Learning Environment for Digital Natives --- Web 2.0 Meets Globalization

Web 2.0 services and communities constitute the daily lives of digital natives with online utilities such as Wikipedia and Facebook. Attempts to apply Web 2.0 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated that the transformation to writing exercises could improve students' learning experiences. Inspired by their success, blogging technology was adopted to pilot a writing-across-the-curriculum project via the learning management system at City University of Hong Kong. Instead of promoting peer assessment, one-on-one tutoring interactions were induced by providing feedback to written assignments. Taking the advantage of the "flat world", tutors were hired from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Spain to experiment with outsourcing and offshoring some of the English enhancement schemes. For the university wide project deployment in the fall of 2008, a globalized network of online language tutors needs to be built up with support from universities in countries with English as the native language.