Blog-based online journals for English As A Second Language learners

The research on the use of blogs as online journals was carried out with a group of twenty five Form Four students in a secondary school in Kuantan, Pahang. The aim of the research is to find out the effects of blogs as a tool in developing writing in English as A Second Language. The instruments include questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and analysis of the blogs content. The research covered students’ perspectives of blogs as the medium for online journals, the effectiveness of blogs as a tool to assist students’ writing skill and to what extent blogs could help students to enhance their writing skills. From the findings, it is discovered that there is a positive impact on the development of students’ writing throughout the research as gained through the instruments. From the research, the students claimed that blogs is an interesting medium for them to write their journals as compared to writing in their log books. Blogs also could help them developed their writing skill in English Language; and through the various features in blogs, students were able to write more effectively

INTRODUCING JAVANESE WEBLOGS ENHANCES PARTICIPATION TOWARDS JAVANESE DISCOURSE

Weblogs have powerful effects on the society, millions of people read blogs daily. English is the main language used, but indigenous languages including Javanese are also used to blog. Javanese blogs need to be introduced especially to young generations to maintain the existence of this old language as they tend not to use it in school and at home. The method used in this study is descriptive, the data are mainly taken from internet. By visiting the suggested blogs, readers will realize that Javanese still exists and needs to be maintained by participating themselves in any of these Javanese blogs

Blogging for the Sake of the President

Many western researchers have hailed blogs of politicians as new, interactive, and ‘inherently democratic’ tools of political communication. Yet, as this chapter illustrates, blogs can be of comparatively even greater appeal to politicians in semi-authoritarian political contexts: In Russia, 29 out of 83 regional leaders (roughly 35 %) were keeping a weblog in May 2010. This chapter accomplishes a comprehensive content analysis of all governors’ blogs and, subsequently, fleshes out a typology of three characteristic types. In conclusion, it is argued that politicians’ blogs are playing a far greater role in generating legitimacy for the Russian political system than they do in democracies, because the semi-authoritarian Russian system lacks other mechanisms which generate (input) legitimacy in developed democracies, such as highly competitive elections

The State of Blogging

Presents findings from a survey of the position of blogs as a key part of online culture. Provides a profile of the typical blogger, information about the increase in readership, and methods used by readers to obtain information delivered from blogs

Lecture or engagement? : communication with readers on three North Carolina newspaper blogs

When a newspaper editor starts a blog, he or she has a new tool to interact with audiences. This paper examines this interaction. Where do editors’ blogs fit into the editor’s toolbox? How are editors communicating with their readers on their blogs? From the findings of this study, it appears editors’ blogs require dedication and commitment to be successful. The blogs were markedly different in the number of posts, number of reader comments, and the number of comments left by editors. The findings of this study lead to the conclusion that the editors’ blogs were used as complementary tools by editors who were willing representatives of their newspapers in the public eye. By committing to a blog and using it effectively, editors are reaching out to audiences in new ways. The results from this study of editors’ blogs at three North Carolina newspapers will provide insight to other editors who are using blogs or expect to use blogs as a communication tool, and will help researchers as they establish new benchmarks in the study of new media.Department of JournalismThesis (M.A.

Archiving scientific blogs with ArchivePress

A poster describing the ArchivePress blog archiving approach and project, presented at the International Digital Curation Conference, London, December 2009

Mining online diaries for blogger identification

In this paper, we present an investigation of authorship identification on personal blogs or diaries, which are different from other types of text such as essays, emails, or articles based on the text properties. The investigation utilizes couple of intuitive feature sets and studies various parameters that affect the identification performance. Many studies manipulated the problem of authorship identification in manually collected corpora, but only few utilized real data from existing blogs. The complexity of the language model in personal blogs is motivating to identify the correspondent author. The main contribution of this work is at least three folds. Firstly, we utilize the LIWC and MRC feature sets together, which have been developed with Psychology background, for the first time for authorship identification on personal blogs. Secondly, we analyze the effect of various parameters, and feature sets, on the identification performance. This includes the number of authors in the data corpus, the post size or the word count, and the number of posts for each author. Finally, we study applying authorship identification over a limited set of users that have a common personality attributes. This analysis is motivated by the lack of standard or solid recommendations in literature for such task, especially in the domain of personal blogs. The results and evaluation show that the utilized features are compact while their performance is highly comparable with other larger feature sets. The analysis also confirmed the most effective parameters, their ranges in the data corpus, and the usefulness of the common users classifier in improving the performance, for the author identification task

‘Economics with training wheels’: Using blogs in teaching and assessing introductory economics

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. This paper explores the use of blogs in the teaching and assessment of a small (40-60 students) introductory economics paper. The role of blogs as a teaching, learning and assessment tool are discussed. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected across four semesters, students’ participation in the blog assessment is found to be associated with student ability, gender, and whether they are distance learners. Importantly, students with past economics experience do not appear to crowd out novice economics students. Student performance in tests and examinations does not appear to be associated with blog participation after controlling for student ability. However, students generally report overall positive experiences with the blog assessment