Blog: Word of the Year

Blog: Word of the Year - not only for Merrian Webster publishers but also for me for the past year and a half.

It's incredible how involved I got in it: from a simple experiment in class to presentations in French and English , two (believe it or not !!!) nominations in James Farmer's blog contest and a 6 week course next January on Using Blogs in EFL: Uses, New Developments and Challenges.

It all started very quietly on May 17th 2003 with the Beeonline class and student blogs. After our winter holidays in July, two mystery guests were invited to interact with the students. Dennis Newson (Germany) posted his riddle and beginning of August the students quickly started posting their suppositions in the main blog. On August 11th, enter Graham Stanley (Blog EFL, Barcelona) with his three questions . The link was made and students chatted happily with him until the end of the month. In September, I coached an Italian teacher with her class to start blogging and we embarked on the Garibaldi project which lasted until the kids got together in July 2004. Beeonline2 class blog opened in February and another group of students of mine was introduced to the blogging experience.

A second window of opportunities connected to blogging started when I was invited to give a talk at Tappedin on my experience for the Becoming a Webhead session of Evonline 2004. For the occasion I produced a little E-booklet : Blogging and Presence Online (also found in html for those with a dial-up connection), trying to answer the questions that had been made throughout the course.
In August, there was Cyberlangues in France, where I presented from Brazil through an audio-conference and blogged about here. In November, another audio-conference about blogging, this time in Minsk, Belarus.
I am presently busy preparing a six-week course for Evonline 2005, together with 3 other hard-core bloggers: Aaron P. Campbell (Japan), Sean Smith (Korea), Graham Stanley (Barcelona).

It was definitely a busy year, reading, tutoring and collaborating on and about blogs !