Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I
will understand
Chinese Proverb
Chinese Proverb
The proverb above can be considered as the main idea of the whole
course that has been conducted by American English Institute in the Linguistics
Department at the University of Oregon (UO AEI). In our first week, most of us were nervous
about creating a blog and posting messages and every other thing that we were supposed
to do. After getting involved in the process, I personally
started to become more integrated to what we are doing and felt like I was
becoming part of a bigger team with the support given by our tutor and colleagues.
As almost everybody, I have a long history in web searching. I
have been searching on the internet for both personal and professional use
since 1998, -it is when Google was first established J-.
Starting from the first day till now I was a very “obedient” user of that
search engine. However, this week I was amazed with all the other options that
I was unaware of.
At the beginning of the week I met this new link shared by
Courtney which opened a window which I started to call “WSSP” : Web Searching
For Specific Purpose. The link shared by Courtney was http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html
Another link which I found to be a key element to all searches
that we can do is, I belive, http://pages.uoregon.edu/dhealey/techtips/june2009.html
. In this link you can find an article by
Deborah Healey where she gives almost all the tips to be used for a “Better Web Searching”
I highly recommend these two sites especially for all the academicians
and practitioners as they will bring different colors to their classrooms and researches.
Other two tasks for the second week were to write an ABCD course
objective and start a Final Project task. Both of those tasks gave me a chance
to “turn around” and look at myself as a teacher and a learner at the same
time. By these tasks I had to verbalize what I had been doing and what I will
be doing and present it my colleagues from different parts of the World. Getting
reflections from experts from different environments is a great opportunity for
a teacher. Also reading about ABCD objectives and Project Tasks of other colleagues
was a great experince. I was amazed by the variety of the classes that
they teach and the projects that they are planning to apply.
Doing reading that Courtney provided on web search and checking
for the useful sites were other tasks of the week. Although doing research is
not something new to me, this study captured me as it showed me things that was
near me but I wasn’t aware of. I have been looking for the answers of different
questions which gives me the feeling of renewal.
As a “lifelong learner” I
am very much satisfied by all the new information I am getting from this 10-week
course. I am also very happy with the sharing that has been going on among
learner-teachers J . I hope we can have a chance to share
the information we gain from this course with our colleagues in our
institutions.
