Sunday, May 13, 2007

Follow-up to B4B Session

After the Blogging for Beginners session, Claudia noticed some similarities between a few of the participants and wrote about it on her blog, ELT Notes. You can read her post ELT Teachers Using Wikis

In this post, Claudia posed a few questions, including:
"How are your projects getting on? What are the difficulties you're encountering?"

My answer:
For the time being, my ESL for Migrants wiki project hasn't grown very much. The main reason I see for this is that the wiki wasn't developed for class use. Instead, I had an idea that former graduate students and current English language teachers would share materials that were successful with this specific learner population. Because of this reason, it has been difficult to motivate others to become involved and to get the project going, although I have had a couple of urgent requests for more information. There is a definite need for good material for teaching English to migrant farm workers and I will continue trying to continue this wiki project, although it could take much longer than I initially expected. Some time ago, Claudia and I discussed the phrase "under perpetual construction" and this would be a fitting phrase for ESL for Migrants!

I would be interested to find out how others have gotten collaborative projects not related to specific courses off the ground!

5 comments:

Claudia Ceraso said...

When I first designed my Corpus I thought of putting some phrase to announce the lurkers the product was not finished.

Then I added the word "perpetual" because I realised I was all wrong when thinking of the wiki as a product. It is a process.

I will keep the phrase "under perpetual construction" right on top of the project because it is the best description my wiki for students can have. Although I understand this should be a given in all wikis and not just mine.

Thank you so much for this post. You clearly point out the lesson you extracted from it was and you are not afraid to share it!

I will keep posting about this in my ELT Notes.

Mary H said...

Thank you, Claudia.
This is one of the nice features of a wiki. Things can be added and changed over time and integrated with the material that is already there. So, it is a gradual process to collect information over time. Looking forward to your future posts in ELT Notes!

Parisa Mehran said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Parisa Mehran said...

Dear Mary,

Thanks for your comment. I am really happy that you have visited my PINK blog (as yours!). I hope I could share more information with you. My desire is to become a teacher and your blog gives me an opportunity to have good ideas!

Hugs,
Parisa

Mary H said...

Hi Parisa,
I think you will be a wonderful teacher! And you must have gotten inspiration from your English teacher in Iran. Since you've been developing both English and computer skills in her classes, you will be well on your way to using these in your future career! Best wishes!