Questionaire

BLOG QUESTIONNAIRE-SKBP 1023

Age: 23

Tutorial Group: 3

LECTURER:  Datin Norizan bte. Abdul Razak

1.       Do you enjoy blogging?

Yes ____________ NO_________________

IF YES OR NO please explains why?

Yes, because blogging can improve my vocabulary and my writing skill.

 

2.       Based on your experience what is the benefit of blogging?

From my experience, there are a lot of benefits that I can get from blogging for example, It can enhance your writing skill and it also will improve your vocabulary indirectly when you are writing.

 

3.       Do you need more assistance to set up your blog?

Yes ____________ NO_________________

If YES Please explain on what aspect?

No.

 

4.       Do you have any memorable/favourite topic in your blog?

Yes ____________ NO_________________

If YES Please list which topic?

Yes, my favourite topic in this blog is about the comparison between the search engines. Here I am able to find out which is the best search engine that I have ever know before this.

 

5.       List 5 advantages of blogging for you.

-          Improve Vocabulary

-          Enhanced writing skill

-          Attract you to read more

-          Improve your general knowledge

-          Can fill your free time

 

6.       List 5 disadvantages of blogging.

-          Wasting time

-          Can publish anything that you want

-          Multilanguage can be use

-          Can be misuse

-          Have to update frequently

 

7.       Will you continue blogging after the course?

Yes ____________ NO_________________

If Yes or No please explain why?

Yes,  because I have already created one.

 

8.       Do you think that blogging improve your writing?

Yes ____________ NO_________________

Yes, definitely it improves my writing skill.

9.       Do you think that we should continue with blogging activity for the next batch of students? Yes ____________ NO_________________

Yes.

 

10.   Will you recommend your friend to blog

Yes ____________ NO_________________

Yes.

 

11.   Can you teach a friend to set up his or her blog

Yes ____________ NO_________________

Yes.

Gud Luck My Frenz...

Concordance

Tools for Chinese Language Teaching and Research

By Marjorie K.M. Chan

This article presents an introduction to concordancers, and to the concordancing of Chinese e-texts in particular. Demonstrations are given of searches using spaced and non-spaced source e-texts, with the concordance results presented in Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) display format. There are illustrations to accompany discussions of full-text concordances, and of concordances targeting specific words or phrases. The writer suggests how concordancers might be used in language-teaching and in conducting research on various linguistic phenomena of the Chinese language. An appendix compares several concordancing programs capable of handling Chinese e-texts.

http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/articles/Chan_JCLTA-2002.pdf

 

Building and using your own corpus and concordance.

By Watson Todd, R

Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on corpora and concordancing in language teaching. The use of corpora and concordances has, however, been largely restricted to institutions with large resources, and the majority of teachers and students have been excluded from gaining the potential benefits. In this paper, the writer showed how specific genre and general corpora can be built and analysed without any special programs. This allows some innovative applications of corpora to become available in most classrooms, including getting students to create their own concordances for self-correction and creating databases to guide course design.

http://arts.kmutt.ac.th/call/doc/Building%20and%20Using%20Your%20Own%20Corpus%20and%20Concordance.pdf

Kawan...

Article Reviews on E-Learning

All students are required to go to Tun Sri Lanang library during your tutorial times and do the following: Go to the Internet lab section of the library at the main entrance. Ask the librarian where is the DOA- Dissertation online and find out what it is and also find out the online databases subsribed by TSL libraries. Then you need to search for EBSCOHost,and Lisa Net. Find 2 articles related to one of the following topics from any online databases subsribed by TSL. CALL Bridging Digital Divide Women and ICT E-Learning Summarize these articles and post them as fourth posting.

 

Building a Dynamic Online Learning Community among Adult Learners.

 

By: Christina Sierra and Terre Folger

 

This article discussed about the nature of learning communities constructed among a diverse group of adult learners in an online graduate-level course. The course engages students in both independent and team tasks to complete several project deliverables. The 21 students enrolled in this online course came from across the USA and countries as far away as Hong Kong, Japan, Argentina and Venezuela. Students and their instructor communicated via a variety of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, including synchronous webcasts and chat sessions and asynchronous e-mail and discussion boards. Discourse artefacts, student profiles, survey responses, and project evaluations were content analysed for evidence of the formation of learning communities, particularly for evidence of three markers: participation, shared identity and the establishment of a social network. This action research also generates pedagogical implications for promoting adult learners' active participation in online learning and instructional strategies to facilitate the community-building process.

 

To view the full article, please click the link below:

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e0h&AN=10306000&site=ehost-live

 

E-Learning Programs in Higher Education.

 

By: Marie Gould.

 

This article will focus 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 postsecondary institutions and corporations. Learning institutions must look at the trends affecting many of their students, faculty, administration and services. As a result of the emerging trends, seven distinct models of organizational structures in higher education have surfaced. These models will serve as a foundation for different trend references and as an illustration of how different types of educational institutions develop strategic plans for implementing distance education into their programs.

 

To view the full article, please click the link below:

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e0h&AN=27577766&site=ehost-live

You're My Friend...

The Varieties of Search Engines...

Hello guys, we meet again in my new post, today we’re going to talk about some search engines which is available on the net for us to search for information, articles and etc. There are a lot of search engine that we can found nowadays in the net due to the development of the World Wide Web (www). For this post I’m going to talk about the four selected search engines which is Yahoo!, Google Scholar, Mamma.com and last but not list Eric Digest.

What is Yahoo!?

Yahoo is a search engine,subject directory, and web portal. Yahoo provides good search results powered by their own search engine database, along with many other Yahoo search options, such as Yahoo Reference Search, or, for an even more complete list, check out the Ultimate Yahoo Search List, my attempt to write down all in one place all the Yahoo search options. Yahoo: main web portal and general jumping off point. You can access all the big Yahoo search options here, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Music, Yahoo News, etc. Yahoo Search: Yahoo's main page dedicated only to search; you can access this from the web portal as well, but this page offers a more streamlined look. Yahoo Directory: Yahoo's subject directory page. Yahoo is one of the oldest directories on the Web, and this is a very large directory.  Yahoo offers many search options on its search portal page; including the capacity to search the Web, search for images only, search in the Yahoo Directory (this gathers results from the human edited subject directory, as opposed to the main search engine driven results page), search locally,search news, and go shopping.

 

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. Google scholar main features is to search diverse sources from one convenient place, find papers, abstracts and citations, locate the complete paper through your library or on the web and learn about key papers in any area of research. Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.

What is Mamma.com

Mamma.com is a "smart" metasearch engine — every time you type in a query Mamma simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites, properly formats the words and syntax for each, compiles their results in a virtual database, eliminates duplicates, and displays them in a uniform manner according to relevance. It's like using multiple search engines, all at the same time. Created in 1996 as a master's thesis, Mamma.com helped to introduce metasearch to the Internet as one of the first of its kind. Due to its quality results, and the benefits of metasearch, Mamma grew rapidly through word of mouth, and quickly became an established search engine on the Internet. Mamma.com's ability to gather the best search results available from top search sources and to provide useful tools to its users has resulted in its receiving multiple Honourable Mentions in the Best Metasearch category in the annual SearchEngineWatch Awards.

What is ERIC Digests?

ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research. ERIC contains short reports (1,000 - 1,500 words) on topics of prime current interest in education. There are a large variety of topics covered including teaching, learning, libraries, charter schools, special education, higher education, home schooling, and many more. It is targeted specifically for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners, but generally useful to the broad educational community. Besides that, it is designed to provide an overview of information on a given topic, plus references to items providing more detailed information. ERIC is being produced by the former 16 subject-specialized ERIC Clearinghouses, and reviewed by experts and content specialists in the field. It was funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), of the U.S. Department of Education (ED). The full-text ERIC Digest database contains over 3000 Digests with the latest updates being added to this site in July 2005.

My View

When we says about Yahoo, most of the frequent computer users in this world may know what is that mean. Yahoo has been around from the early days of internet and appears as a famous search engine. Similar to Google, it has other wonderful services such as games, downloads, emails, horoscopes, news, music and the list goes on. In addition, you can look at local weather results, upcoming movies, the Marketplace, and Yahoo International. Yahoo's home page is pretty crowded but it has a lot to offer. I've used Yahoo for many moons now; for their great Yahoo Mail service and for the My Yahoo search options. However, unlike the other search engines, yahoo has an advantage that may help those hazy ones look for the apt information.

Talking about Google Scholar, the obvious different that we can see compared to the other search engine is the categories. There are no categories being provided by this search engine and this somehow makes the job of searching for information or anything that we want to know becomes more complicated and takes the whole day of our time. However it is suitable for scholar suits its name Google Scholar.

Mamma.com is a Meta search engine with a wide range of other web search engines for its results! Like the company’s saying, “The Mother Of All Search Engines”, mamma.com certainly is the central to other search engines available on the net. However, practically speaking, most of us do not have all day to browse through search engines to other search engines. Thus, mamma.com may require one to spend a lot of time browsing through these web engines before arriving to the final destination for results.

There are similarities between Eric Digest and Google Scholar, both of this search engines doesn’t have categories. This factor limited the users to find precise information about what they are searching for because it is not narrowed down according to the categories. Eric Digest is not widely use maybe because of there is not enough exposure to this kind of search engine. Furthermore, it’s only function as an online digital library of education research and information. 

Just 4 u my frenz...

How blogging can helps language learners to enhance their writing skill.

Blogging improves your writing skills. 

Better writing ability, and an enhanced ability to express yourself in print, is a rarely thought about benefit of blogging. 

While most people think of writers as infinitely talented, living in some rarified air denied to the rest of us, writing is a learned skill. 

While some people are indeed born more talented with the written word than others, most people can become better writers simply through practice. 

Blogging is as good a practice field as any. 

Like playing sports or a musical instrument, improvement in skill level only results from constant practice. The more you work on the skills, the better at applying them you become. 

Writing your daily blog post provides a fresh blank canvas for self expression. As the words form sentences on the page, a sense of accomplishment is the direct result. 

It feels good to finish a blog post. 

Don't be bashful. Feel proud of what you have written. 

Many bloggers have told me they had no idea that they could write even one coherent post; let alone one or more a day. Often, they were entirely convinced that writing well formed thoughts was impossible for them. 

Becoming bloggers changed that mistaken idea entirely. 

It's all a matter of practice, and with that continual application of fingers to keyboard, the skills improve constantly. 

Before you know it, another well written and easily understood blog post appears on the page. 

It's almost like magic. 

Of course, I keep thinking that through constant practice, my typing skills will eventually improve to the level of being semi-adequate. Occasionally, I can even type a word or two without looking at the keyboard. That event always shocks me. 

I believe that is truly a case of real magic; or perhaps even a miracle of monumental proportions. 

Well, enough of that. 

With writing, the more a person does it, the better they get at doing it. 

Blogs are a great way to practice and hone your ability to express yourself and your thoughts via the written word. 

Learning how to write well, and express thoughts in a logical and coherent manner, are hidden benefits of blogging. 

It's a good thing those benefits don't stay hidden for long. 

The benefits of blogging and its acceptance as a form of mainstream media

There has been growing acceptance and awareness of the terms blog and blogging. An article on technical blog revealed that 80% of Americans are aware of blogs and visit blogs on a regular basis.

Many people have been accustom to blogs and its ability to provide information on specialised and niche topics that may not be covered in mainstream medias. Others also find blogs as a useful source of entertainment news and gossip, however a large percentage of blog readers still refer to traditional forms of media for news, sharing their time spent with blogs on medias such as newspaper, television and radio.

Therefore as people become increasingly aware of blogs, they develop an understanding of the business opportunities blogs. Following is a description of is a list of the opportunities:

• Targeted advertising: because of the specific nature of blogs which concentrate on particular interest and topics. Blogs usually tend to have attract a certain group of audience with specific demographic and audience, increasing the effectiveness of advertising on industry to topic specific blogs.
  
• Promotion: increasingly consumers are relying on blogs as a reliable source of product review and qualification. A corporate blog provides the opportunity for companies to review and present their products to consumers in a subtle manner unlike traditional forms of banner advertising.
  
• Authority and recognition: blogs allow companies to easily update and add relevant content within their online promotions and marketing campaigns. The more companies blog about topics relevant to their industry and more recognition and authority they will gain from the industry as a voice and point of contact when consumers queries the products and services related to a industry.

The list of benefits and opportunities of blogs is continually expanding and the acceptance of the technique as a mainstream media is only an example of the potential of blogging and its benefits to a company.

http://www.wiliam.com.au/wiliam-blog/benefits-of-blogging-and-its-acceptance-as-a-form-of-mainstream-media

Reading for Information.

Cause and effect for global warming

Cause of global warming

Almost 100% of the observed temperature increase over the last 50 years has been due to the increase in the atmosphere of greenhouse gas concentrations like water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane and ozone. Greenhouse gases are those gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect (see below). The largest contributing source of greenhouse gas is the burning of fossil fuels leading to the emission of carbon dioxide.

 

The greenhouse effect

When sunlight reaches Earth's surface some is absorbed and warms the earth and most of the rest is radiated back to the atmosphere at a longer wavelength than the sun light. Some of these longer wavelengths are absorbed by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before they are lost to space. The absorption of this longwave radiant energy warms the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases act like a mirror and reflect back to the Earth some of the heat energy which would otherwise be lost to space. The reflecting back of heat energy by the atmosphere is called the "greenhouse effect".

The major natural greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide CO₂, which causes 9-26%; methane, which causes 4-9%, and ozone, which causes 3-7%. It is not possible to state that a certain gas causes a certain percentage of the greenhouse effect, because the influences of the various gases are not additive. Other greenhouse gases include, but are not limited to, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons.

 

Global warming causes by greenhouse effect

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (see above) act like a mirror and reflect back to the Earth a part of the heat radiation, which would otherwise be lost to space. The higher the concentration of green house gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more heat energy is being reflected back to the Earth. The emission of carbon dioxide into the environment mainly from burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, petrol, kerosene, etc.) has been increased dramatically over the past 50 years.

http://timeforchange.org/cause-and-effect-for-global-warming

I have categorized this article as reading for information because I am looking forward for the information about the causes and the effects global warming. By reading this kind of article, I will get a detail information about the definition of global warming until the root of the cause. Besides, this article also give me the information about the green house effect. 

Just Stand Up

Just Stand Up:

The heart is stronger than you think

It’s like it can go through anything

And even you think it can’t finds a way to still push on though

Sometimes you want to run away

Ain’t got the patience for the pain

And if you don’t believe it look into your heart the beat goes on

I’m tellin you that things get better through whatever

If you fall, dust it off, don’t let up

Don’t you know you can go be your own miracle?

You need to know

If the mind keeps telling you don’t give up

Who are we to be questioning, wondering what is what

Don’t give up, through it all, JUST STAND UP!

It’s like we all up in your face

Just because you go through it don’t mean you got to take control, no

You ain’t gotta find no hiding place

Because the heart can beat the hate

Don’t wanna let your mind keep playin’ you and sayin’ you can’t go on

You don’t gotta be prisoner in your mind

You can live your life 

Song for Gaza...

Hi guys,

As u all know, Gaza now is quite a big issue for the whole world. I'm not mentioning what has happened to them as all of u had already know what happen. So, just to show that we all care, I'm just promoting a song for Gaza that I've come across while surfing the net reading about Gaza news.

A song writter, named Michael Heart, has created a song for Gaza, titled "We will not go down (Song for Gaza)". You can just search in youtube, for this song. Or, you can just go to his Official Website. In his official website, u can even care to donate to organization called "UNRWA", which a special organization dedicated to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Show that you care~

We will not go down Lyrics:
WE WILL NOT GO DOWN (Song for Gaza)
(Composed by Michael Heart)
Copyright 2009

A blinding flash of white light
Lit up the sky over Gaza tonight
People running for cover
Not knowing whether they’re dead or alive

They came with their tanks and their planes
With ravaging fiery flames
And nothing remains
Just a voice rising up in the smoky haze

We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight

Women and children alike
Murdered and massacred night after night
While the so-called leaders of countries afar
Debated on who’s wrong or right

But their powerless words were in vain
And the bombs fell down like acid rain
But through the tears and the blood and the pain
You can still hear that voice through the smoky haze

We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight