Gifts and shockers

This morning I had set up the class to talk about an object - you know, describe what it looks like, what it's made of, what it is for, what it means to you...

Just before I left the house this morning, the youngest of our three cats shot into the house with what looked like a tennis ball made of raffia and flock in her mouth.

A bird's nest, with three tiny orange-tinged eggs in it.

We think it is a sunbird nest.

The eggs were still warm (possibly because they'd been in Roxy's mouth) but there was no way we could have persuaded a parent bird to sit on them again. So that's three little birdies that will never say tweet tweet tweet.

Oh dear.

A mog is a mog, and they will hunt, but having three of them does rather tilt the odds in favour of the feline crew as against the feathered prey.

But it did make an excellent talking point for the class. And while I would never disturb or handle a nest in the wild, it is fascinating to see one up close.

It's mainly made of something like reed or dry grass, with a fluffy padding. I can't tell if the fluff is organic, gathered from the Arabian Fluff tree (there is a tree here called the Ghaff and another called Ethel), or gleaned from the discarded matresses of itinerant labourers.

The eggs are cream speckled with orange, with denser colour at the rounded end.

(I wonder, about eggs, whether the pointed end is the end that emerges first... that's one for henhouse experiments.)

Anyway, that was my warmer for the class ... it went downhill from then on.

More on that later.

Playing Catchup

Well here we are at the end of Week 4 and I'm just getting to grips with part of Week 2, playing with Delicious. Most of what I've bookmarked has been folkie videos (simply because some friends I'm in touch with over Facebook keep sending me stuff that I wanted to keep... the problem with this internet business is how one thing leads to another...)

I can see the benefits of developing a group resource or reading list: one of the goals for the students I teach is to broaden their horizons, develop awareness of what's going on in the region and the world.

Also it would perhaps help with the ever-present problem of plagiarism, if students know that the resources they are using are already available to the instructors - although most of the plagiarism we have to deal with is not that sophisticated: a basic google search tends to come up with anything suspicious immediately.

Have also been doing some reading - the Franklin and van Harmelen piece was interesting.

Think I can see plenty of opportunities in students creating a Wiki... students often have to work as a team to research a topic and present their findings in report form - a wiki might be a good option.

One thing I have noticed as an English Language teacher with student writing is that, even with word processing, once things have been put into a given written form, they tend to stay that way... corrections and re-writes tend to focus on the rather superficial elements - "surface errors" rather than serious structural problems.

I wonder whether wikis would encourage more flexibility of approach to drafting and re-drafting? Also of course another way to create a shared reading/resource list.

Well... I hope to find out!

More thinking

Have done no more actual work on the topic but just a bit more thinking.

Part of what I teach here comes under the heading of "career preparation" - focussing on skills in English which will be useful when our Business and IT and Engineering students get jobs. The kinds of tasks we ask students to do include job applications, CV writing, etc.

For example an assignment was to find an advert for a job you really could do and write a letter of application for it. But naturally most of the jobs the students look for are advertised online and don't even give a land address - it would be odd to reply to an online ad with a letter unless it was specified.

Students tend to use email principally as a private-life means of communication, which means that they are not usually familiar with the norms of business-style email communication... sign offs like "I miss U" etc abound.

So it needs some thought and a bit of work...