Blogs and wikis: Environments for online collaboration

Language professionals have embraced the world of collaborative opportunities the Internet has introduced.Many tools --e-mail, discussion forums, chat --are by now familiar to many language teachers.Recent innovations --blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds --may be less familiar but offer powerful opportunities for online collaboration for both language professionals and learners.The underlying technology of the new tools is XML ("extensible markup language") which separates content from formatting, encourages use of meta-data, and enables machine processing of Internet documents.The latter is key in the ability to link automatically disparate documents of interest to individuals or groups.The new collaborative opportunities this enables have led some to consider the growing importance of XML as the signal of the arrival of the second-generation Web. FIRST-GENERATION WEB Asynchronous ToolsFirst-generation tools are far from disappearing from the Internet landscape.E-mail continues to be a viable tool for tandem learning and classroom exchanges.Now that most e-mail programs support formatted text and graphics, e-mail is more attractive and versatile than in the days of plain ASCII.Multimedia can now be embedded directly in messages and non-Roman characters are more easily supported.However, many instructors have increasingly turned to discussion forums as the principal tool for written exchanges among class members.Compared to e-mail, discussion forums facilitate group exchanges, and they maintain automatically a log of all messages in a threaded, hierarchical structure.Some instructors find that students consider language structure somewhat more in contributing to discussion forums (as a form of semi-public display) than in writing e-mail (a quick and easy private and informal system).Discussion forums are often seen as an equalizing tool, which encourage universal participation in discussion compared to face-to-face dialogue.It will be interesting to see whether new voice-based forums such as Wimba change that dynamic.