Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer interaction,learning motivation,and academic achievements

Blogs have been increasingly used to supplement traditional classroom lectures in higher education. This paper explores the use of blogs, and how student attitudes towards online peer interaction and peer learning, as well as motivation to learn from peers, may differ when using the blog comments feature, and when students are encouraged to read and comment on each other's work. We contrast two ways blogs affect learning engagement: (1) solitary blogs as personal digital portfolios for writers; or (2) blogs used interactively to facilitate peer interaction by exposing blogging content and comments to peers. A quasi‐experiment was conducted across two semesters, involving 154 graduate and undergraduate students. The result suggests that interactive blogs, compared with isolated blogs, are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement in course subjects and in online peer interaction. Students showed positive motivation to learn from peer work, regardless of whether blogs were interactive or solitary.     

Blog-enhanced ICT courses: Examining their effects on prospective teachers’ ICT competencies and perceptions

Blogs are used as a technology support tool in teaching-learning processes in contemporary schools, especially in higher education. This paper examines the effects of using blogs on prospective teachers’ perceived ICT competencies and perceptions in blog-enhanced ICT courses. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were used in the data collection and analysis processes. The findings indicate that most of the participants perceived blogs to be an important tool that changed their ICT perceptions in a positive way and familiarized them with ICT. The participants also perceived the use of blogs as important for the acquisition of ICT competencies.     

Personalized Semantic Based Blog Retrieval

Blog retrieval is a complex task because of the informal language usage.Blogs deviate from the language which is used in traditional corpora largely due to various reasons.Spelling errors,grammatical irregularity,over use of abbreviations and symbolic characters like emotions are a few reasons of irregular corpus blogs.To make the retrieval of blogs easier,the novel idea of personalized semantic based blog retrieval(PSBBR) system is discussed in this paper.The blogs are tagged with a relationship to one another with reference to ontology.The meanings of the blog content and key term are tagged as XML tags.The query term accesses the XML tags to retrieve entire blog content.The system is evaluated with a huge number of blogs extracted from various blog sources.Relevance score is calculated for every blog associated with     

Blog mining-review and extensions: “From each according to his opinion”

Blogs provide a type of website that contains information and personal opinions of the individual authors. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the literature aimed at gathering opinion, sentiment and information from blogs. This paper also extends the previous literature in a number of directions, extending the use of knowledge from tags on blogs, finding the need for domain specific terms to capture a richer understanding of mood of a blog and finding a relationship between information in message boards and blogs. The relationship between blog chatter and sales, and blogs and public image are also examined.     

Verbal irony use in personal blogs

Blogs are a widely growing form of computer-mediated communication used to achieve various personal and professional communicative goals. In the present study, we examined previously posted entries from 71 regular bloggers. We examined the blogs for the use of five forms of verbal irony: hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical question, sarcasm and jocularity. In addition, topic and emotional valence of the ironic utterances were examined. Results showed that hyperbole and understatement were more frequently used than the other forms of ironic language. Discussion of hobbies and social outings was the most commonly occurring topic of ironic language, and bloggers used verbal irony to convey both positive and negative intent. The results of this study demonstrated that adult bloggers do use a variety of forms of verbal irony in their personal blogs, despite the potential risk of being misunderstood.     

RetriBlog: An architecture-centered framework for developing blog crawlers

Blogs have become an important social tool. It allows the users to share their tastes, express their opinions, report news, form groups related to some subject, among others. The information obtained from the blogosphere may be used to create several applications in various fields. However, due to the growing number of blogs posted every day, as well as the dynamicity of the blogosphere, the task of extracting relevant information from the blogs has become difficult and time consuming. In this paper, we use information retrieval and extraction techniques to deal with this problem. Furthermore, as blogs have many variation points is required to provide applications that can be easily adapted. Faced with this scenario, the work proposes RetriBlog, an architecture-centered framework for the development of blog crawlers. Finally, it presents an evaluation of the proposed algorithms and three case studies.     

A Review of “Research On Main Street: Using The Web to Find Local Business and Market Information. Phelps,Marcy.”

Slam the Boards (STB) is a grassroots activity in which librarians visit social Q&;A sites on the tenth of each month and answer as many questions as possible. Through this activity, librarians hope to represent librarianship at a new venue; encounter users beyond the library and provide well-sourced, dependable answers to people's questions; and ultimately increase the public's awareness of libraries. Semistructured interviews were conducted with participating librarians, examining their motivation, experience, and reflection. Findings of the study can help develop an in-depth understanding of STB and yield insights on how to efficiently and effectively promote library resources and services beyond the library.     

Blog Archiving Issues: A Look at Blogs on Major Events and Popular Blogs

This paper describes the state of blog archiving by identifying from the published literature the most popular blogs and blogs on major events. Next it will check their current status and archiving methods. Blogs are not systematically archived, and some blogs on major events of the first decade of this millennium may already have been lost. It calls for better preservation and organization of blogs that have historical significance.     

Towards building a blog preservation platform

Social media content and user participation has increased dramatically since the advent of Web 2.0. Blogs have become relevant to every aspect of business and personal life. Nevertheless, we do not have the right tools to aggregate and preserve blog content correctly, as well as to manage blog archives effectively. Given the rising importance of blogs, it is crucial to build systems to facilitate blog preservation, safeguarding an essential part of our heritage that will prove valuable for current and future generations. In this paper, we present our work in progress towards building a novel blog preservation platform featuring robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for blogs. This work is part of the BlogForever project which is aiming to make an impact to the theory and practice of blog preservation by creating guidelines and software that any individual or organization could use to preserve their blogs.     

改进贪婪算法在博客突发事件检测中的研究

博客在当今人们的生活中起到重要的作用,但是人们在有限的时间内读哪些博客而不丢失重要的内容呢？这个问题可以看做是突发检测,也就是从众多博客里面选取一个。用改进贪婪算法来处理这种和类似问题,并阐述了“子模性”的概念。这种算法能推广应用到其他领域,仿真表明此算法能够接近最优结果。     

Generating blogs out of product catalogues: An MDE approach

Blogs can be used as a conduit for customer opinions and, in so doing, building communities around products. We attempt to realise this vision by building blogs out of product catalogues. Unfortunately, the immaturity of blog engines makes this endeavour risky. This paper presents a model-driven approach to face this drawback. This implies the introduction of (meta)models: the catalogue model, based on the standard Open Catalog Format, and blog models, that elaborate on the use of blogs as conduits for virtual communities. Blog models end up being realised through blog engines. Specifically, we focus on two types of engines: a hosted blog platform and a standalone blog platform, both in Blojsom. However, the lack of standards in a broad and constantly evolving blog-engine space, hinders both the portability and the maintainability of the solution. Hence, we resort to the notion of “abstract platform” as a way to depart from the peculiarities of specific blog engines. Additionally, the paper measures the reuse gains brought by MDE in comparison with the manual coding of blogs.     

Current Awareness on a Shoe String

ABSTRACT

There is no shortage of articles describing the nature of blogs and RSS feeds and their potential use in libraries. However, articles describing the implementation and evaluation of RSS for library current awareness services and the lessons learned along the way are harder to find. This case study relates the experience of implementing an RSS feed-based current awareness service in a small special library in Canada, and the preliminary uptake and feedback of the staff it serves.     

The World Wide Web

Abstract

The World Wide Web is increasingly being used by libraries as a way to extend traditional services to patrons. The Web can also be used as a tool to facilitate communications between library professionals and to deliver presentations, organize exhibits, and develop demonstration projects. The allocation of personal Web work space on a library server provides librarians with a means to experiment with using the medium and a place to publish information of interest to the library profession. This paper explores the uses of the Web to enhance communications between library professionals and addresses some of the issues associated with such uses.     

CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION FROM BLOGS BY USING DATA MINING: AN EXAMPLE OF VOIP PHONE

Blogs have been considered the 4th Internet application that can cause radical changes in the world, after e-mail, instant messaging, and Bulletin Board System (BBS). Many Internet users rely heavily on them to express their emotions and personal comments on whatever topics interest them. Nowadays, blogs have become the popular media and could be viewed as new marketing channels. Depending on the blog search engine, Technorati, we tracked about 94 million blogs in August 2007. It also reported that a whole new blog is created every 7.4 seconds and 275,000 blogs are updated daily. These figures can be used to illustrate the reason why more and more companies attempt to discover useful knowledge from this vast number of blogs for business purposes. Therefore, blog mining could be a new trend of web mining. The major objective of this study is to present a structure that includes unsupervised (self-organizing map) and supervised learning methods (back-propagation neural networks, decision tree, and support vector machines) for extracting knowledge from blogs, namely, a blog mining (BM) model. Moreover, a real case regarding VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone products is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Prompting authentic blogging practice in an online graduate course

Blogging is characterized by an individual exploration of ideas of personal interest through frequent online posts, documenting ideas as they emerge over time. Community emerges as bloggers read and link across blogs, based on shared interests. Blogs have gained acceptance in higher education for a variety of instructional activities, among which, reflective journal writing is popular. In this study, we examine a project in which blogs were implemented within an online graduate course in order to create opportunities for students to reflect on their academic, professional and personal interests, with the goal of establishing consistent blogging that exhibits the timely, frequent and interest-driven practices of blogging practices outside educational contexts. Students enrolled in an online graduate course maintained individual blogs in which they were prompted to write about their interests and experiences as graduate students. Through an analysis of the patterns of prompt use and blog content, as well as data from a post-course survey and an online discussion, we explore how to support student engagement with blogging practice within an educational setting. Findings suggest that frequency of writing, topic resonance with the students own interests, and the timeliness of entries were key factors in scaffolding writing that aligns with blogging practice. By focusing on writing as characterized by authentic blogging practice, this study contributes to an understanding of how to harness the unique communicative elements of the blog in post-secondary settings.     

Annotating opinion—evaluation of blogs: the Blogoscopy corpus

The blog phenomenon is universal. Blogs are characterized by their evaluative use, in that they enable Internet users to express their opinion on a given subject. From this point of view, they are an ideal resource for the constitution of an annotated sentiment analysis corpus, crossing the subject and the opinion expressed on this subject. This paper presents the Blogoscopy corpus for the French language which was built up with personal thematic blogs. The annotation was governed by three principles: theoretical, as opinion is grounded in a linguistic theory of evaluation, practical, as every opinion is linked to an object, and methodological as annotation rules and successive phases are defined to ensure quality and thoroughness.     

LIBRARIES,SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND DISTANCE LEARNERS: BLOG IT,TAG IT,SHARE IT!

This paper describes a recent project funded by the University of London to explore how social software or Web 2.0 technologies can enhance the use of libraries by distance learners. LASSIE (Libraries And Social Software In Education) involves a team of librarians, learning technologists and archivists. The project first conducted an extensive literature review, which is available online. The literature review provides an overview of key social software and explores the current implementation of these tools by libraries. It also considers the key issues in supporting distance learners’ use of libraries and whether social software might provide solutions. The literature review was followed by several case studies to explore specific types of social software in practice. These included the use of social bookmarking for sharing resources, social software and online reading lists, blogging in the library community, the use of social networking sites and podcasting for information literacy support. LASSIE will be completed in December 2007 and a final report with results from the case studies and an updated literature review will be made available from the project website. One of the successes of the project has been to establish a project blog, which provides the project team with an opportunity to reflect on progress, but also to gather opinions from others in the field.     

A Comparison of Academic Libraries' Webliographies

ABSTRACT

The authors sent a survey about building and maintaining webliographies to two library listservs and mailed it to ASERL (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries) members. Librarians from 19 colleges and universities and 18 ASERL institutions responded. The guides are a logical extension of the pathfinders most libraries maintain for their patrons' use. This paper shows what importance librarians from all over the country place on creating and maintaining webliographies. Members of ASERL institutions are devoting as many or more librarians to create and maintain Web guides as are their colleagues in other geographic areas. The final results of the survey are outlined in the paper.     

A Review of “Hiring,Training, and Supervising Library Shelvers”

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet has dramatically changed information access capabilities through computers. Tools and resources available on the Internet affect library services in various ways. Many health science librarians are using Internet resources to meet the information needs of health care providers and themselves. This study examines different applications of the Internet components in medical library settings with a special emphasis on reference services. It also discusses the role of the Internet in fulfilling National Network of Libraries of Medicine's (NN/LM) objectives and analyzes the merit and demerits of using the Internet as a reference tool in health sciences libraries.