FA China Tour

Skimming and scanning are two skills that I regularly ask students to exercise in my class.  The typical EFL (English as a foreign language) student has done mostly intensive reading where a text is studied word by work and carefully dissected for grammatical patterns and complete comprehension.  This style of study usually leads students to a feeling of overwhelming incompetence.  I can’t tell you how many times my students have read a short passage and then told me they didn’t understand because there were too many new words.  Skimming and scanning are skills that lead students to see that “understanding” a text or a map or a diagram can be fulfilled with a cursory study.  This superficial look at a text allows readers to feel they are still in control and the text has not subdued them.  This initial “read” is to acquaint oneself with the main ideas and organization and then one can dive deeper into parts that may be most important or necessary for them to learn.

What have I been getting out of exercising my S & S skills?  Curiously I’ve found that by subscribing to several news feeds from the US and China, I have learned a bit more about how each country portrays itself and others in media.  Admittedly I’m reading Chinese news in English, China News Wrap, which has a unique slant and a more narrow audience.  I am also learning that generalizing about either country cannot be done faithfully.  A truly great variety of news and opinions are available on the world wide web from each nation and this effectively negates the question of “free press” that is often used against the Chinese government.  Even as I experience blocks against some websites here, I have learned that the Chinese people using the internet are as adept as any at getting around restrictions.

I can’t help but think of the musical/movie “Little Shop of Horrors” when I ever I encounter the word feed. In this movie a small venus-flytrap like plant requires a daily dose of blood from Seymour until the plant outgrows his caretaker.  He then requires more…  Yes you can only imagine.  So, i return to Google Reader with trepidation.  Will my appetite for RSS lead me into a tangled jungle of feeds?  Most likely.  There must be some simple principle for pruning though.

Here are my thoughts on pruning so that the reader doesn’t get clogged like the SPAM box of my email account.  If I haven’t found anything interesting to read for 2 weeks, cut it.  If my reader has more than 10 feeds trim it to 8.  And finally so as to keep a healthy balance of feeds, if any one topic reaches 5 feeds, cut it to three and look for variety.  A good garden has an assortment of crops, for good nutrition and a healthy environment.

Nate Wahlgren actually got me started using an RSS reader last year.  One evening while on dorm duty Nate told me how the FA Wikipedia page has been hacked in the past to add odd, funny or offensive things.  He and others have taken up the charge to correct errors as they arise.  How does one know if the page has been changed?  He show me how to get a reader feed that will alert followers to any changes.  I then started using the RSS feed to follow my class blog so that I could see when students had updated their own blog posts or added new material to our class blog.  My reader is part of my email program so I don’t need to go to a website like Google to see the changes.

Now I’ve set up the Google reader online which allows me to follow the feeds from any computer.  This is useful as I’m sharing our laptop with Jenny this summer and she needs it most.  As I browse the new material I was surprised to find on Infinite Thinking Machine that there is an organization called Teachers Without Borders which, like it’s predecessor and Nobel Prize winner, Medicine Sans Frontier (Doctors Without Borders) is working to improve educational opportunities and access for kids and teachers in impoverished areas of the world.

The second feed I read was a student post on Students2oh called “Don’t Save the World” about students traveling the world looking for good college resume building activities and not looking for their own passions.  Quite a contrast.

If I ever get students to China I’d like them to do something meaningful for the Chinese but I also hope they will do it because it is memorable for them.  I would think any student who chooses to leave home and travel abroad has already got the interest to make a major commitment to their education at least.

The word “blog” is not yet recognized by spellcheck on my computer.  I find this unforgivable since computers and their software are updated so frequently these days.  For heaven’s sake, programmers should at least include their own terminology even if they may overlook the lingo of other fields.

As a language teacher, I’m particularly interested in the ethnographic inquiry of blogging language centered around writing and reading.  And not surprisingly, my students need more practice in these two areas of communication because these are key elements of academic.  Technology opens up an interesting middle ground between speech and writing that is particularly valuable to my second language classes.  It provides a place for language development in a shared space.  It allows more connection between speech and writing.  And the web links classroom discussion and dialogue from day to day.

Previously looked at blogs and websites within my field of ESOL teaching, but the blogs from our course list opened up new thoughts.  Three I found most valuable were EduBlog Insights (Anne Davis) , Discourse About Discourse , and NeverEnding Search.  What I liked about each of these was their attention to the use of language and how their thoughts paralleled my experience with students use of techno-tools.

In Anne Davis’ “A Rationale for Educational Blogging” her brevity and focus were particularly useful.  She reminded me that when I ask students to write  blog posts they should be brief.  When we read online we’re looking for a quick fix.  That’s OK.  Leave the longer more in depth readings for books.  Blogs should not replace books.

In Discourse about Discourse, Ben Wilkoff writes about the need to contextualize the use of web resources within an environment of interested learners.  Several of his points rang true for me but especially his notes on collaboration.  Both educators and learners “have a genuine need to be heard by others and, in one way or another, receive feedback for contributions.”  The value of the public sphere of writing is that your classmates and the teacher can make comments that everyone can appreciate and learn from.  Commenting, complimenting and critiquing are skills that need practice as well.

Lastly, Joyce Valenza Ph.D touches some key issues in my classroom in her blog called “Power Point Reform“.   She writes about limiting language on PP slides so that the presenter can truly present and the slides can provide visual support of concepts, not words.  I appreciate her insight because my students more often than not use PP slides as presentation notes.  Instead, I tell my students that speaking is still the most important part of a presentation and the slides merely allow you to focus audience eyes away from you but their ears are still relying on your speech – slow, clear and directed at them.

Well I have had some technical difficulties with my pictures blog in the US, but here in China I can’t even get to the site.  I have just posted a link to the page on the right of this blog, but I’m not promising it will work perfectly yet.  Hopefully Stateside everyone can read it fine, but it’s hard for me to check it from China.  Here’s the site address in case the link is faulty.

web.mac.com/jghdibook