Ekorkuda's Blog

All postings from 1-6 are done as the course requirement for SKBP 1023, Language and ICT, under Ass. Prof. Datin Dr. Norizan Abdul Razak.

Before I walk away, I’d like to wish a very big THANK YOU to my dearest lecturer, Dr. Norizan for sharing your knowledge with us. Mmuuaaahhhhh 

To all of my buddies, let’s not stop here. Go on with your blogging addiction. Once we’ve started it, never look back.  

Till then……. 

CONCORDANCE

Part 1

According to the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, “a concordance is an alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and often how it is used.” Whereas, a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance is known as concordancer. Those who wish to

1)     find phrases and idioms

2)     compare different usages of a word

3)     make indexes and word lists

4)     count word frequencies

5)     analyze keywords

can make it all possible with the use of concordance. As it is common nowadays, concordance is being widely used in

1) Natural language software development

2) Data mining and data clean-up

3) Lexicography

4) Language teaching and learning

5) Content analysis in many disciplines including accountancy, history, marketing, musicology, politics, geography,   and media studies.

6)     Corpus linguistics

7)     Translation and language engineering

8)     Literary and linguistic scholarship

9)     Latest News

Reference :

http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/

For a more detail information regarding concordance, please log on to

http://www.iei.uiuc.edu/structure/Structure1/conc.html – how to use a concordance

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm – using concordance programs in the Modern Foreign Language Classroom

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Part 2

Q1: Do you think that computer can assist you to become better language learner? Why?

Answer: I firmly believe that computer can help me to become a better language learner based on these reasons :

a) Online Free Translation Programs – Assist me in knowing other languages in advance.

b) Online Dictionary – Speed up the search of words’ meaning process.

c) Thesaurus – Provides immediate process of words’ synonyms / antonyms.

– Helps me in varying the use of words

d) CALL Programs – Enable me to gain the four learning skills of English.

Q2 : How effective is blogging in assisting you in

Confidence in writing – Answer : Normally when I’m blogging, I feel free to write in my thoughts for the attractiveness of the environment provided, makes my ideas flow well compare to paper-based writing. I just can’t illustrate my feeling..But this is what I can tell.

Confidence in publishing your work – Answer : Well, I’m pretty confident to publish my work even though its contents is not as good as others may come out with. Nevertheless, the confidence appear because I’ll not know or don’t even have to know the individuals that will read my masterpiece. Therefore, I don’t have to worry about those critics.

Getting ideas to write – Answer : This is my favourite part! When I read others blogs, I’ll tend to come out with my own masterpiece. Blogging makes my thought grows day by day. It truly gives more ideas and point of views in helping me to expand my blog content.

Improving your writing skill – Answer : As I was being introduced to blog since taking Language and Information Technology Course, I need to look on my own writing skill and make sure that my grammar won’t mess up. Thus, I can say that I’ve improve my writing skills as I learn a lot of new words, especially synonyms to most-used words.

Q3 : If you are going to use computer to teach language one day which language learning website will you recommend? Elaborate why do you recommend that website.

Answer : http://www.languageguide.org/

Since I joined a tuition program as a language tutor for Standard 1-5 in Semenyih, I’d like to recommend the above language learning website. It provides the four skills to learn a language, namely reading, writing, listening, and speaking for 13 most-spoken languages in the world. The most important part is the figures are not mind-numbing. Honestly, I’ve not been using this website to teach those little brothers and sisters for there’s no Internet connection provided. But I’m planning to copy and paste some of the teaching apparatus that can be applied during the teaching and learning session.

Well…computers do allow us to do nasty yet brilliant action..

ONLINE LANGUAGE TESTING

ADVANTAGES VS DISADVANTAGES

Supposely today we gonna have online test with the UJI-ICT UKM. Unfortunately, since the site was blocked, we then need to search any online test on our own and do it in groups. Here are some of the url that I managed to find, with the help from Dr. Norizan  :

http://examenglish.com

http://scottenglish.com

Advantages:

1. Can be accessed anywhere.

2. The answers or results can be found in a blink of  eyes.

3. Paperless. Environment friendly.

4. Provides an attractive learning space.

5. Links help reduce time consuming in looking for any preferable questions.

Disadvantages:

1. Not everyone able to access the Internet.

2. The answers provided may not be accurate.

3. Cannot do the online test if the computers breakdown.

4. Too much pictures may cause inconvenience to some students.

5. Too many links will lead to time wasting. Students may cheat during the test.

LEARN LITERATURE ONLINE

This task has two parts, comprises of :

Part 1: summary, objective, target group and opinion (effectiveness of asking students to refer to the literature material online for understanding literature as well as the best way to use the website so that students can appreciate literature better by using online materials) of the url.

Part 2: effectiveness and usefulness of the selected website in understanding literature better.

While looking for the uniform resource locator (url) that can be used to teach literature, I was excited when I came across http://www.justenglish.com which basically created for those who wants to learn English. Besides, it is also meant for English teachers who wish to gain the knowledge on improving their teaching skills.

The lessons are various, that readers can choose any aspects of English that they want to learn, namely learning idioms, pronouncing words the right way, reading through books, magazines,and many other resources, e-prep worksheets, teachers’ guidelines, and not to forget learning the literature parts. Through this website, one can subscribe their preferable reading materials at lower price, including 24% discounts.

The objectives of the website is simple : to develop students’ reading skills, whilst in the process, they are able to  develop the confidence and fluency to reading such material that offers a wide range of topics.

Personally, I think that this website should be credited because of its effectiveness and usefulness in understanding literature better as it provides easy access to review literature masterpiece in terms of their literature components which are prepared accordingly as in the KBSM syllabus. Furthermore, students’ understanding will be enhanced with the help of attention-grabbing pictures in it.

Moreover, I also encountered http://www.readbookonline.net. The best thing of this website is, it includes awesome numbers of literature materials, written by more than 30 authors! This incredible website is specially for individuals who loves to read, especially literature readings. Thus, it is not only for students or teachers who wish to study the literature materials.

On the other hand to the first url, this website specifies to literature materials only. Therefore, readers are just able to read poems, novels, essays and short stories without learning the other aspects of English. Nevertheless, this kind of appearance is good for those who need faster access to the literature readings, without having to click on so many links

The objective of this website is to expose readers to all well-known authors and their masterpieces that may or may not familiar among today’s generations.

Nonetheless, it is not effective and useful enough in comprehending literature better because it does not provides readers with any literature components, meaning to say that one cannot learn more in addition to his readings.

In brief, I found that learning literature via online materials is very effective for students rather than books or paper-based resources as they come with more interesting learning environment that include cartoons appearance and colourful fonts or backgrounds too. Besides, with the help of links, accessibility to literature aspects makes life easy – everything are clickable.

In my point of view, the best way to use websites so that students can appreciate literature better by using online materials is to expose them with any online resources regarding literature in schools. In order to accomplish it, the school administration must then provide sufficient number of computers in schools and teachers must be among those who are good in utilizing computers. This way, both teachers and students can make use of the opportunity to learn literature which considered as mind-numbing or unexciting for some people in a more interesting upbringing.

ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT

                                                         1NITA

Hooray!!! We did not have tutorial class this week..( so mean..) All of us, ELS and E-Lit freshmen were invited to join the launching project of 1Nita ceremony at Manhattan II, 14th Floor, Berjaya Times Square Hotel. The ceremony was launched by YB Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Johnity Ongkili, Minister of Science Technology and Innovation Ministry, and it was brought by .My domain registry.

Once we reached there, we registered our names before entering the Manhattan ballroom and were given free goodies, comprised of woven bag, colourful highlighter and notepad . The agenda started with the explanation regarding 1Nita project by Mr. Mohd Amri Ramli and continued with a brief explanation of the workshop activity by our ONE and ONLY, Dr. Norizan Abdul Razak. Honestly speaking, I was so proud to have a sophisticated lecturer like her .

Next, Mr. Assakhof Ab Satar demonstrated the platform of 1Nita, followed by speech delivery on “Effective Advertisement Language” by Dr. Jam from the School of Media and Communication, UKM. Then, we enjoyed the yummy yummy meals…

Right after lunch, we visited the products exhibition made by various young entrepreneurs which was dominated by the women. Those moms should be credited not only because of their great job as a mother, but the courage they have to get themselves involve in entrepreneurship.

Finally, the momentum of this event hit the environment when YB Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Johnity Ongkili officially launched the 1Nita Book and the multimedia show presented by .my domain registry. Before we left the ballroom, we have photo-taking session. Everyone seemed to be very excited

To conclude, I found the event is very interesting, as it gave many beneficial information. Therefore, it need to be organized again in the future. Hopefully with the support from our government, we will able to come out with more women entrepreneurs, or better still internet millionairs ..

COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

CMC is commonly associated with Computer Mediated Communication. Any communicative transaction that happens via the utilization of two or more networked computers can be called as CMC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-mediated_communication) i.e facebook, friendster, instant messages, e-mails, so on and so forth. In other words, CMC is used for a lot of systems that enable people to keep in touch with one another by means of computers or networks (http://www.aect.org/edtech/ed1/14/index.html).

There are three types of CMC, namely, highly interactive communication, multi-way communication, as well as synchronous or asynchronous communication. The first type of CMC which is highly interactive communication is capable in supporting complex processes of interaction between the participants, whereas multi-way communication is likely to be in an electronic-mail environment where two or more people exchange messages, while synchronous
(i.e telephone conversation, face-to-face meeting, classroom-based discussion) or asynchronous (i.e fax, letter-writing) communication is a kind of interaction between two or more person in real time or the case of correspondence by letter or fax.

Language learning activities can be created in ways that may extend the potential of the computers beyond just a ‘device’ to facilitate the language learning process. According to a book entitled ” Online Teaching and Learning in ELT”, web-based computer applications help in terms of:

• Allowing learners to use modern technology in order to study a course, which has often been associated with things of the past.
• Connecting learners to a large source of reading materials that are available in electronic form.
• Enable learners to determine their own course and direction in learning about a text or a writer.
• Connecting learners to the other learners with similar interests.
• Allowing authentic communication between readers of literary texts.
• Facilitating an interactive mode of learning unlike many earlier forms of technologies like the audiotape and television that were non-interactive in nature.
• Removing the four walls of the classroom.
• Leading teachers to become facilitators in the learning process.
• Instill independence among students.

NETSPEAK

http://anakabahbaik2.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post.html

SOCIAL NETWORKS

FACEBOOK VS MYSPACE

Actually, this task should be posted here. But I have made big mistake when I published both of this task and the second one in my blogspot account. Very sorry… 😦 So, here is the link http://anakabahbaik2.blogspot.com/2010/02/1st-post-of-week-7.html

http://anakabahbaik2.blogspot.com/2010/01/tutorial-activity-week-6.html