Korean Job Discussion Forums

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

My department has just given me approval to include a couple of hours of instruction on setting up and maintaining a blog to the English for Academic Purposes course that I'm teaching over summer. Does anyone have any experience doing this kind of thing? Does anyone have any software/website recommendations? Any comments, advice, warnings etc?

Thanks.

Hotpants · Joined: 27 Jan 2006

I've found quite a lot of student/teacher blog projects out there. In fact, I wrote about my co-workers ESL blog on my website (url below).

Basically, my co-worker finds it really hard to keep all the students committed to the blog. The students don't seem to adopt it as an integral part of their lives in the same way as Westerners. Koreans prefer the MiniHompi format which allows for lots of short bursts of expression on nicely illustrated templates with room for lots of those ^^ ^*^ ^^: things.

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

Delirium's Brother · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 1:01 pm Post subject:

Have you thought about doing a wiki instead? It's less work for you to manage once it's up and running; and yet promotes a similar level of involvement for the students. Each week you can nominate a topic based on whatever your course goals might be, and then have students develop pages: user pages (which a student develops for his/herself), discussion pages (which all are required to contribute to), talk pages (which, again, require student contribution) and main entry pages (which hopefully grow as a result). It's more collaborative than a blog, and some of your students might find that less threatening. Just an idea.

A simple forum might work too, but I prefer the wiki idea.

SuperHero · Joined: 10 Dec 2003 Location: Superhero Hideout

for blogs I would send them to http://eslblogs.org it's free and runs on wordpress multi-user. I wouldn't spend too much time working on getting them to customize the look. In my experience most of your time will be spent getting them blogging and commenting as they don't really understand how it works.

good luck. should be a fun project.

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

Thanks for the suggestions.

Yes, I've thought about a wiki, and might look at trying it out first trimester next year, but for now it's not quite what I was thinking about. I'm imagining that independent web journals that have very limited connection with the course (the course just being the 'seed') have the potential to be used for a lot more purposes, as well as being able to be used after the course finishes - and especially in my students' context as (mostly) international students studying abroad, they could look at the project as a record of their time in New Zealand rather than just as a language learning exercise. I'm worried that a class wiki would be a lot more limiting in terms of its purposes, and it could easily come to seem like a chore. Having been a participant in a class wiki myself, I've found that it's very easy to lose motivation for participation, and also to lose ownership of your own writing when you feel like you're obligated to contribute. The wiki idea is definitely something I'll be looking into though.