Central Weblog Exchange

Jamie Hall wrote on July 15, 2005:

If there was such a weblog exchange I would gladly share what I have done with my class and be eager to learn about other projects. I would imagine that such a repository could consist of the instructors names and a 100 word description of his or her blogging project followed by a link to the actual project. I guess entries could be organized by either class type for ESL/EFL classes (reading, writing, etc.), location, level, academic area or instructor name.

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Rudolf wrote on July 15, 2005:

Hi Jamie—Given that we’re trying to connect students and engage them in conversations, and given also that student weblogs tend not to outlast the course for which they are produced, the Exchange wouldn’t be so much about sharing what has been done but pooling what is around, alive and twitching, or what is going to be around soon.

So time is probably among the most important criteria: whatever public user interface the Exchange is going to have, the courses that are now playing or coming soon will have to be front and centre.

To gauge the level of interest and the practicality of doing something like this, we could just set up a message board with a bunch of different forums and XML feeds, and then we’d simply allow anyone to register and start new topics promoting their courses.

If this establishes itself, we could still poke around for a more sophisticated, taylor-made interface.

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Marco Polo wrote on July 18, 2005:

Because such a “Blog Exchange” doesn’t exist yet, I simply listed my class blogs and a link to Aaron’s class-blog lists at New tanuki, on my page at Sheffner’s Classes

1 way: to list simply the class names, together with a brief description of the kind of class it is (and perhaps what kind of blogs/language, etc., they are looking for)

Another way: to list each blog separately with a description of the blog (and perhaps what kind of partner the blog-author is looking for).

Of course, there are already the technorati tags, and the “interests” of LiveJournal and Blogger, so the system need not double these attributes.

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Rudolf wrote on July 18, 2005:

We recently discussed Technorati tags as a possible means of identifying weblogs that welcome comments from language learners. We might want to introduce a tag in conjunction with a drive to get weblog owners to state that they’re okay with comments from EFL/ESL students.

Technorati tags, however, won’t work for ESL/EFL student blogging projects because such projects, like it or not, tend to have a shelf life that’s limited by the duration of a term. While you can sort Technorati returns by date, you can’t make them time sensitive.

The Exchange would need to have a mechanism built in, either human editing or some scripting on the backend, that recognises the time span during which a project is likely to be active.

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AJ wrote on August 21, 2005:

Yes… perhaps an informal network of class hubs is an easy way to start.

On our own blogs, we have links to all our students blogs.

Then we add links to other teacher’s/classes’ blogs… each of which also contains a list of students blog links.

I think that might be enough to get them surfing, especially if you encouraged them to at the end of each class.

I know my students would be particularly curious about students in other regions of the world… ie. North/South America, Europe.

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Elizabeth Hanson-Smith wrote on August 31, 2005:

Hi all—I have been examining ways to make blogs more communal, and Flickr does now allow “groups” to be organized. It still seems quite clumsy.

This seems like the kind of question that might be discussed and a community or communities organized during an Electronic Village Online session this winter. (EVO is a project of the CALL-IS of TESOL.)

Would anyone here (preferably a little group) be willing to moderate an EVO session on communal blogging? This might also be a means to set up and sustain some good student ESL/EFL blog exchanges. You don’t necessarily have to teach a course, just provide a good discussion base for participants to find each other and to experiment together.

More information is found at

EVO Call for Proposals

Please contact me if you have any questions about EVO or how the sessions work.

Rudolf—I’m thinking this would be a broader audience for the community that is building at Dekita and would grow from the Blogging course Bee Dieu did for us last year. (Bee can’t do it this year, hence my call for help.)

Cheers——Elizabeth Hanson-Smith
for the Coordination Team

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Nellie Deutsch wrote on September 17, 2005:

Greetings,
I have been looking into many ideas on how to integrate technology into my ESL/EFL classes. I use WebQuests (my own and others) and Nicenet: http://www.nicenet.org to communicate with my classes. Currently, I am trying to adapt Moodle for my own online courses.
I have created my own only 2 comments thus far. I can encourage my students to use it when it doesn’t work for me. I would love to hear how others are using weblogs in their classes.

Thank you.

Best wishes.
Nellie Deutsch
Sharing is caring.
http://www.nelliemuller.com

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Nellie Deutsch wrote on September 17, 2005:

Greetings,

I have had wonderful experience with Nicenet: http://www.nicenet.org to communicate with my classes. The students can view each others work and comment on them as well as share links within their own and other classrooms.
It’s a great asset and it’s free.
Try it and let me how it goes.
Best wishes.
Nellie Deutsch
Sharing is caring.
http://www.nelliemuller.com

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Bee wrote on September 18, 2005:

Thanks for sharing your many resources with us, Nellie.

“I would love to hear how others are using weblogs in their classes”

Join our mailing list and post the question :-)
What we are trying at Dekita.org is to promote open P2P (peer to peer) conversation through blogging and webpublishing so as to encourage learners to create their own content and communicate with other speakers of the language freely, on subjects and topics of their interest. Aaron has made a an excellent post on this subject in his blog E-poche.net

Have a look at the classes featured in the Dekita Exchange Page and let us know if you are interested in joining us with your classes.

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Carla Arena wrote on September 21, 2005:

I’ve been using blogs and webpages to keep in touch with students outside the classroom and going beyond it. They can ask questions, solve a doubt, know what happened during class time if they missed classes, getting extra practice in English…

Even the ones who don’t interact much, I know that they check the blog and profit from it.

Now, I’ve just set a blog to a teacher, friend of mine, who moved to the U.S. so that students and friends accompany her professional journey and interact with her.

Well, I think that there are no limits for the pedagogical use of technology. The limit is set by our imagination!

Carla Arena
Casa Thomas Jefferson
Brasilia – Brazil
carlaarena@gmail.com

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Bee wrote on September 21, 2005:

Carla,
Great to hear from Brasilia. If you are interested in facilitating the blogging connection between your students with other classes around the world, find out what you need to do to join the P2P EFL/ESL Exchange Project and let us know.

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Andrew Meyerhoff wrote on March 30, 2006:

My students will be blogging via my music blog starting April. My blog is hooked up with over 100 renowned musicians worldwide, so it provides a great platform for communication.

Yorohiku….andrew/

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