Affordances and Constraints of Weblogs.

Affordances of Weblogs:

• Weblogs provide a virtual personal space for people to communicate their personal thoughts and publish information; this space is solely owned by the publisher. This ownership allows one to be in control of the space, find personal values and also take serious responsiblity of it. With increased responsibilites, blogger invest more time for serious and deep thinking before publishing their post. The reverse chronological order of the blog helps people to construct meanings in their activity over time and it definitely good for reflection purposes (a systematic hierarchy of the activity).

• Teachers uses blog to provide necessary instructional materials, emphasing key points, link ideas together. It also allows teachers to provide feedbacks; thus scaffolding the student. Teachers can use the blog as a platform to provide equal opportunities for students (especially the introverts) to express their opinions and views and ideas freely.

• Blogs are also easy to create (no difficult technical knowledge needed). In addition, blogs can have its interface easily customised to add a more personal feeling to it.

Constraints of Weblog:

• Weblogs does not effectively provide a social environment where students can share information, construct knowledge in an interactive manner.

• Intellectual property is also an issue for contents on weblogs. Content being used without proper attributions.

• People can easily delete and edit blogs any time. This volatily of the blogs make it difficult medium to archive content and informations.

• Since weblogs publizes a person to the rest of the world, it becomes a potential treat to cyberwellness issues.

Using Microsoft Agents in teaching-- Good or Bad?

Microsoft Agent is a tool used to create innovative, audio interfaces for applications (like power-point and words) and Web pages. It provides animation capability, interactivity, and versatility, with incredible ease of development.

Good

Microsoft Agents creates a pleasant learning environment with its visual and audio animation. It is ideal in drawing learner's attention (thru its emphasing keywords technique or thru its gestures) to a specific item in the learning presentation. It also provides an alternative medium for presentation work; esp good for "wordy" presentation.

Poor

• It cannot be used for all presentation type; esp those where the serious element is vital, because it seems a little childish.
• The voice of the agent is rather synthetic; in fact it has some Pronunciation problems with technical jargon and some non-English words which are used commonly in English language (eg guru, mantra, Bon voyage, Bon Fide).
• Oh ya! to view the agents..you must download the Microsoft Agent pack otherwise no agents can be viewed.
• Having Limited agents also can be issue if you exhaust all agents for your lessons.
• Lastly, to apply the agents on your website, you must have the technical know-how.

My View:

If teaching the pri/sec levels, using microsoft agents would be a good way to get their attention to be subject matter. It also adds colour,variation,sound and animation to the conventional slides. It might not work too well for tertiary students (can't imagine my NUS lecturer using peedy to explain thermodynamics or process controls).

With the 2 links given by Mr Woo, I find it easier to understand and comprehend the content when animation is used. But i must add that my judgement may not be fair because i read the content from the non-animation first; Thus with my prior knowledge, viewing the animation one made me understand things easier.

So let's hear your view---from those you watch the animation site before the non-animated one!