To blog or "tu blagues" !!!

Hello fellow bloggers,

To blog or not to blog, that is the question that has inhabited my mind for quite a year or so. Friends kept telling me to create a blog over and over. But I was reluctant to start the blogging experience for no obvious reasons. Perhaps, laziness or fear of the unknown in any new adventurous experience were behind my being a late comer to the bloggers’ community. But « better late than never » has an unquestionable and perennial wisdom as a proverb!

Also, had it not been part of the requirements of the online webskills course, I perhaps wouldn’t have been blogging at all. So I am very grateful to the University of Oregon people who designed this course in a manner that has made ‘ our ‘ bloghood not only a possibility but a virtual reality.

I think having an email is perhaps one of the basic requirements of netizenship. I would even dare and say it is the lowest form of netizenship. Having and maintaining a blog , I believe , is a further step towards true and active netizenship. So I 'm very happy about this upgrade and looking forward to learning how to use more social network tools in order to get a bit closer to full netizenship.

Anyway, through this blog I intend to share with you fellow coursemates and bloggers what I will be learning throughout this ten week long webskills online course . Later on, I will try to shift the focus of my posts from the course and teaching to other more general and varied topics.

Week One

We are about thirty students representing a certainly interesting cultural, geographical, … and liguistic mosaic. Thoughout ten weeks, we are supposed to re-awaken the student in us to learn and perhaps re-learn things we probably mis-learned before. Introducing ourselves was a sort of entrée to this copious learning experience awaiting us. I learnt a lot of inspiring quotes my fellow coursemates carefully selected and shared with us. We also reacted to a set of ground rules for our discussions and gave our opinions about the criteria according to which our interaction will be assessed. We seemed to have unanimously agreed upon the objectivity, practicality and efficiency of the rubrics and evaluation criteria. Before embarking on creating our own blogs, Lady Deborah, our course facilitator, suggested some useful material to read and provided us with links to blog samples. They were very helpful.

What follows is a summary of an article we were assigned to read.

Blogging for ELT , an article written by Graham Stanely, was a good read in every sense of the word. The writer was very laconic and systematic while demystifying « blogging » for tech neophytes of my calibre. He started with a brief introduction of what a blog is and moved to outlining three possible types of blogs that teachers might use in their language classes. Links were provided to examples for each type of blogs to give the reader a visual evidence of how things work. Furthermore, the writer mentioned the rationale behind blogging, where to start and suggested some ideas for activities we can use. I will certainly try some of them with my students next school year. In the end, we were given tips on how to have a safe blogging experience.