savoy093

In recent years, the use of web logs or blogs in education is on the rise. Even though it has immense potential as an extremely valuable tool in higher education learning, writing blogs in Malaysia is still in its infancy. Therefore, the objective of this study is to introduce a new ICT and CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) application – blogs, and investigate undergraduate students’ perceptions of using blogs as a tool for journal writing. This study employed the Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (1989) and its questionnaire-based measurement instrument to evaluate and justify users’ attitudes and behaviour. TAM posits two determinants–Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU) to determine an individual’s Behavioural Intention (BI) as a mediator of actual technology use. To explore the relationships among PEOU, PU, and BI of blog users to accomplish a writing task, questionnaire was administered on 78 undergraduate students as the target sample. Based on th...

This research aims to discover the benefits of group autonomy (GA) and peer assessment (PA) among tertiary students through newspapers in carrying out reading comprehension (RC) activities. This paper seeks to find out (1) how far GA had provided freedom for students to construct and determine own questions in RC activities and (2) how far PA had helped students to be more engaged in RC activities and to heighten understanding of reading newspaper articles. Direct observations by independent observers and rating evaluation formed by participants had been used to measure the actual behaviour and feedback of learners in RC activities using newspapers. 86 students were subsequently divided into smaller groups and given autonomy to carry out RC activities, select newspaper texts, formulate questions and handle inter-group participation in RC activities. Assessment was conducted by the respective groups themselves whereby each group checked on the correctness of the other groups’ written re...