Blogging to Learn: Becoming EFL Academic Writers Through Collaborative Dialogues (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Blogs have become one of the best-received applications in the Web 2.0 era and have fundamentally changed the way we use the Internet, from mostly information consumers to information creators and contributors (Du & Wagner, 2007). Blogs differ from listservs, discussion boards, or Wikis in that blogs are controlled and owned by the bloggers and are primarily centered on and identified with their author or authors themselves, rather than organized around specific topics. Characterized by their strong personal editorship, hyperlinking potential, archival features and public access to content (Nardi, Schiano & Gumbrecht, 2004), blogs invite users to share, create, and interact in a virtual space--through writing and commenting on each other's posts--to generate knowledge (Richardson, 2006; Warlick, 2005). Such ongoing textual and intellectual collaboration nurtures the interconnectivity of ideas, arguments, and theories between bloggers, and encourages reflection and meaning negotiation (Godwin-Jones, 2003; Instone, 2005; Oravec, 2002, 2003; Warlick, 2005).