B. , 2006). The secret to Blog being popular is that Google search ranks blogs results extensively. This would make the indentification of blog that suites the searchers need more easily. Thus making it user-friendly to the students.

Article No. 3

DO STUDENTS WANT WEB 2.0?AN INVESTIGATION INTO STUDENTINSTRUCTIONAL PREFERENCES

LASH KEITH VANCEUniversity of California, Riverside

In this last article review, I have stumbled upon an interesting article by Lash Keith Vanc, from University of California. It is on the other side of the argument that I have brought into view which was proposing the idea of Web 2.0. It also important to see other opinion on this subject matter and it is an increasingly important issue pertaining the future of education.

One of the most significant ideas of web 2.0 is the idea of sharing and contributing. According to (Vance, 2012) he brought of a question whether students want web 2.0 for doing their work or for pleasure? The initial target user is the age of 18-33, but the majority of learners or language learners starts at the age of 7-17. Recent developments in Web 2.0 have heightened the need for a closer analysis of the effect Web 2.0 has and will give so effect to the learners. Also, one has to see the pedagogical uses of technology in the classroom settings or student perception of technology (Vance, 2012). Having to check a twitter message is quite different from using it for instructional purpose. Research data also reveals the kind of information about how these learners behave online, but is it the same case with the learners using Web 2.0 for their learning process?The type of activities the learners indulge in Web 2.0 differs with different purpose. Blogging as cited in (Thompson, 2006) was started in 1994, since then millions now have and read blogs on daily basis. It is considered as a Self-expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue (Deng & Yuen, 2011). Another activity on Web 2.0 is Podcasting which is define as in (Panday, 2009) an optimum way of using music devices, especially mp3 players, for the purpose of education. Even though there are some uses of podcasting in lessons, students are not sure of the advantages of using podcasting in their learning (Lonnn & Teasely, 2009). Also in this article, Vance found that in Social Networking there is also there is a widespread of anticipation of possible uses for social networking sites as instructional and research tools (Dickinson, 2010). With the growing need to adapt Social Networking in the classroom, the learners have become ignorant of the pressure it gave to the educator to introduce the technology.The result for the study shows that learners prefer the inclusion of web 2.0 into their classroom. This maybe as a result of the connectedness of the millennial generation ( (Vance, 2012). Nevertheless, being connected does not mean they are a willing-user in utilizing Web 2.0 in all aspect of learning (Vance, 2012). One of the interesting results from the study shows that 75% of the respondents thought that Facebook should be one element of the course.

References

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning. Educause, 34-44.Alexander, B., & Levine, A. (2008, Nov./Dec.). Web 2.0 Storytelling. Emergence of a New Genre. In EduCAUSE Review. Vol. 43 / no. 6. 2008. 40-56. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0865.pdfBarnard, R., & Meehan, A. (2005). Writing for the real world: Student book 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Cobbs, J. (2008, feb 1). Learning 2.0 for Associations. . Retrieved from http://blog.missiontolearn.com/files/Learning_20_for_Associations_eBook_v1.pdfDeng, L., & Yuen, A. (2011). Towards a framework for educational affordancesof blogs. Computers & Education,, 56(2), 441-451.Dickinson, G. K. (2010). How do you use social networking tools? Library Media Connection, 28(5, 45-44.Karapanos, E. (2013). Modeling users' experiences with interactive systems. Berlin:: Springer.Lonnn, S., & Teasely, S. D. (2009). Podcasting in higher education: What are the implications for teaching and learning? Internet & Higher Education, 12(2),, 88-92.Panday, P. P. (2009). Simplifying podcasting. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 20(2), 251-261.Rouse , M. (2006). social bookmarking.Thompson, C. (2006). The early years. New York Magazine, 4/11/2011).Vance, L. k. (2012). Do student want web 2.0? An investigation into instructional referrences. J. EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH, Vol. 47(4), 481-493.