MOO

Hi all.

Unfortunately, I couldn't join in for the MOO experience last week. I had a tour on my own there and I found it a bit "plain" in the beginning. I thought I would face a 3D environment and so at first I was a bit disappointed in discovering that it was word-based. But as I moved on, I found it rather stimulating using my own imagination to picture things into my mind. What do you think?

I was wondering: do you often use CMC in your classes? Are you up to any projects at the moment?

Read you soon!

A

MOO's

Hello all
Good idea Martin to have an agenda and keep us all organised! I propose we start with MOO's and our experience we had on the MOO last week.
We could use the comment feature to add comments to this topic.
I thought it quite interesting but maybe not a good use of time. In the hour we spent we only got to know each other a little (that was useful) but the time spent on a "serious" discussion wasn't much. Compare this to a real life seminar and what could be achieved in an hour. I think other CMC tools would be more suited to seriuos discussion. I also found it fairly hard to concentrate.
Lynn

finger crossed

Hi all,

I'm just checking whether this is going to work out..... Hope it will.....

A

An Agenda

Hi Bushra, Alessandra & Lynn,

Just wondering if we should try to establish an agenda of topics to discuss here? Or should we keep it quite free-form? Any thoughts?

Bye for now.

Weblogs Article

Hi Lynn, Bushra, Alessandra,

I wonder if you've got access to 'IATEFL CALL Review' February 2004? In it (4-7) there's an article by Graham Stanley (Lynn's colleague) 'Creating a CALL Community for your Class using a Simple Blog-based VLE'. Graham outlines 3 main types of ESL blog: Tutor blog, Learner blog and Class blog. One thing Graham says about Tutor blogs is that they are,

'an ideal way of giving students extra reading practice, and of directing them to sources of interest on the Web.' (p4)

Learner blogs, on the other hand, can,

'act as showcases for student writing' (p5)

Clearly, then, blogs have a useful role to play in an integrated approach to the development of reading and writing skills. Here are a few links from Graham's article, in case you don't have access to the original:

• This short article outlines 3 main types of ESL blog: Learner Blog, Class Blog, Tutor Blog: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-Weblogs.html

• Here is an example of a student blog in action: http://cat-cult.blogspot.com/

• And, of course, Graham has his own extensive blog at: http://blog-efl.blogspot.com/

Bye for now :-).

Thought so far

Hello all.
Actually not too many thoughts at this time of night! I just thought I'd experiment. I'm going to try to add a photo here and it would be good to see what everyone else looks like (I've seen yours Martin!)
I'm looking forward to the chat too next week and just thinking about the reading to do before it.
All for now
Lynn

Welcome

This is the MD363 weblog for Bushra, Alessandra, Lynn & Martin. It's an experiment, so let's hope it works :-).