Abstract:

For the generation of students who grown with the Internet, they show a common character that Internet is taken for granted as part of their daily life. Regarding life experience, most instructors tend to see the Internet as a “new medium.” This reflects a significant perceptional gap between the two sides.
This study takes “blog” as an example to discuss the phenomena of application of general Internet tools in teaching. The main question is, how do students perceive the policy of applying blog as a teaching tool?
This research adopts the suggestion of “suspension” from phenomenological method to put the previous definition of blog aside. In such an understanding process, not only can we explain the appearance of objects, but also take the background of the emergence of objects into account.
Students in Journalism major are the subjects of this study. They are selected mainly because that the tasks of data collecting, processing, and editing are a major part of their learning. Theoretically, they would be more sensitive than their counterparts in other majors. On the other hand, E-generation students’ characteristic of growing with Internet might affect their perception of defining blog. The primary focus is to discuss students’ “perceptional content.”
1. Preliminary Results
One hundred and eleven copies of quasi-structured questionnaire are sent out to junior and senior students. In the end, ninety seven copies of questionnaire are collected.
In the question of “blog is/is not applicable to be an educational tool”, 45% of respondents answered positively. 33% of respondents replied negatively. Yet, very interestingly, there were 19% of respondents answered the question with some conditional requirements.
1.1 Applicabl
Nearly all of the respondents who agreed with blog-on-teaching mentioned a blog’s characteristics of “being a communication platform” and its user-friendly design. This is a clear indication and emphasis on the technical feature of blog and that is why instructors can adopt it to get closer to their students.
1.2 Conditionality and insecurity
Opinion with conditionality means that respondents who agree that blog can be applied to be a teaching tool with some reservations.
Students almost entirely skip the medium and technical dimensions of blog but point to the feature of “teaching activities” itself.
1.3 Blog is not applicable to be a teaching tool
The primary two reasons for disagreement are from two features of blog: openness, and personalized style.
For students, homework or project is just a practice. It is only for the purpose of instructors’ grading and review, but not making it as material of permanent record on the open cyberspace.
Among the group of students who disagreed with blog as a teaching tool, another sub-group illustrated that “blog is very personalized” as their reasoning of why blog is not applicable for teaching.
2. Conclusion
Previous literature’s emphasis on technical characteristic guides the majority of attention to looking at instructors’ needs. Students’ general imagination about web tool as teaching application is missing in this one-sided perspective. This study starts from speaker’s perceptional framework with the help of phenomenological method to explore the objects’ (students’) ordinary perception and understanding of the phenomena of blog as a teaching tool.

Keywords:

blog, perception, teaching tool.