Tina Abdullah

Technology has become an integral part of everyone's life. Students nowadays are adept at using technology especially online social network such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on in their everyday life. This has helped them to communicate and socialise with friends and relatives easily. It also helps them to support learner's internal negotiations and meaning making as well as to construct personal representations of meaning (Jonassen, Marra, Howland & Crismond, 2010). It is important for teachers to take this opportunity to integrate online social network in the teaching and learning processes to facilitate students' learning experiences. In the case of introducing Shakespearean drama in literature lessons, technology in the form of social media can become an effective platform for students to become active meaning makers. Through a case study of twenty teacher trainees, this paper explores how Shakespearean drama can be taught and learnt through online social network in particular Facebook. The findings generally show that when students got to express their thoughts and feelings through Facebook they were able to develop their linguistic, cultural and personal competence as they were able to connect, communicate and create meaning by becoming active learners when they participated actively online. They also showed positive attitude as they enjoyed the drama activities in the classroom.

This paper shares the researcher’s experience in employing the technology supported face-to-face collaborative learning. In achieving this, a digital interactive audio capturing tool (DIACT) was used to digitally capture the interactive event of collaborative learning among English as second language (ESL) teacher trainees in a “Computer Integrated Classroom” (CiC) environment. Having merely online learning of computer support which ignores the elements of face-to-face (F2F), the impact of “collaboration” seems seriously lacking. With the emergence of DIACT in a CiC environment, the researcher attempts to see how those co-located ESL teacher trainees manage to effectively communicate face-to-face and collaborate among themselves to build knowledge. The interaction was captured and transferred to computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) to be analyzed for evidence of impactful knowledge building. Findings indicated that the use of DIACT in a F2F CiC environment has significantly helped students in collaborative knowledge building. Keywords: Computer supported collaborative learning environment, face-to-face, interaction, computer integrated classroom, knowledge building