Money Values

Thanks to Nate, I've learnt the value of my blog - in money. I'm neither surprised nor disappointed.

My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

Autumn

Nate worried this summer about the silent members of the association he was a member of. The association of LSP teachers that I am a member of (there are about 50 of us) suffers from the same problem. I like to think about it as a natural state: two thirds of members are as silent as they could be. We were surprised to learn from a survey that the association’s reputation is very good and is actually regarded as the one that is really in the forefront of LSP in Slovenia. All the other public institutions and higher education institutions were lagging far behind.

This drove us into trying to strengthen relations with members with a community blog (I wrote about it in my previous post). After we informed members of its existence, the visitation rate increased from 20 to 84 within a week. However, only 2 silent members left comments or a post. I understand that being a silent member is a safe position but being one of the active ones can be lonesome at times. But we must carry on, right?

Time flies

Time for putting down my reflections is scarce when I am busy doing things. Just a quick catch-up this time.

I went to the local IATEFL conference and gave a presentation on blogging in the EFL class. The result: out of the 15 teachers present two teachers have started a classblog, one has started a teacher blog. Someone from the Ministry of Education asked me to modify the presentation slightly for a group of computer specialists who are engaged in the field of education.

I also started a blog for the Slovene Association of LSP Teachers. At present, I’m still the only one posting, but hopefully this will change when all the members are notified about its existence.
I created a teacher blog for every class I teach this year and have asked the students to blog too.

I moved on to a wiki as well. My luck with Webcollaborator was not as good as that of Bee, Aaron and Graham. I can’t access my files in it and this has been going on now for almost a month (I can’t get the owner reply my help messages). Instead I now moved to a free wiki farm at www.pbwiki.com. It seems a lot more reliable. I’ll ask my students to use it for documenting their projects (minutes of meetings, writing the project report and other documentation). These are the same students that I blogged with last spring. They just listened to my explanation and seemed to be willing to start this adventure. We’ll see.

I also followed Aaron’s advice and created a Bloglines blog with travel and tourism industry news. I must admit that I don’t like this blog because you can’t just click on a link to the original news article. Instead you have to click first to get to the post’s URL and only then you can click on the news URL. Of course it may be that I can’t get my settings in Bloglines blog right. What’s more, I was somewhat hoping for short summaries or introductions in the individual news items. Unfortunately the majority have only a title. I’m not sure this is long enough to catch my students’ interest. Will have to find a better solution.

And now I have to start making Sunday lunch for my family. Perhaps I'll find some time for Sunday baking as well.

P.S.
I really don't know what's going on with this blog: how come there's such huge space between the post title and the post. I might change the layout one of these days or move to Edublogs.