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Showing posts from July, 2009

To Blog or not to Blog?

Why blog? Getting started - my experience Recently, I've been thinking about blogging and why people do it. I've been encouraged by the nomination for an award I mentioned in my last post, and by Karenne Sylvester 's call for entries to the blog carnival she has organised to help newbie EFL bloggers . So, what makes someone sit down and write something and publish it on the Internet for all to see? In particular what makes an EFL teacher do this. The main reasons I suppose are self-expression, to communicate with other teachers, to share ideas, reflect on practice. Of course there's also the teacher who wants to try it out because you want your learners to blog and you don't think you should ask them to do something that you wouldn't do or haven't tried . That's why I started. Let me start with some statistics - I've been blogging at http://blog-efl.blogspot.com for six years (since July 9th 2003), have written 553 posts so far and over 60,000 word

BLOG-EFL nominated as one of the 100 Best Blogs (Language Technology)

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Are awards important for bloggers? The reason I ask is because I recently found out I've been nominated for one (from Anna, whose excellent blog about her experiences in Second Life has also been nominated). The Top 100 Language Blogs 2009 Awards have been organised by LexioPhiles and there are four categories: Language Learning, Language Teaching, Language Technology and Language Professionals. I was surprised to hear that I'd been nominated, because I haven't been blogging here much recently (much of what I used to use my blog for has been taken over by Twitter or Facebook or Delicous ). Surprised and also chuffed. And then I wondered why. Thinking about it, I realised I'd been wanting to get back into blogging, but needed a good reason for doing so. Browsing the other nominated blogs (for me - this is the most important reason for such awards - you can find out about bloggers you weren't previously aware of, or people you haven't looked at in a while), I