Málfríður - 15.10.2008, Blaðsíða 9

MÁLFRÍÐUR 
2.2 Distance Learning
Some  of  my  students  belong  to  the  business  com-
munity.  Due  to  their  work  schedule  or  because 
of  a  work  trip  they  cannot  always  attend  classes. 
Sometimes, despite the fact that they want to keep 
on practicing and studying a language, they give it 
up as they find it hard to follow the course. The blog 
as an asynchronous tool3 has contributed to chang-
ing this situation. Now students can keep on work-
ing and collaborating in the course even if they are 
abroad or they cannot attend class on that day.
My courses at the University of Reykjavík can be 
considered as a mixture of distance and on campus 
course. Once a week I meet my students so we do 
not  lose  the  personal  contact  that  I  also  consider 
necessary.  The  rest  of  the  time  we  keep  connected 
through the course blog where a dialogue about dif-
ferent issues is established.
2.3 Blogs as a collaborative space.
One of the biggest potentials of Weblogs is the abil-
ity to create spaces where students can collaborate 
online.  The  Read/Write  Web  opens  up  all  sorts  of 
new  possibilities  for  students  to  learn  from  each 
other.
According to Will Richardson “blogs are made of 
reflections and conversations updated every day (if 
not a couple of  times a day). They engage readers 
with ideas and questions and links. They ask read-
ers  to  think  and  to  respond.  They  demand  inter-
action.  Blogs  are  a  collaborative  space,  as  readers 
become part of the writing and learning process”. 
The blogs I run in both courses (Business Spanish 
III  and  V)  are  described  as  “a  collaborative  space 
created  for  and  by  the  students  of  Reykjavík 
University”. They know that their collaboration and 
participation is absolutely necessary and that sense 
of responsibility helps them to be more autonomous 
in their learning process.
Students  interact  with  each  other  through  their 
comments asking for explanation of a word they do 
not know, for more information about their lives or 
expressing  their  agreement  or  disagreement.  They 
create  a  virtual  Spanish  learning  community  and 
when they come to class I usually hear things like: 
“Oh,  yes,  you  mentioned  that  in  the  blog…”  This 
sense of community helps the students to feel  that 
3   Asynchronous tools enable communication and collaboration over a 
period of time through a „different time-different place“ mode. They 
possess the advantage of being able to involve people from multiple 
time zones. In addition, asynchronous tools are helpful in capturing 
the  history  of  the  interactions  of  a  group,  allowing  for  collective 
knowledge to be more easily shared and distributed.
they are part of a group. They work better together 
in class and the blog increases social interaction. The 
learning process here is less focused on the teacher 
and  more  on  the  students  who  do  not  expect  the 
teacher to give them all the information. They create 
and construct their own knowledge. 
Following the basic principles of Constructivism, 
the educational environment should provide learn-
ers  with  real  learning  context  making  them  more 
independent to monitor their  learning process and 
promote  interaction.  These  three  aspects  are  per-
fectly included in the Weblogs.
2.4 A motivating tool
Having an audience  is one of  the most motivating 
factors of the Read/Write web. Students know that 
their  comments  and  entries  will  be  read  by  their 
classmates  which  makes  them  take  responsibility 
for their writing (which is extremely positive from 
a  linguistic  point  of  view)  as  well  as  motivating 
them to keep on publishing in the blog where they 
express their own ideas and their own vision of the 
world.
By  reading  and  commenting  on  others’  entries, 
they  start  to  learn  from  each  other  without  the 
instructor  being  too  directly  involved.  Their  com-
ments  are  as  important  as  mine,  they  “build”  the 
blog with them. This helps them to be more critical 
and  analytical  without  waiting  for  the  teacher’s 
opinion.  They are not just readers and writers they 
are editors and collaborators as well.
Their initial shyness disappears and they express 
themselves  in  a  more  free  way.  People  in  general 
participate and feel more free to express their opin-
ions in blogs and chat rooms. The Weblog is a demo-
cratic tool that supports different learning styles, so 
for  these students who might be more reluctant  to 
express their ideas in front of the class, a blog gives 
them the opportunity to share  in writing the ideas 
they may be too shy to talk about.
3. My teaching experience with blogs:
target students, content and evaluation
Over  the  last  few  years,  some  tools  as  weblogs  or 
forums  have  often  been  relegated,  perhaps  due  to 
the  perceived  informality  or  maybe  because  some 
teachers (I include myself in this group) suffer from 
“technophobia”  (or  what  already  has  been  called 
“fear  2.0)  or  they  just  think  that  those  tools  will 
mean an extra work load. I must admit that this can 
be a time-consuming exercise depending on the size 
of the class. The best way is to check the blogs every