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In today's world, there are lots of methods in language teaching in general and teaching writing in particular. Using two different tools in writing essays and conducting a study to compare the effectiveness of these two tools namely blog and pen-and-paper was the basis of this study. This study used a quantitative true experimental design aimed at comparing the students' writing performance scores by using pen-and-paper essay writing and blogging among Iranian graduate students of University Putra Malaysia (UPM). The result of this study showed that the tools by themselves could not effect on the quality of writing essays and improvement in the students' writing performance. However, using technology and in this study, Internet can motivate the EFL learners to write more eagerly since they may like innovation in learning in contrast with traditional old methods of learning writing and practicing it. Yet it does not necessarily improve their writing performance only because of using computer and Internet. The Iranian graduate students of UPM found blog more interesting and motivating tool for writing, but it was not as easy using as pen-and-paper for them with which everyone is familiar. This research could find answers to the research questions posed at the beginning of the study and investigated the hypotheses presented then.

Open Research has the potential to advance the scientific process by improving the transparency, rigour, scope and reach of research, but choosing to experiment with Open Research carries with it a set of ideological, legal, technical and operational considerations. Researchers, especially those in resource-constrained situations, may not be aware of the complex interrelations between these different domains of open practice, the additional resources required, or how Open Research can support traditional research practices. Using the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project as an example, this paper attempts to demonstrate the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical and operational openness; the resources that conducting Open Research requires; and the benefits of an iterative, strategic approach to one's own Open Research practice. In this paper we discuss the value of a critical approach towards Open Research to ensure better coherence between "open" ideology (embodied in strategic intention) and "open" practice (the everyday operationalisation of open principles). [This paper was presented at the "Open Education Consortium Global Conference," Krakow, Poland, April 12-14, 2016.]

Predictability of absolute data transaction for real time information and reduction of incalculable data delivery time are the major factors to lead the global education as well as economic system towards a paperless environment. Some universities such as the University of Phoenix, Western Governors University, UK Open University, University of California, and Hong Kong University are playing a pioneering role to achieve this paperless environment in the respective campuses. Multimedia University (MMU) is a very distinctive university and is considered the jewel of Malaysia's bold plan to enter the world arena of 21st century information technology. The university is now operational with intelligent building systems, wireless technology system, satellite tele-education, a digital library, state-of-the-art learning, and research facilities, as well as an integrated computer education management system. MMU runs a paperless administration with the full-fledged e-governance having all these facilities. E-governance is about the use of information technology to raise the quality of the services organizations deliver for its management. The university also provides a Registry of Graduates homepage that not only eliminates fraud, but also complements the e-governance system, preparing itself for a truly web-based society. This article mainly aims to illustrate the development of higher education in the Multimedia University by establishing a paperless environment. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

This paper reports on a collaborative effort taken by a team of three teacher educators in using the Project Based Learning (PBL) approach in the teaching of Japanese culture with the aim to investigate the presence of actual "meaningful learning" among 15 students of a 12-Week Preparatory Japanese Language course under a teacher training programme. The instrument used in the study was a blog created for the project and the data collected was a compilation of students' reflection reports and messages about their learning experience uploaded onto the blog. The qualitative data was analysed using an adapted version of Jonassen's 1999 rubric on meaningful learning attributes. Findings from this study showed a significant presence of meaningful learning attributes, namely constructive and authentic learning. This paper reaffirms project-based instruction as a viable and flexible alternative to traditional intensive coursework.

Over the past decade aspects pertinent to the area of feedback have been extensively explored by researchers. While some of the studies show positive effects of peer review, others discuss its problematic areas. In spite of the controversies the new ways of integrating peer feedback in ESL classrooms are being explored. Researchers show an interest in looking into the possibilities of integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in providing feedback to students. This paper discusses students' experience of receiving and providing peer feedback using blogs that was integrated into a Life Sciences classroom in a private university in Malaysia in the year 2010. While carrying out the research, qualitative research methods were employed. Data were mainly gathered through interviews, peer feedback questionnaire and students' writings posted to their blogs. Students used their blogs as an online portfolio, where they shared their experiences and posted writing assignments based on lessons and discussions. The findings and discussion of this paper may assist practitioners in implementing blog peer feedback process and designing suitable activities for use in ESL classrooms.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of statistics education research in Malaysia and the Philippines by modes of dissemination, research areas, and trends. An electronic search for published research papers in the area of statistics education from 2000-2012 yielded 20 for Malaysia and 19 for the Philippines. Analysis of these papers showed that most were primarily empirical research published in national refereed journals or in conference proceedings. Statistics education research in Malaysia has focused on integration of technology and on affective aspects of statistics learning. In the Philippines, studies have investigated university-level statistics pedagogy, statistics academic programs and teachers' professional development. Implications for future statistics education research and teaching practice in these two countries are identified.

Web 2.0 tools are expected to assist students to acquire knowledge effectively in their university environment. However, the lack of effort from lecturers in planning the learning process can make it difficult for the students to optimize their learning experiences. The aim of this paper is to integrate Web 2.0 tools with learning strategy in order to enhance the motivation of the students to use the Web 2.0 tools. The integration of the tools in learning a programming course is based on PQR strategy, which includes three components: Preview, Questions and Reflect. The study sample consisted of 39 undergraduate students for identifying their preference towards the use of Web 2.0 tools which include Blog, YouTube, Google Form and Padlet. The results show that the perception of students towards the use web 2.0 tools was positive. Hence, it was possible to integrate a learning strategy with specific Web 2.0 tools, and, thus, facilitate blended learning.

The purpose of this action research was to investigate the use of YouTube videos and interactive activities in stimulating critical thinking among students from a public university in Malaysia. There were 50 students of mixed background, comprised of local and foreign students who participated in this study which lasted for one semester. Data was collected using a few approaches which included video recording of the lessons, students' and researcher's reflections and role play. In this paper, we specifically focus on the students' reflections of their experience while using YouTube videos. Thematic analysis was conducted to examine the themes that emerged in their reflections. Using Lewin's Action research model supported by Constructivism Theory, a-four stage action research consisted of planning, acting, observing and reflecting were conducted. We found that YouTube Videos were fun and interesting, increased students' participation and engagement and enhanced their critical thinking skills. The students were able to participate actively and demonstrated strong interest in the learning process as they were able to understand lectures better by visualizing the content and relating it to real workplace. Our study revealed the potential of YouTube video as a tool for stimulating students' learning and enhancing their critical thinking.

The number of publication has been one of the measurement values in the performance evaluation for higher education academicians. Over the years, the obligation to publish has amplified to not just on getting published but also on getting published in high quality journal whereby the quality ranking is determined by publication categories. This paper gives an account on the publication output in Scopus by the Malaysian private and the public universities in 2010. The study employed a query search on the Malaysian universities affiliation using Scopus database. The result of the search was tabulated and narrowed to journal publications and the other types of publication such as reviews, proceedings and letters were omitted. The number of journal publications by each university was listed out and comparison on the average was made. Comparison was made between the average number of publications by the private and the public universities. Findings show that the spur on publishing among Malaysian universities has taken effect. The study found that the Malaysian private universities published a distinctively smaller number of documents in Scopus compared to the public universities. The percentage for publication of journal article from the overall Scopus publication type journal articles published by the private universities was also smaller compared to the public universities. In other words, compared to the public universities, the authors in the Malaysian private universities had lower inclination to publish journal articles and were more likely to publish in conference proceedings, reviews and articles in press. The discussion section explores the reasons for these differences and presents the possible trending on the issue of publication in Malaysia.

This paper discusses the challenges faced by a group of "Smart School" teachers in a partnership model designed to help them develop professionally through the use of online tools. This model known as e-CPDelT: Model 2020 is loosely based on the successful, UK based "Improving the Quality of Education For All" (IQEA) project (Hopkins et al., 1996). The model was piloted on 20 teachers of english, mathematics and science from 5 "Smart Schools" around Kuala Lumpur. It features collaboration between these teachers in the hope that it would lead to the development of viable communities of practice. Teacher collaboration in this pilot was in the form of (a) sharing text based narratives of perceived good lessons through blogs and (b) sharing of video clips of good lessons through the "ViP" (Virtual interactive Platform) and (c) forum discussions of lessons. Data were obtained from teacher interviews and mentor reflections. Brinkerhoff's (2006) framework on technology adoption was used to identify the challenges faced by these teachers. The findings revealed that teachers faced resource, institutional, informational and attitudinal problems. The paper concludes with discussion of suggested measures to improve technology adoption by teachers. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Teaching in today's classroom is technology-driven. For language teachers, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is exciting yet challenging as they are required to possess appropriate skills and knowledge to teach in such an environment. Both technical skills and pedagogical knowledge are crucial for teaching and learning in a technologically-enhanced classroom (Hubbard & Levy 2006). Consequently, teachers must be provided opportunities to learn and develop these skills. Online interactive platforms like blogs and Facebook can expose teachers to this. Through interaction with peers, teachers are not only made aware of the skills but also learn how to integrate the skills in their instruction. This paper attempts to demonstrate that teacher involvement in a community of practice can assist them in this endeavor. It is based on a study involving Malaysian Smart School English language teachers who shared their knowledge and experiences with other members in their community of practice through blogging. The findings suggest that teacher collaboration via blogs can expose teachers to skills that are critical for computer-assisted teaching and help them to enhance existing competences.

This study explores the phenomenon of reflective learning through weblogging among pre-service teachers enrolled in an undergraduate technology course. Teacher trainees used weblogs to record their experiences in learning to use technology in teaching and learning. Although weblogging has emerged as a new form of mainstream communication among younger "digital citizens" (Prensky, 2001), it has yet to be widely studied in the teacher training program in Malaysia, as a tool for reflective learning. This study seeks to find out the practicability of introducing weblogging in an instructional setting by examining the focus and level of reflection weblogging is able to facilitate. The findings from the content analysis of individual weblogs and focus group interviews show that the sample of six pre-service teachers were generally at ease and optimistic about using weblogging to reflect on a range of content. However, some weblogs were more reflective than others and seven factors were found to influence the level of reflection in the weblogs. This paper reveals that assessment in weblogging for reflective learning is contentious and may be a culture-specific issue. It is suggested that weblogging is generally a viable tool to facilitate reflective learning; not only about course content but also professional values, attitudes and learning strategies. The condition is that instructional design elements must be observed.

In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online. Jeffrey Beall (Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com) has characterized this phenomenon as "predatory OA publishing," since it is oriented largely to extorting a high fee from authors. This exponential growth in start-up cyber-journals galore of questionable quality and dubious upstart origin is driven largely by the globalization of Euro-Atlantic research cultures into the Global South and lower-income economies everywhere, part of the now rapid internationalization of scientific research (Jha 2011) and "researching under the audit" (Illner 2011: 70), and is potentially a form of "academic racketeering." It tends to attract and exploit lesser-privileged academics, often on "knowledge production peripheries." They are a segment of a hugely expanding global constellation of researchers, in some ways a "research proletariat" (Harvie 2000), many of whom can can least afford the "cyber-services" of these start-up, fee-gouging OA journals. Yet researchers anywhere, including doctoral students and others in an "academic precariat," may be lured to publish there, given a turnaround time of three weeks from submission to acceptance and publication often offered and implemented (Stratford 2012). A certain kind of "market cynicism" (Power 2010) may take hold, where young academics are forced to think of themselves largely in economic terms and the "price" of quick dubious publication. In essential ways, the phenomenon of predatory academic journals is also part of the largely ex-colonial and subalternized "academic periphery striking back" against that Eurodominance of research cultures, involving basic contestations about asymmetrical power and representation and the geopolitics of hegemonic and subaltern knowledge production and dissemination on a global scale, the "coloniality of power/knowledge" (Quijano 2000; Grosvoguel 2008; Jaramillo 2012) within the changing face of biopolitical production and the emergence of a new "common" (Hardt 2010; Hardt & Negri 2009) inside globalized immaterial capitalist production. Racist subtexts about "academic scams based in Africa and South Asia" need to be confronted and avoided. In resisting trends toward corporate, high-cost Western-dominated academic publication, cost-free OA knowledge publication paradigms need to be expanded in the (re)appropriation of a "knowledge commons" under late capitalism. These include arXiv.org, journals like JCEPS, the Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Qualitative Social Research (bit.ly/xjc0mD), and more than 7,000 others associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) -- in the spirit of the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (bit.ly/zPYYFJ) and the work of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), Open Journal Systems (tinyurl.com/2ydklr), SciELO (http://socialsciences.scielo.org/) in Latin America--and other initiatives for "Green OA" in open-access repositories elsewhere. These OA needs to be reconceived in the struggle for a "communism of the common" (Hardt 2010: 140). That re appropriation and its self-organization should become a main goal in confronting and dismantling the regime of monopolistic knowledge control today by giant "knowledge enclosure" corporations like Thomson-Reuters, Springer and Wiley. A key aim of the present paper is to spotlight these "predatory" journals and urge further empirical research. Despite the huge amount of largely bourgeois analysis of OA, there is very scant critical inquiry into such academic journals and their burgeoning conglomerates.

This study examines the users of electronic journals published in a hosting system catted EJUM (Electronic Journal of the University of Malaya) and their perceived satisfaction with the electronic journals as well as their preferred features in electronic journals and problems they face when using the electronic journals. The Malaysian Journal of Computer Science (MJCS), Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science (MJCS) and Journal of Problem Based Learning (JPBL) are being hosted by EJUM. These three electronic journals constitute 3 out of an estimated 17 electronic journals published in Malaysia. Users seem to use the electronic journals to mainly support research and teaching needs. About 50% of respondents rated the journals as "good ", 20.6% rated "fair". Respondents seem to find out about the journals mainly serendipitously as they were browsing the Internet or "found out from a conference paper" or "saw information about it in an article ". Keywords (28.9%) and title (24.3%) searches were chosen by a third of respondents respectively. The majority of respondents (70%) indicated preferring retrieving articles in PDF or HTML About 41.8% of respondents access the electronic journals while making searches on Google or Yahoo. The next most selected option was "from specific journal hosting system" (21.8%), followed by "from my library web portal" and "from citation links found in another resource ". Most respondents scan the abstracts first to check relevance and then download the articles. Most respondents believed that electronic journals will co-exist with print journals (46.2%). The rest believed that electronic journals will replace the print journals (25.5%) or will supplement (25.5%). The list of functions and features preferred by electronic journal is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancements in digital technology are making waves in the publishing industry and e-publishing is starting to make its mark in the market. Although publishers view e-publishing as an opportunity to exploit products and new distribution channels, some of them are seeing this development as a risk rather than an opportunity, and thus are not willing to participate in these changes. This study was conducted to determine the readiness of e-publishing among Malaysian book publishers based on the E-Publishing Readiness Assessment Model. The results found that publishers in Malaysia are prepared in terms of infrastructure and human resources. However, only a small percentage of them are willing to practice e-publishing by publishing at least one e-book, while the majority is taking a wait and see approach before they start issuing e-books. Interviews with two companies displaying high levels of e-readiness and low e-readiness, showed a willingness depend on the decision of the company’s top management. In addition, external factors such as market demand, technological pressure, competition, consumer habits and police and government policies also affect the results of the top management to run e-publishing in their respective companies. Through these findings, the government and agencies involved in the publishing industry may be able to help find a solution when designing a strategy for improving e-publishing practices in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]