Summary of Emerging Technologies... BLogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Colloboration

I have recently read an article called “Emerging Technologies, Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration” written by Robert Godwin-Jones from Virginia Comonwealth University. The article tells about the usage of internet in language teaching and the tools that are used in this sense.
The writer separates the tools into two groups as “First Generation Web” and “Second Generation Web” that are somehow different from each other. He also separates the First Generation Web into two groups as asynchronized tools, including e-mails and discussion forums and synchronized tools including chatrooms as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, iVisit and Paltalk etc. .
Second Generation Web has its tools as Blogs and Wikis. Blogs and Wikis both help students and teachers share their information and get help in language learning as well as language teaching. Both are easy to be created and used. One does not need to have knowledge about HTML in order to use blogs and wikis. We can simply create and use these tools. We can edit our blogs and wikis easily. Even though they seem to be the same, they have some differences. Firstly, blogs are more personal than wikis as the creator of them can make changes and he/she can direct it. The people who are not the creators of a blog cannot add their information on someone’s blog, they can only make comments if the creator lets them do so. Nevertheless, everyone can add information on wikis as long as it is relevant. This enables people to reach a great deal of data by the help of wikis.
In conclusion, internet has a great impact on our language learning recent years. As everything change and improve, the tools that help education, language learning is improving as well. Therefore, language learning becomes much easier and effective thanks to these tools. The only thing that the learners of a language should do is to make use of these tools at utmost.