Moved

Sorry, this is just to inform you that I moved blog. You can find me here. A new blog, a kind of new start. Wishful thinking? Keep your fingers crossed.

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.

Learning styles

Following Nancy's steps I finally figured out my own learning style. I could never make up my mind so far. Well, the answer from the quiz did not come as a surprise: I belong to the vast majority (50-70% of the population) who combine learning styles. My scores were:

• Visual: 2
• Aural: 5
• Read/Write: 6
• Kinesthetic: 4

Thank you Nancy.

P.S.
My computer has got a new hard disk.

Hard disk failure

Well, some of us learn lessons the hard way. At least now and then. My hard disk has broken down. Just like that, without any warning. And yes, I'm one of those who keep forgetting to make a backup of their files. I haven't made one for more than a year and the last one disappeared. Yes, months of work have gone into thin air: the coursebook I was writing for my fist year students, one third of my MA thesis, a corpus of research articles covering a time span of 35 years, at least 5 more specialized copora, one of which went into tens of millions of words. Not to mention all the text resources I had carefully collected for materials writing. I hate to think of it.
My mind plays tricks on me: all the files still exist in my memory - I still know where to look for a particular file, what the texts look like, etc. I don't like changes that happen overnight. Turning a new leaf. Starting everything from scratch. I prefer building slowly over the long term.
I somehow hope that computer specialists will be able to recover at least some of the files. Mind you, it'll hit my pocket. It's a lesson that I hope I've learnt now.

Summer readings

I was ill for the past five days and watched the telly extensively. I was impressed by some of the programmes that BBC World has broadcasted lately, especially the ones in the series Africa Lives on the BBC. Educating, enlightening, and deeply moving.

So today, when I finally managed to sit long enough at my desk, I visited BBC World online to check whether there’s anything more about this series of programmes. I managed to find a couple of things. But just like ususal, my information hunt on the web lead me astray to other topics.

I came across an article ("Catholic podcast makes waves") about a catholic priest who blogs and uses podcasting for communicating about religion (Vatican is waiting to see what’ll happen).

Then I found another one ("Rewriting the rules of publishing") about an online publishing venture called Lulu. What
they basically do is this: authors upload their manuscripts onto the site and these are then printed individually anytime someone wants to buy them. The book or CD is then posted to the buyer. 20% of the price is kept by the publisher, 80% goes to the author. Unfortunately, Lulu is still US based, but they promise to set up business in Europe in six months. If the project team I’m part of (we introduced problem-based teaching of English in Slovenia) doesn’t get the funds to publish our book, Lulu might be our choice.

I couldn’t help and check the latest developments on the Learning English site. I haven’t visited the site for months and I was amazed by the goodies: learning quizzes, vocabulary and listening exercises, interactive activities and especially the Keep Your English Up to Date by Professor Crystal. Good hunt. And now I've got to dash off.

Summer

The busy exam period at the college is over and I decided to take a summer break in my tutor blog and switch back to my personal blog.

I started studying for my exam in English linguistics. I’m into semantics right now and it feels OK - I’m quite familiar with it. At the same time I’ve started updating my corpus of tourism abstracts. My MA thesis will focus on their discourse. I’m looking forward to working with concordances again. They look like this:



They remind me of the times when I developed black and white photos myself. That intense feeling of expectation and the magic of an image appearing on a piece of white paper in front of you! I feel pretty similar when I load my files in my concordancer and set the search word and then the lines of words start appearing. There’s some kind of magic in it. The image words create can tell you so much about them. Yeah, I’m fascinated by words and the magic they can create.