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Andy (and everyone else),

If you want to include Team Blogs, I've got three courses starting next month which will be using Team Blogs in slightly different ways. None of them have much on them now, but they will soon.

Teaching English to Younger Children is a distance in-service training course for teachers teaching English at all levels from day nursery up to the end of junior school (as it used to be called). This team blog is designed to help participants share the ideas that come up during Study Group Meetings and can be found at:

http://teyc06.blogspot.com/

Business Writing is an entirely on-line business English course, where the team blog is used for students to post 'warm-up' tasks, which are lighter versions or practice versions of more major send-in tasks. The purpose here is really to allow people to make common mistakes without losing too many marks. My job as course coordinator is firstly to make public comments on problems many students are likely to have (which takes place on the team blog), and secondly to make a private assessment of the blog contribution and give it mark (which takes place in a private e-mail to the student concerned). This team blog can be found at:

http://bwvt06.blogspot.com/

Finally, we have a team blog going for the partnership programme between my Writing Course students in southern Sweden (who're learning how to write academic essays) and students on a Composition course at Central Missouri State University. We're still discussing precisely how this blog will be used, but the basic idea is to allow peer-to-peer contact between students researching similar writing topics. You'll find this blog at:

http://concomp.blogspot.com/

These blogs will really take off around mid-February. There's already a one interesting side-effect, though. If you take a look at the profiles constructed by participants on the blog, you can see how often they've been viewed. There are some that have only been viewed a couple of times, but others which have already passed the hundred mark, despite the fact that the course hasn't even started yet … It looks like students are using their profiles to communicate 'off-course' information with each other, and I'm fairly sure I know what type! Cyber-flirting is one of the innocent pleasures of on-line education, isn't it!

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  • 2 months later...

"Cyber Flirting"

I like that term David :D;)

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Glad you like it, David. I remember doing a course years ago where we used First Class (which had a 'History' function, so that you could see who accessed whose posts and when). Most of the participants were in their mid-30s, but there were two younger ones, a man and a woman. I happened to notice one day that whenever the young man posted, the young woman was the first one to read the post, often within an hour of the posting. Unfortunately, though, it wasn't mutual - he probably finished the course blissfully unaware of his secret admirer.

I'm doing a seminar in Stockholm on May 4th about team blogging and team podcasting, by the way. There's a blog relating to it, which can be found at:

http://stockholm-seminar.blogspot.com/

Feel free to join us via Marratech, if you have the time and interest.

You can read more about it at:

http://www.upc.su.se/kalendarium/anmalan.asp?id=316

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