NMC 2004 - SmallPiecesLooselyJoined

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the information about this summer conference that aims to engage as many edu bloggers as possible to remotely participate in a presentation at the June 2004 New Media Consortium Summer Conference in Vancouver.

The idea is to try to get away from a "stale conference presentation" by involving as many edubloggers as possible in a presentation "to show the power of using a discrete series of "small" often free/open source technologies" in an educational context.

They have started a list of participants already confirmed for the presentation which will take place on the 17th June.

...iain... - Bravenet Web Journal

...iain... - Bravenet Web Journal: "In the EFL classroom in Spain or Italy you can expect the students to jump at discussion based exercises and start arguing with each other. Here one has to spoon feed students the English and some students have complained that my feeding technique is too laid back."

Another personal journal from a teacher in Japan...

Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips

Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips: "Stay up-to-date on the latest RSS & Atom news with Lockergnome"

English Notes, Musings, and Observations

English Notes, Musings, and Observations: "I am curious (actually I wanted to say I wonder...) if a sentence that starts with 'I wonder...', 'We are wondering...', 'They were wondering...', and so on should end in a period or a question mark?"

The eprofe blog answers this and others, and makes very interesting reading.

Weblogs in the writing classroom: Cyberdash

Cyberdash: Weblogs in the writing classroom:

"While weblogs are normally public, free tools such as Blogger can be used for private, expressive writing. Students need only choose "no" when Blogger asks if they want a public blogsite, keep their site's location on the web secret, and exchange the URL only with the teacher, resulting in a private electronic writing space where they can be free to express the personal. However, to use blogs merely as a tool for private journaling is to privilege our understanding of journals as private writing spaces without considering the benefits of weblogs as public writing."

There's a lot more here of interest to ELT teachers.

Found at the alt.usage.english group

"I can accept "blog" as a noun. It's a nifty word that serves a legitimate purpose. I can even accept "blog" as an intransitive
verb ("Golly, I just spent my whole afternoon blogging").

But as a transitive verb with a direct object? There's something about "blogging the nanotechnology conference" that just doesn't
ring right. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's there.
Maybe it's the misuse of the transitive sense, which entails a
subject doing something TO a direct object. And because "blogging
the conference" doesn't actually do anything TO the conference, it
seems an improper usage."

What do you think?

Design change

Bear with me while I play around with the new templates / features that Blogger has on offer - the links section, etc will be back soon...

The Washington Monthly

The Washington Monthly: "So what are blogs good at?"

All this and more explained in this article...

Blogger relaunch

The new Blogger relaunch is more than a facelift. There are new templates to choose from, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are other features that have previously been provided by other weblog providers, or as add-ons to Blogger by third parties (such as the comments feature).

I will be playing around with blog-efl to take advantage of this at the weekend.

elearnspace. everything elearning.

elearnspace. everything elearning.: "The Art of Blogging
Summary Notes" from a presentation by George Siemens of http://www.elearnspace.org

Turning the Tide

Turning the Tide: "The official weblog of Noam Chomsky, including exclusive, original observations drawn from personal correspondence, ZNet Sustainer Forums posts, and direct blog entries"

EdTechPost educational blog-discussion

EdTechPost has been involved in a discussion about blogging in education

The conclusions: That..."maybe blogs were a new form of 'narrative' that promoted more personal, self-reflective style of writing and less of a 'debate' and more 'active listening' than you sometimes get in threaded discussions. A few others seemed to see potential as a journal tool, and as an eportfolio tool. But there were some really valid observations about difficulties that blogs present: as they stand now they can be labour intensive for the instructor or administrator to set up for each student to have an 'individual' site; there are some really valid concerns about student privacy and exposing the students to online 'predators' or the potential for students to stir up public controversy online."

Materials Education

Materials Education 12 Guides for Lecturers is not weblog-related, or even EFL/ESL related, but it does have relevance for those involved in higher education materials writing.

Moviemaking for the Language Acquisition Classroom

This article in Techlearning explains how an American soap opera is being used to teach Spanish.

There is also an example lesson plan, which could be adapted for an english classroom and soap opera.

Thanks to Educational Technology for the link

"Normal Blogs" and more

James Trotta's Blogs for learning English + teaching English "provides links to blogs that can be used for learning English + teaching English because ESL + EFL students are welcome and encouraged to post comments on each blog. Please remember that the bloggers themselves welcome comments from people learning English, but that the owner of each blog listed takes no responsibility for other people leaving comments"

This is a great introductory site for students. My experience has shown me that lots of students just don't get the idea of blogging at first. It takes a while for them to understand just what they're supposed to do. This could be a solution to that, if, before asking students to get their own blog, they visit this site.

All we need now is a worksheet/online activity to take advantage of the information on the site. What do you think, James?

APPI 2004

Teresa Almeida d’Eça has made her
APPI 2004 presentation slides available. They were used for a presentation on using blogs in EFL and are well worth a look.