The Daily English Show

I've been looking at various English videos and videoblogs on sites such as Youtube recently, and have been really impressed by one in particular.



This is the Daily English Show, a video podcast, which is professionally made and put together by Sarah, a teacher in Tokyo, Japan.



Available to view online here at Youtube and at Grouper, you can also put the RSS feed into your podcatcher to download the videos.



It's amazing that she can write, film, edit and upload all of this (almost) every day. Hats off to you, Sarah. How do you manage to do it?

EFL Bridges World Conversation Club

I've been using Skypecast to hold a conversation club and recording it to upload as a podcast, as part of the EFLBridges site. Jeff at Worldbridges has also set up another EFLBridges site, which should become the centre of operations soon (the other one will be a community site for any students who want a space to write in a blog, and even upload their own podcast). Hopefully, this should develop into something more substantial in the next few weeks.



The first two were last weekend, and were a lot of fun. I'm also using this as a way of learning how to become a webcaster, and I'm enrolled in the Webcast Academy to learn how to do this.



I'm currently editing the audio from last Sunday's show - the recording wasn't great, but it should be passable. I've decided to add a bit of music, and cut out the dead air to make it more interesting to listen to. This, of course, takes time.



The next EFLBridges World Conversation Club Skypecast will be on Sunday morning. I've now established a regular time and am hoping it can build into something special.



Please tell your students of English to download Skype and join in

Happy Birthday Worldbridges!

It's been a year since Worldbridges first kicked off their network of live interactive webcasts, and they are celebrating with a webcastathon.

I first heard about Worldbridges from Elderbob and the Webheads. It's a credit to this fabulous community of practice that they discovered the first day Jeff Lebow started webcasting from the site (there's not much that happens on the Web that isn't picked up early on by the Webheads).

Since then, I've been informed, educated, thrilled, entertained, driven, and encouraged by Worldbridges, and we've seen the site transform into a community of webcasters and committed listeners. On one of the EdTechTalk shows, I was persuaded to join in the fun with a webcast for EFL learners. The first of these was in February 2006, after the ELT podcasting TESOL evo2006 session that Worldbridges kindly helped make a success. EFLBridges hasn't progressed much since then, but I've been inspired recently to dive in and make it a regular event.

One of the reasons for this is through joining the Webcast Academy. Another reason is that it's suddenly become easier to do, with the introduction of Skypecasts.

I'll be trying out this, hosting two EFLBridges skypecasts as part of the Worldbridges anniversary. Please join me , and raise a glass to celebrate the birthday of this great site. Here's looking forward to the next year!

Baldric gets his own blog

I've been spending a lot of time in Second Life, and I know I'll want to write a lot more about my discoveries there.

Rather than let this blog turn into a Second Life blog, I've set up another blog, Baldric's Trousers, and have also been capturing Baldric's explorations and observations on a separate Flickr account.

This way, I can continue to document my experience in SL without it taking over this blog.

Esperanto Centre in Second Life

I must admit that I'd not been doing anything serious in Second Life over the last couple of days. I'd been enjoying the fun that has been centred around Curry Castle, as Adam Curry is talking about SL every day on his podcast, the Daily Source code.



This means that every day there's a gathering of podcasters and podcast listeners around this area, with spontaneous parties breaking out on rooftops in the area. It's been a lot of fun, and I'll soon be posting some photos on Flickr of Monday night's party at the Curry Castle (a virtual Madge Weinstein turned up) when I get a chance. It's also interesting to note how a scramble has begun to build in the area that is completely crazy - within a couple of days, what was a sparsely populated area has seen huge property development as podcasters and others hoping to make it rich living next to a famous neighbour, move in.



But enough of frivolity, as I was hanging out at the Curry Castle again yesterday, just people watching and trying to chat to some podcasters, I was contacted by one of the members of the Second Life Language and Linguistics group, and have now been invited to participate in their forum, Babel, which aims "to advance language learning in multi-user virtual environments". It is also affiliated with SimTeach






Above: A picture of the Esperanto centre (with its own museum) in SL



I will folow this up later at more detail, but I see that one of the posts in the forum is about the possibility of using the Silent Way in Second Life as a possible language learning tool. This is starting to get very interesting.

Second Life Progress Report

I've been spending more time than I'd like to admit exploring Second Life (SL) recently.



I've started joining groups, and even tried to take a class on particle building on Saturday at the Second Life Academy(SLA). IT's not that I am particularly interested in particle building in this virtual world (but, hey! I'll give it a go), but I am interested in observing people teaching within the environment, and this seemed like a good opportunity to do so.



All members of the SLA were sent an IM to tell us the time for the class was approaching. A meeting point was established, and as people arrived, introductions took place. This involved not only chit chat, but also checking out other people's profiles, which is one of the best ways to get to know what's going on in SL - especially as people share their 'SL Picks', the places they recommend.



It started getting funny when a real newbie arrived and started crashing into us all - I realised that I've come a long way in a week. Then, a teleport location was established for the group. This was becuase the class was really a field trip, and the culmination of a week-long particle building course. I asked if I should wait until the start of a new course (it starts on Monday), but was told that they didn't mind if I tagged along, and I would see the effects of particle building first, which may be a good thing. I agreed, and hit the teleport button. I don't know what I did worng, or if I went before everyone else, but I ended up in a brown trench, alone, and wondering what to do next. I waited a while and someone else turned up, landing on my head, and then shortly afterwards disappeared.



I decided to fly upwards to see if the others were near, and then explored the area a bit more. I couldn't find anyone so I teleported back to the meeting point. There wasn't anybody there either, so I tried to find my way back to the location of the class. No success.



If I ever get to the point of holding a class in SL, I'll have to take this into consideration.



But, now I'm intrigued, and I think I just may have to check out that course that's starting on Monday.

One blog a second...blogs are more important than sex

I can't remember who told me this first, or where I read this, but it's true. I've just checked it. A search on Google for 'blog' yields 1.590.000.000 entries. If you search on 'sex', you'll get 699.000.000.



From eflgeek comes links to the Economist and two recent articles on blogging: 'It's the links, stupid' and 'Among the audience'.



The first article mentions that "the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every five months" and that one blog is made every second.



It was interesting to see the comment too that "many adolescents consider e-mail passé, and instead are using either instant messaging (IM) or blogging for their communications". That is what I've seen with my students. I recently conducted a survey, and the younger ones (12-16) never use e-mail. Just about all of them use IM, and quite a lot of them have their own blog or photoblog. Perhaps it's that e-mail is associated with the adult world, or the world of work? What is true is that it's just not cool.



In the second article, the Economist identifies that what many people have described as Web 2.0, is leading to a new 'Age of participation'. What is interesting to me about all this is the change in where we get our news from. In my twenties, I relied on newspapers to tell me what was new. Very rarely would I not hear about something first(a new trend, etc) from a newspaper. Then it would usually be picked up by TV if it was considered more mainstream.



Now, it has totally changed. I was blogging and podcasting before I saw either of them mentioned in a newspaper or magazine (the exception is probably Wired), and I was even approached here by a Spanish journalist to talk about blogs in education for an article.