091 in the rearview mirror
I've been so derelict on my own weblogs, I've not only failed to point out the highlights of the term, but also failed to keep up in a lot of other pursuits. It's not that things aren't happening, they are...only that I'm so busy, I can hardly document it. Here are some highlights...-TESOL '09 coming up, in Denver, and I'm barely prepared; haven't had much time to put into it. Scroll down the template to see what I've done; three things are coming, and I'd like to be a little better prepared for each...
-CESL blogs work their way up on Google, and in the process draw in more unusual visitors. This is partly because the eap2 blog won a prize and therefore a big link, a few terms back; it's drawn visitors and google thus found all of us & put us up a notch. People write on blogs like the US economic problems blog, which is outdated, about an entirely different economic problem, yet if it comes up on google, people will go there & find it.
-one of my favorite exchanges is here, where a student wrote about the Japanese education system, and the author found her, responded, and even included a letter from a third person. The topic at hand here is how English is taught in Japan, and it's very relevant, not only to the student and the career she's looking at, but also to various other people who find their way here. Another exchange happened in December as I was leaving for break, when a researcher found our papers about falcons; you meet some cool people writing in public, and putting ideas out on the table.
-much of the world continues to move over into Facebook; I try to keep up with it, and as a result get drawn into FB myself where I find increasingly more old friends who I love to have in my life again. A number of questions arise: what are the risks, for our students, for our program, to be all over main street? How can computer pop-art evolve to be totally useful in this venue? How has it transformed chat, if at all? And, will it implode under the weight of its own social transformation? Maybe I haven't worded my questions properly; at the moment, I'm in awe, and newspapers & the U.S. Postal Service are both due to collapse at any moment. My own FB bib suffering from neglect as an unweeded garden. But who needs it? The whole world is in the trees, twittering into their facebooks, and I here, on the ground, barely get in there to post a status. I enjoy the process, though. I see old friends who remind me of old times, connect me with the earlier eras of my experience. I also had my students write about facebook; most of their essays are posted on the now-famous eap2 weblog, but give a kind of panoramic view of their mixed feelings toward the changing social atmosphere...
Finally, on the home front, CESL classes are full; a diverse and interesting crowd continues to fill them up. And I'm always amazed at how, though people have to leave Carbondale eventually, they leave a part of themselves here, and pine for it, in their own way, at whatever faraway locale they end up in. My next job, publicizing an SIUC reunion in Denver at TESOL 2009, I'm going to remind people that CESL and SIUC continue to keep their image out there, remind people of SIUC's long and colorful history as a mainstay of the esl/efl world. Hang in there, SIUC: things keep changing, and as much as we complain, these could still be the good old days...
Labels: cesl, chat, facebook, pop art, siuc, tesol, twitter, weblogs
posted by tom @ 9:26 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home