Korean Job Discussion Forums

[poeticjustice]

I'm sick and tired of using the internet for ESL resources. I find that there is hardly anything substantial and when I do find something good, it's usually in a huge pile of mess. This goes for Dave's ESL resources as well.

I suppose this affects me more because I teach at an HS and not an elementary level hagwon like most other teachers. Resources are a lot harder to come by. I typically spend hours online, browsing, by the time I can put together a solid plan. I think that there are very few good ESL websites around that are organized well and have a good amount of resources.

As the old saying goes, "if you want something done, you gotta do it yourself."

I'm considering a couple of things,

-A wiki style website
-A UBB Forum style website
-A blog style website

I haven't had a website in years, I've never paid for a host before and my HTML is rusty as hell. What I do have is a ton of free time to figure this out.

The website, ideally, is going to have resources organized by various criteria. I want subscribers and users to be able to organize the resources by themselves in a ton of ways, for example, by level, by prep. time, by hits/popularity, by quality (I want there to be ratings), etc. etc.

I also want it to be an extremely clean and simple site. It will probably need to be ad supported but I don't want it to be a mess like the rest. I also want it to be specifically tailored for teachers in Korea, not elsewhere, taking the most common teaching styles and practices into account.

Anyway, that being said, where should I start?

-What is a good host? What kind of prices am I looking at?
-How do I build the site? Do I code the HTML by myself, line by line or use a template?
-What is the best way to go about this?

Thanks!

[Chet Wautlands]

I can't help with building a website, but I think it's a great idea. So, this is a bump.

[losing_touch]

Personally, I use Dreamweaver. Punching in html is not my idea of fun!

For hosting, I use 3IX, and I have been extremely satisfied with them. Setting it all up is a bit confusing, but once you have your FTP setup, it is all rather simple. Your html skills will come in handy to tweak your page. Unfortunately, I don't have nearly enough time for my little project, but it earns me some money and it helps out people from time to time. Mine is a travel related site.

Sorry, I have forgotten the prices, but they are pretty cheap. So cheap that I forgot what they are because it was meaningless!

[makemischief]

For this sort of venture to work and be adequately organized you're best off using a good content management system like Drupal or Joomla (both good).

Forums and wiki's are nice, but hyperlinks can't trump sites designed for deep organization. Good luck- it sounds nice!

[tfunk]

Double post, see below..

[tfunk]

poeticjustice, I'm already in the process of building a website that sounds a lot like what you have in mind.

Would you be interested in collaborating?

I'll PM you more details when I get home from work.

[poeticjustice]

[The King of Kwangju]

I'm a web developer, but I used to be an ESL teacher in Korea. I've worked on tons of these ESL sites, including the eslcafe. I did the design before this current design and also hacked the forums numerous times.

This is an interesting idea, and here are my thoughts, if you're interested:

What you're looking to do is manage assets here. Forget what they are, they could be anything. But you want people to be able to contribute some kind of asset and then use different filtering mechanisms to pull them out.

Look at http://ffffound.com/ this could just as easily be lesson plans. The point is that you want to be able to document assets in an organized way. Note that this site is aggregating stuff from other sites as well. You'll want this option so you can link to the good lesson plans on other sites, they don't have to be on yours.

So from a technical side I would investigate different CMS and see which can do this for you. If none exists, you'll have to build one yourself.

Forget about html. For this site you'll be building software and be doing very little html. You're going to be doing some kind of programming, or finding some very nerdy friends who will do it for you.

The technical side is just one small part of it. Take a good look at smee's site. He has a lot of lesson plans in there, but they are hard to get at. The site is a forum, which isn't the best way to display these assets. You see the problem he has with metadata and organization is the problem you will need to solve. No offense, smee.

As he mentions, he has a lot of readers, and very few contributors. His site is actually pretty dead. This is another problem you're going to have to solve.

Remember the technology is only one part of it. Dave Sperling has a crap site as far as tech is concerned, but he makes a lot of money off of it.

Why is that?

[poeticjustice]

[poeticjustice]

[poeticjustice]

[cubanlord]

[The King of Kwangju]

I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that this is not a "good" site. But it makes some good money.

Making a site for yourself, or your book, great. But to make a site to compete with this one will take money and investors.

[cubanlord]

[The King of Kwangju]

I don't think you would have a hard time convincing the buyers, or the advertisers. But you would need to snag the audience. That won't be easy and will need some marketing dollars at the very least.

And starting a message board - following Dave - is not going to cut it. You need to offer something wonderful that this site doesn't.

And once you get the audience, it's game over for this site.

The lesson plans are actually a great idea. If you could build a substantive, searchable, well-organized set of lesson plans you would have something this site does not.