Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

25 – Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
Learning outcomes
After reading this chapter, you should be able to use
important online tools such as digital stories, blogs, and
wikis to:
• Develop learners’ online identities and communicative
abilities.
• Engage learners with course content and with their
peers.
• Develop online learner communities.
• Vary modes of participation.
You should also be aware of theoretical and practical
issues surrounding these tools, and collaborative and
collective online and blended endeavours.
Introduction
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,
but in the expert’s there are few.” (Suzuki, 2006, p. 21)
In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner's mind
(shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment
is asked to look at things as they are, without
preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from
learners' perspectives is to see things the way new students
do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks
that they might face, a task that takes on added significance
in light of the relative newness of online education.
Online education acts as a universal solvent,
dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have
taken for granted. Lynn Kirkland Harvey’s observations
about online identities (Chapter 29, Identity in Online
Education) are important to keep in mind because the
theme of online identity is one to which we often refer.
This chapter includes two sections on relatively new
technologies—blogs and wikis—not only to introduce
the possibilities of creating sets of many-to-many relations
within classes, and potentially outside classes as
well, but also to encourage educators to use blogs and
wikis in their classrooms as a way of returning to a state
of beginner’s mind. These tools are not only powerful in
themselves but may have an even greater potential when
used together.
Joseph Tomei and Richard Lavin's section on blogs in
this chapter argues that they may be the best (if such a
claim makes any sense), all-round tool for computermediated
communication (CMC). They are an ideal
tool for helping learners (and educators) get their feet
wet with online learning, and, revisiting Harvey’s theme,
they allow learners and educators alike to build their
online identity in a semi-enclosed space from which they
can venture out on their own terms to engage with others.
Lavin & Tomei’s section on wikis points to some of the
possibilities of these powerful tools for collaboration and
some of the issues associated with them. They argue that,
in general, wikis work better when learners already have a
solid foundation in blogging. They mention recent work
that attempts to merge the functions of blogs and wikis.
Also in this section is a discussion of usability and flow.
These concepts come to the fore with tools like wikis that
are unfamiliar or can sometimes be difficult to grasp.
We then move to digital storytelling. David Brear
walks educators through the process of planning and
creating their own stories, preparing them to teach their
students how to do the same. In the process, he takes
one of the oldest urges of humankind and places it
firmly in the technological present. The process of assembling
various media and pieces of information into a
story encourages deep learner engagement and can be a
wonderfully effective way to master curricular content,
while helping encourage a computer literacy that is becoming
more and more important. David’s guide also
provides a fitting introduction to another of the underlying
themes of this chapter, that of narrative structure,
revisited especially in the sections on blogs.
Blogs, identity, and engagement
by Joseph Tomei & Richard S. Lavin
“Our achievements of today are but the sum total
of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where
the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and
you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today
take you”. – Blaise Pascal
INTRODUCTION
The blogging boom shows little sign of abating, and it is
not surprising that more and more educators are showing
an interest in using blogs for educational purposes.
In this section, we give a brief overview of blogs and
what makes them work. We will assume in the bulk of the
section that you will be helping your students set up individual
blogs, which we would recommend in most cases.
A word is in order here on our teaching context. We
are teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to
Japanese university students, but we try to make our
suggestions applicable to the widest possible audience.
We feel that blogs are very flexible and can be adapted to
382 Education for a Digital World