A friend sent me a link recently. She is taking a Bahasa Melayu, also known as the Malay language course as part of her communications degree in university.
I wondered what link it is and to my pleasant surprise, it is a blog set up by her lecturer in her attempt to teach this IT pumped, blog and facebook days Z generation the way to master the linguistics of the Malay language. What a creative teaching method, as I imagine her lecturer to think her students would spend more time in front of their computers rather than books, and thus having a class discussion and projects assignment in the form of a blog is a pretty good idea.
As I browsed through the blog, nevermind the lack of interesting flowery design to it, I was impressed with the content of the blog. Apparantly, each student is allocated an assignment where they had to blog a short story in Malay and a translation in English, as well as a reflection piece. The lecturer or 'cikgu' will then give her comments and mark the blogs.
Perhaps the idea of using a blog as a class interaction tool is not new, but this is the first time I discovered this method and I applaud the cikgu for using something a tool that is 'outside of the classroom' to teach her students.
Reference source:
Wordpress, viewed 24th March 2009, http://malayjournal1.wordpress.com/