38 Instructional Blogging as Interaction Tools to Promote Student’s Critical Thinking in Distanc Education

Nowadays, one of the great targets of science and technology education is to further students’ critical thinking as an approach to enhance students’ conceptual comprehending and thinking skills in distance education. This paper has two aims. First is to explain possible pedagogical utilization of Weblog from the point of importance of interaction in distance education to promote critical thinking. The second purpose of this paper identifies a 4 step Practical Inquiry Model that can be implemented in distance education to effectively move students toward critical thinking. Because the different views imply that critical thinking can be a set of skills, such as analyzing, arguing, synthesizing, evaluating and applying; it is the importance of cognitive progress that can be promoted by creation of Community of Inquiry and writing reflection in the weblogs. Finally, the value of a tool to evaluate cognitive presence depends on utilize of the model of critical thinking and its ability to reflect pedagogical exercise. Practical inquiry model can be an operationalized tool to assess and promote critical thinking in distance education.