~FoUrTh PoStInG~

Hello again...
This is the fourth posting. For this time,the task is to find or search about three things which are what is the DOA- Dissertation online, online databases subsribed by TSL libraries and then I need to search for EBSCOHost,and Lisa Net and find 2 articles related to one of the following topics from any online databases subsribed by TSL. CALL, Bridging Digital Divide Women and ICT and E-Learning. Then I have to summarize the articles.

I did found about the online databases subscribed by TSL library and Lisa Net and EBSCOHost are example of it.

Summary Of Articles
First Article

E-Learning Programs in Higher Education
by Marie Gould

This article focuses on the e-Learning industry, which has become an integral part of our society and education. Potential markets have emerged in elementary and secondary education environments as well as in post secondary institutions and corporations. Learning institutions must look at the trends affecting many of their students, faculty, administration and services. Asa result of the emerging trends, seven distinct models oforganizational structures in higher education have surfaced. These models will serve as a foundation for different trend references

Second Article

Evidence-based practice and e-learning in Higher Education:
can we and should we?
by Martin Oliver and Grainne Conole

Policy makers are increasingly looking to evidence-based practice as a means of ensuring accountability and validity in education and more recently in e-learning. In this paper, the origins of evidence-based practice are reviewed, and considered in relation to the emergence of e-learning as an area of policy, research and practice. The close links between these three activities within e-learning are described, and a critique is presented that raises methodological, epistemological and moral questions about this approach. This analysis identifies a number of implications for e-learning, including the problems facing practitioner-researchers working on project funding and the potentially distorting effect of e-learning policy on research in this field. Possible alternative approaches are suggested, advocating a more inclusive conception of evidence-based practice in which any single model (such as the hierarchy of evidence developed within medicine) is prevented from dominating evaluation by explicitly adopting a commitment to inclusivity and empowerment within evaluation and research.

Activity

EBSCOHost - http://www.ebscohost.com/

LISA net - http://www.csa.com/

~ThIrD PoStInG~

Hello out there..
For posting three, we have been told to make a comparison and contrast among four search engine.First of all..What is a search engine?...For those that are not familiar with that term, you can get all the knowledge of it by clicking this link. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine)
There are many types of search engines. If I have to analyse all of it, it will take a million years to finish. In the context of this task,luckily I have to analyse just four of it. The search engines are mamma.com, google scholar, eric digest and yahoo.com.

The first is mamma.com. The page is very simple with a logo of mamma.com which is a picture of an old woman. Now, I knew where the word mamma came from. Type of categories provided in mamma.com are web, jobs, videos, shop, travel, yellow pages and white pages. Other than that, mamma.com offers two languages which are English and France

The second search engine is google scholar. This is an extension of the Google search engine where as this search engine is mainly about finding scholar's work. The appeareance and the logo is similar to Google.com but there is an addition of the word scholar in at the logo. The tagline is stand on the shoulders of giants. Dont get the meaning actually. As been told before, this search engine enables you to find the work of a scholar such as paper work,journal or books. It is quite useful in searching material for assignments. There are links to the Google.com and Information about Google.com and Google scholar.


Next is yahoo.com. The main page of yahoo.com is eyecatching and interesting compared to the previous search engines. There are a lot of things in the main page. You can sign up for an email account with yahoo.com. There is an abstract of news in it and the sections of news. It is available in Malay and English language. It is very convenience since it is very hard to find search engine that provides Malay language as the medium language. The language is interchangeably. There is a list of top searches. Other thing is quite similar where there are variety of sections such as answers, auto, finance and others. There are also box on featured services, small business and Pulse-What yahoo are into. There are more services compared to other search engines.


The last but not least is eric digest. I never heard the word eric digest before. The nearest is Reader's Digest but that is a book and not a search engine. Basically, Eric digest is a short reports on topic of prime current interest in education. There are a large variety of topics covered including teaching, learning, libraries, charter schools, special education, higher education and others. It is targeted specifically for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners, but generally useful to the broad educational community. Eric digest offers two languages. The languages are English and spain.

There you go. Now, you have the knowledge of what is search engine is and the type of it. To explore on your own plese look at the activitity section

Activity
Mamma.com - http://www.mamma.com/
Google scholar - http://scholar.google.com.my/
Yahoo.com - http://www.yahoo.com/
Eric Digect - http://www.ericdigests.org/

~SeCoNd PoStInG~

(Huffaker, D. (2005). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom. AACE Journal, 13(2), 91-98)

Weblogs are an excellent way to fuse educational technology and storytelling inside the classroom and beyond school walls. Because their format is similar to a personal diary, where recounting tales and autobiographical events is prevalent, blogs provide an arena where self-expression and creativity is encouraged. Its linkages to other bloggers establish the same peer-group relationships found in nonvirtual worlds. Its “underdetermined” design, where a system is engaging, yet intuitive and easy to learn(Cassell, 2002), makes it equitable for many age groups and both genders, and simple for teachers to implement. Being situated within the Internet allows bloggers to access their blogs anywhere and anytime an Internet connection is available, an opportunity for learning to continue outside the classroom. Blogs are both individualistic and collaborative. Blogs promote self expression,a place where the author can develop highly personalized content. Yet blogs connect with an online community—bloggers cancomment and give feedback to other bloggers, and they can link to fellow bloggers, creating an interwoven, dynamic organization. In the classroom, students can have a personal space to read and write alongside a communal one, where ideas are shared, questions are asked and answered, and social cohesion is developed.

Blogs can be multidisciplinary. Because reading and writing can be used in a variety of academic contexts, blogs are fungible across disciplines. Storytelling should not be relegated to language arts alone—students can express their perceptions on any number of subjects. A science class, for instance, can give rise to an exchange of lessons learned after a scientific experiment. A discussion of fundamental concepts in mathematics could help students understand the logic behind the formula. Nonfictional stories can help students situate themselves in a particular historical or humanities context. A global blog could truly introduce students to international culture or politics. In short, any discipline can use blogs to approach a style of meta-learning, where concepts or contexts are discussed and articulated in both a personalized and group exchange, and ideas are built on previous educational content.

Review
From the article, it proves that blog is very helpful in assisting the process of language learning. It is due to certain factors such highlighted in the article. We can conclude from the article that blog serves an environment that encourages the process of learning.

It states that blog is suitable for learning purposes and that include language learning. According to the article, blog is suitable because their format is similar to a personal diary; blogs provide an arena where self-expression and creativity is encouraged, a place where the author can develop highly personalized.

Other than that, content blogs connect with an online community, blogs can be multidisciplinary and a global blog could truly introduce students to international culture or politics are also the factors. As provided in the article it states that any discipline can use blogs to approach a style of meta-learning. It means that language learning process can also use blog as the medium for that purpose. Blogging is one thing that is new for me although I have my own blog there is more than meets the eye when you are talking about blog. But I have to admit that blog did help in learning language. For instance, I am writing in this page and in the same time using other language which is English as the medium of writing. So, it improves my writing skill and eventually my proficiency in the language.

I do not have any particular blog that in favour when it comes to blog but I love to browse randomly for other blogs. The interesting and eye catching blog regardless from the writing or layout aspect will be my reading material for that day. So, it can be say that i have embedded myself in the large community of blogosphere even though I am not an active blogger.

Activity

Click this link and the first hit in that page is the PDF form of this article. It is a study actually conducted by David Huffaker.

http://scholar.google.com/scholarq=role+of+blog+in+learning+language

~FirSt PoStInG~

The Efficacy of Computer-Provided Reading Treatment for Chronic Aphasic Adults
(http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/3/493)

Richard C. Katz 1Robert T. Wertz 2 1 Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center Phoenix, AZ and Arizona State University Tempe2 Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center Nashville, TN and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Nashville, TN
katz.richard@phoenix.va.gov

We examined the effects of computer-provided reading activities on language performance in chronic aphasic patients. Fifty-five aphasic adults were assigned randomly to one of three conditions: computer reading treatment, computer stimulation, or no treatment. Subjects in the computer groups used computers 3 hours each week for 26 weeks. Computer reading treatment software consisted of visual matching and reading comprehension tasks. Computer stimulation software consisted of nonverbal games and cognitive rehabilitation tasks. Language measures were administered to all subjects at entry and after 3 and 6 months. Significant improvement over the 26 weeks occurred on five language measures for the computer reading treatment group, on one language measure for the computer stimulation group, and on none of the language measures for the no treatment group. The computer reading treatment group displayed significantly more improvement on the Porch Index of Communicative Ability "Overall" and "Verbal" modality percentiles and on the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia "Quotient" and "Repetition" subtest than the other two groups. The results suggest that (a) computerized reading treatment can be administered with minimal assistance from a clinician, (b) improvement on the computerized reading treatment tasks generalized to non-computer language performance, (c) improvement resulted from the language content of the software and not stimulation provided by a computer, and (d) the computerized reading treatment we provided to chronic aphasic patients was efficacious.

Review
This article that I have read falls under the category of reading for information. This article explains about a study on the effects of computer-provided reading activities on language performance in chronic aphasic patients. There are 55 subjects in this study which are all of them are aphasic adults. They were assigned randomly to three conditions which are computer reading treatment, computer stimulation, or no treatment at all. Subjects in the computer groups used computers 3 hours each week for 26 weeks. In the computer reading treatment group, they are exposed to computer reading treatment software consisted of visual matching and reading comprehension tasks. On the other hand, in the computer stimulation group, they were exposed to computer stimulation software consisted of nonverbal games and cognitive rehabilitation tasks. Language measures were administered to all subjects at entry and after 3 and 6 months to study the effect. There is significant improvement over the 26 weeks period where it occurred on five language measures for the computer reading treatment group, on one language measure for the computer stimulation group, and none of the language measures for the no treatment group. The computer reading treatment group displayed a significant improvement on the 4 scale items which are the Porch Index of Communicative Ability "Overall" and "Verbal" modality percentiles, the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia "Quotient" and "Repetition" subtest than the other two groups. The result from conducted test shows that computerized reading treatment can be addressed with minimal assistance from a clinician. There is an improvement on the computerized reading treatment tasks generalized to non-computer language performance. There is also an improvement resulted from the language content of the software and not stimulation provided by a computer. So, the computerized reading treatment that has been provided to the chronic aphasic patients is a successful.

Activities
1. For those that is not familiar with the term aphasic, please click here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia
2. To read the original article, please click here.http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/3/493