Blog as a tool to develop e-learning experience in an international distance course Wei-Jane Lin Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Kyoto University lin@mm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp Yi-Ling Liu Department of Agricultural Extension, National Taiwan University r92630006@ntu.edu.tw Koh Kakusho Academic Center for Computer and Media studies, Kyoto University Kakusho@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp Hsiu-Ping Yueh Department of Agricultural Extension, National Taiwan University yueh@mm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp Masayuki Murakami Research Center for Multimedia Education Kyoto University of Foreign Studies masayuki@murakami-lab.org Michihiko Minoh Academic Center for Computer and Media Studies, Kyoto University minoh@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp Abstract This paper describes the implementation of blog system in an international distance course between Japan and Taiwan. In the study, blog was used as a tool to encourage students’ reflective learning and communication. Findings suggested that blog was effective for students to document their learning, share experience and knowledge, have direct interaction with peers especially internationally. Students preferred blog over the LMS where this course builds an course website and they proved to use blog in developing their e-learning experience. We proposed the use of blog could lead to a technologically enhanced support for instructional strategy that serves as an informative model for other web-assisted international courses. 1. Introduction The weblog (blog) emerged rapidly as a popular application and has been widely adopted in use in higher education has during the past three years. This growth reflects attempts to circumvent the constraints of centralized authorship [4] and increased needs for instant communication on knowledge-building community [5], as it allows alternative forms of self- reflection, student-student and student-tutor contact to the traditional ways such as emails, discussion forums and instant messaging. A particularly salient affordance of blog is its propensity for effective and easy personal publication in which manipulating its motivational or affective content can also dramatically impact users’ beliefs and attributions [2]. When thinking of integrating technologies to improve collaborative knowledge- building, the most insidious concern is whether most students have the motivation and ability to construct their own knowledge. The blog provides the field where the decentralized authorship can be realized, and creates more comfortable environment where students can be motivated to make reflections and comments. With the appropriate design and guiding strategies, blog has great potential to become one of the effective groupware in education and work projects [5]. 2. The context 2.1 Designing the international distance course This course was conducted between two universities in Taiwan and Japan as a distance course that entitled as “Introduction to e-Learning” and was offered to undergraduate students in the semester of fall 2005. The course was delivered via video conferencing system synchronously every week