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Stevens.
Webheads Chat Logs from
2001
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January 7, 2001 -
wfw010106.htm - The chat this evening took
place in Hear Me. (Someone dropped by Homestead and said 'hi' but left before I
had a chance to respond; if it was you, come back!). We talked on the
usual wide range of topics. These included: Ying Lan's terrible day, Maggie's
desire to go to Tibet and the relationship of China to Tibet, relations between
Japan and Taiwain, what we did New Year's Eve, and the Milky Way. Just before
Ying left for the evening, she asked us about the lyrics to the old song,
'Let's call the whole thing off.' This got us on a subject that voice chat is
ideally suited for, since the song is about American and British pronunciation.
Not only that, but we all had to sing the song. We were having so much fun that
by the end of the chat, Michael and I had decided to attempt a virtual guitar
jam using one of our hands-free voice chat clients next week, and Ying Lan can
sing (turns out she has a great voice). Think we'll do it? Stop by next week
and find out!
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and Michael in Australia
Friends
and students present: John in Puerto Rico and Ying Lan in Taiwan
January 14, 2001 -
wfw010114.htm - We talked on the usual
wide range of topics, and because Gloria was with us without mic or sound card,
we did a lot of our chat in text. We talked about how to distinguish like,
love, and passion, what we eat for Christmas dinner, and John's difficulty with
maps (you can see an example here). Michael came on just as I was telling the
class about his email wondering why more students don't come to our Sunday
chats. He thought perhaps we should start a separate session each week for
different level students, and we got on the subject of what Webheads want out
of our class, more formal lessons, for example. Maggi thought we could just ask
them, but John has been interviewing students and he told us that one had
suggested we include more directed reading. So we talked about reading and how
to read effectively in a second language. Ying Lan was most concerned about
vocabulary, and we talked about research suggesting that we can remember only 7
things at a time. By comparison, this got us on to the topic of Stephen
Krashen's i+1 hypothesis, where he suggests that second language input should
be just (+1) beyond comprehensible input. Michael was by that hour in Australia
comprehending at a -1 level, so he and Vance quickly planned their guitar jam
next day, and John prepared to leave as well, saying he had to finish painting
his house. Meanwhile Nicia had arrived, and we found out things about her
recycled-paper business by using search engines on the Internet. Nicia and
Maggi are both single mothers, and since it was time for me to leave, I left
them talking together.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and Michael in Australia
Friends
and students present: John in Puerto Rico, Arif in Turkey, Gloria in
Paraguay, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
January 15, 2001 -
Michael and Vance got together to make Webheads history:
Webheads have on this date once again made history. Michael and I have
carried out what may be the first ever synchronous-chat guitar jam in history.
We had sort of agreed to do it when we met for our regular online Writing for
Webheads class, noon GMT each Sunday, but we needed to have time to ourselves
to experiment, so we decided to do it on the next day, Monday, Jan 15, 2001.
We tried it first using Yahoo Messenger, which you can get at
http://www.yahoo.com, and click on Messenger
to download and install it. If you get the latest version, and then pull down
Friends and activate voice chat, you can click on the microphone icon to talk
to someone who also has a talk version of Yahoo Messenger. You can also click
on 'hands free' to talk without having to press anything. AND you can both talk
at the same time. It was in this mode that we attempted our first ever distance
guitar jam.
Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as we'd hoped. I could hear
Michael and I could play along with him, but there may have been a delay in the
time it took Michael's music to reach me, and another delay for Michael to hear
the result, so I'm not sure if we were playing together. The reason we didn't
know is that although Yahoo allows duplex chat, two people talking at the same
time, it seems that a lot of talk coming from one end cuts off talk at the
other, so when one guitar was playing, bandwidth was flooded, and we didn't
really get more than one guitar coming down the pipe at any given moment. I
could hear Michael and jam with him, but he couldn't hear me.
So we tried again at our Excite chatrooms, which Michael and I had both
set up independently of one another. To get there you visit
http://www.excite.com and then find in the middle of the page where you can
Voice Chat. Then you type in the name of a room. Our rooms are called
'webheads' and 'efiwebheads'. You are welcome to go there at any time if you
would like to try them out.
There we could again talk to each other, and almost simultaneously. The
systems works in duplex, but again, bandwidth appeared to be overwhelmed a few
seconds into a duplex chat, and one voice was cut out to make room for the
other. Also, this was not hands free, so we couldn't play our guitars. The
sound quality was good, and this venue would accommodate audiences as well as
instrumentalists, but the instrumentalists would have to have assistants, or
play one-handed or hold down the control key with their toes, so we left our
shoes on and went on to the next experiment.
We both happened to have Qtalk, http://www.qtalka.com/. Our versions of Qtalk
only allow 5 min. of synchronous connect time, but in that time, we were able
to communicate hands-free, and to get a few riffs and licks in, in synch this
time, and thereby become the first ever musicians in the history of the
universe (to our knowledge, a major qualifier there) to accomplish a guitar jam
in synchronous time using today's budding technologies. At last, something
useful you can do with voice chat!
January 21, 2001 -
wfw010121.htm - This was, sadly, our first
chat where we would have to do without HearMe, our favorite chat client, since
its producers decided not to support it after January 19. Furthermore, the
Virtual Schoolhouse at the Palace was again down, so it seems that an era of
free use of compelling online chat clients may be ending. Fortunately, we had
tested alternative sites, and before Ying Lan came Maggi, Vance and John all
went to the Webheads Excite voice chatroom. It seemed to work alright, except
that John's sound card gave errors, and we were not able to text chat all
together (for some reason, Excite only allows text chat one-on-one). During
this time, we were joined by Steve Chadwick responding to an invitation to join
us posted on Teaching for Webheads, but he declined to voice chat with us.
Michael had also joined us in both Homestead and Excite, but had to work next
morning after six weeks holiday, so he turned in early. It was only then that
Ying Lan had arrived after sleeping most of the day. After that, we spent the
rest of the time in the voice chat. The client is fine for casual conversation,
giving better sound quality than Hear Me, but it lacks a hands-free mode and a
group text chat.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and Michael in Australia
Friends
and students present: John in Puerto Rico and Ying Lan in Taiwan, and Steve
Chadwick from the Teaching for Webheads group
January 28, 2001 -
wfw010128.htm (<-- if you visit this
link, you can click on topics here and jump to those places in the chat
transcript) - Four of the Webheads in the chat today had been trying to
start voice chat rooms at the Telcopoint 'hearme' site before they joined
today's chat. But Telcopoint had been apparently overwhelmed by the demand for
chat rooms, and the site was not allowing creation of chatrooms. So as the chat
began, and many other places in the chat, we talked about our frustration at
not being able to voice chat. In fact today's chat was unusual in that it took
place almost entirely in text. Only at the end of the chat did we manage to
connect in voice chat via Yahoo! messenger.
At
the beginning of the chat, John and Ying Lan were asked if they would like to
act as 'tutors' in the group. Vance, Maggi, and Michael have been 'tutors' for
almost three years now (we tried to figure out exactly how long, but couldn't
remember exactly). Tutors in our group have to above all show a long-term
commitment to the group. John has been with us only since last September, but
he is a teacher in Puerto Rico with keen interest in the group. He is using the
Webheads class as part of his PhD research, and most importantly, he's been in
the live online chat class nearly every Sunday since he joined us. He likes the
group and has demonstrated his commitment by being with us each week, and we
wanted to show our appreciation in return by regarding him as one of the
tutors. Ying Lan has been a student in our group since 1998, and an EFI student
for a year or two before that. In that time, her English has improved a lot
(her spoken English in particular!). She has written advice to students wanting
to join our group, and most importantly, she has demonstrated her commitment to
the group by attending almost every live online chat each Sunday for as long as
we've been having them. So again, we wish to recognize her commitment to the
group and also to invite students who would like to have any information about
Webheads from a student's perspective to get in touch with her, since she is as
familiar with the Webheads concept as any other tutor.
As
we were reminiscing about the start of the Webheads (reminisce means to talk
about what you remember) we started talking about another first-member of our
group, Felix. And as we were talking about him, speak of the devil! (that's an
expression we use when someone we have been talking about appears) he came on
ICQ, and we soon had him with us in our chat. Nicia and Michael joined as well,
and in response to a question Ying Lan asked us, we started talking about who
wears the pants in our families (that means, who's the boss). This got us on to
the topic of divorce, whether it is possible to divorce someone you love, and
what it's like to live with a soulmate. Meanwhile Sergei had joined us from
Belarus. Sergei is another teacher interested in how chats can be used in
teaching, and (like John) he knows about us from the Teaching for Webheads
group.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto Rico
and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:Nicia and Felix
from Brazil, and Sergei from Belarus from the Teaching for Webheads
group
February 4, 2001 -
wfw010204.htm (<-- if you visit this
link, you can click on topics here and jump to those places in the chat
transcript) - The chat began with Aum, a new student since last December,
talking with John about what we do in the class, how many students we have, and
that sort of thing. Once Ying Lan appeared she and Maggi and Vance went into
the Excite Webheads voice chat room. We also talked about Firetalk and Delphi,
our new threaded discussion site, and when Michael arrived, we talked about how
we could thread discussions with voice with Wimba. Meanwhile, our conversation
skirted John's new diet (where the doctor cut him back from one to four meals a
day - read below to figure that out), Groundhog Day, new movies such as
Castaway, and what Ying Lan was reading (fantasy). We also discussed the
hardest part about learning a language, our Webheads writing topics , and
singing English, which Vance says everyone really must try. Finally we asked
questions about Aum so we could put the answers on her web
page.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto Rico
and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:Aum from
Thailand
February 11, 2001 -
wfw010211.htm - The chat began with John
telling Vance he'd read that an undersea cable had been cut and China and
Taiwan were cut off from the Internet world. The situation proved not so
drastic when Wendy and Taiwan both turned up, from mainland China and Taiwan,
respectively. While the participants talked about food and music, several of
the participants were trying to get into Vance's Telcopoint (HearMe) voice chat
room. Everyone has been having problems reaching there but Vance managed to get
the applet running that placed him in the chat room, and while he was there,
Peter from Japan dropped by as well as John, Maggi, and Michael. However, no
one could hear anyone else there, and we were only able to learn how the text
chat worked, and how awkward it was for our purposes. Its only advantage
appears to be that you can save your conversations fairly easily. Meanwhile,
people had been popping in and out of the Homestead chat 'like toast' as Maggi
said, when suddenly Vance was tossed offline. In Vance's case it turned out to
be a server crash, so Vance packed his bags and went home to drink his
Kilkenny.
One interesting thing about this chat was that we were
joined by Wendy, from China, who was sent to us by Dave Kees, a Webhead teacher
working in China. Wendy politely left a message in the Homestead Guest Book, so
I was able to get in touch with her to tell her where these chat logs are.
Maybe she'll join our group.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto Rico
and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:Aum from
Thailand, Peter from Japan, and Wendy from China
February 18, 2001 -
wfw010218.htm - Tonight was mostly teacher
talk, with a long appearance by Felix (also a language teacher in Brazil), who
was looking forward to Carnival in Brazil the following week. Ying Lan was away
at a wedding, and Michael had been away at a 3-day music festival, so neither
joined us, but Rif in Turkey and Sergei in Belarus were both online, and both
agreed to join Vance at his trial Telcopoint chat room at
http://www.vancestevens.com/hearme.htm.
And, EUREKA, it worked. After several attempts with disappointing results, we
finally got the chat client to let us HEAR each other. However, sound quality
was very bad and almost incomprehensible.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and John in Puerto Rico (Michael had been
at a 3-day music festival and sent apologies; Ying Lan was attending a wedding
celebration)
Friends and students present:Felix from Brazil, Rif from
Turkey, Sergei from Belarus, and Juanide, a guest from Brazil
February 25, 2001 -
wfw010225.htm - Tonight, Maggi and I met and chatted in ICQ until Ying
Lan appeared online and called us into the Homestead text chat room, where we
were soon joined by Naeem, who had attended one of my recent presentations in
Abu Dhabi, and Michael. Ying Lan told us of an eventful week, not only
attending a wedding, but also the premature birth of a new infant in her
extended family. She was just saying how Felix must be enjoying his carnival,
when Felix himself appeared. Those present were not particularly adventurous
tonight, with only Michael joining me at Tapped In, and my attempting to launch
Paltalk, which I have so far been unable to register, but Felix did get us
watching videos of Carnival at
http://app.uol.com.br/tvuol/tvuol.php?titulo_obra=uol+carnaval+2001.
As people were saying goodbye, I was exploring the Wimba discussion sites at
both EFI http://study.com/voicemessage.html
and Webheads http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/wimba.htm
and leaving a few messages there. We're hoping we can get Michael to start us
off on some discussion topics there, and I would like to have every Webhead
leave a voice message on our site; what a great archive!
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan from
Taiwan
Friends and students present:Felix from Brazil, and Naeem from
Pakistan, living in Abu Dhabi
March 4, 2001 -
wfw010304.htm - We had a
fine chat, low tech, all in Homestead (though Vance was monitoring Tapped In
and the Excite voice chat room), and more or less the usual crowd (Vance,
Maggi, Michael, Ying Lan, and Felix, who is starting to be a regular again). We
were talking about our reading when Pon dropped by, and we were happy to see
him and thank him for his logos which are at the top of many webheads pages now
(like this one). And Felix had recruited a couple of Webheads-to-be from Juani
from Chile and Cougar from Canada and had them drop in. Juani is a teacher who
does class email projects with Felix. We hope to see more of them more
often.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Puerto Rico, Michael in
Australia, and Ying Lan from Taiwan
Friends and students present:Pon
from Thailand, Felix from Brazil, Cougar from Canada, and Juani from
Chile
March 11, 2001 -
wfw010311.htm - .We had a
friendly and wide ranging chat tonight. At the appointed time, noon GMT, John
in Puerto Rico told me via ICQ that Maggi in Germany was in the Homestead chat
room, and Ying Lan joined us about the time that I got there. Ying Lan was
having a bad day at her job in Taiwan because her boss is a little Caesar.
Meanwhile Moral had appeared in the Excite chat room, all the way from Kunming,
but he couldn't get to the Homestead one as well, so he and I talked about his
hopes to work for Save the Children, and the job interview he had with them
which didn't go so well because of an Australian lady who asked him questions
he didn't quite understand. Felix soon appeared in Homestead from a morning in
Brazil but he couldn't stay long because he was at his sister's and she's an
Internet freak and needed to go online. Juani came into Homestead from across
the continent in Chile just after Felix had left. Meanwhile, Michael had
arrived from Brisbane to join us in the Excite voice chat room where he and
Moral discussed the cultural aspects of the abortive job interview and how well
suited to her job the Australian woman could possibly have been. By then, Naeem
had joined us; he is from Pakistan, but lives in Abu Dhabi where Vance had met
him at a conference last month. Naeem had to leave when some friends appeared
at his house.
The chat was quite hectic with Michael and I struggling to keep up with
both voice and text chats, and Juani losing her Homestead connection each time
she tried to join us in the Excite voice chatroom (she never made it). Moral
suggested that next time we all chat on ICQ and those who can join us in voice
chat as well. The goal is to find a combination of places that work like Hear
Me did for us, where we can all talk and / or write to each other in the same
chat. We hope we will soon find a single client that gives us this capability.
Meanwhile, to test what other clients he could reach, Moral made his way into
Tapped In via GMUD and joined Vance in his office. John was able to meet him
there and hold a conversation, but Vance had been inactive for two hours and
couldn't revive his connection (I could see John and Moral in my office but had
no chat window and, since it's on that window, no way to log out - closing the
browser and reconnecting put me in the same, inactive condition). So Vance gave
up and went home, as did everyone else.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Puerto Rico, Michael in
Australia, and Ying Lan from Taiwan
Friends and students
present:Felix from Brazil, Juani from Chile, Naeem from Pakistan, and Moral
from China
March 14,
2001 -
http//www.vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/arabia2001
- John, Moral, and Michael came online during the conference
presentation. John was in Homestead and Tapped in, and Moral and Michael spoke
to a room packed with people. I just turned the sound up and everyone listened
intently. It was a great performance by Webheads. Moral's English was clear and
sincere, and Michael knows exactly what to say to explain Webheads to a room
full of people. The medium is the message, but it helps to have a message. Mics
weren't working in the room so I couldn't talk back but everyone could hear the
conversation, and it went VERY well. We all got a hand at the end (they
clapped).
March 18,
2001 - wfw010318.htm - My day online
began in conversation on ICQ with Rif about his work surveying and promoting
use of computers in education in Turkey. Eventually I joined John and Maggi in
Homestead where we started talking about how we could find Palaces still alive
and well. Soon Moral appeared at Vance's office at Tapped In and we went from
there to the Excite voice chat room. As is often the case, due to connection
problems in different parts of the world, Moral has not been able to join us in
our Homestead chat room, and Maggi has not been able to join us at Tapped In.
However, once Ying Lan and Michael appeared, we were able to bring everyone but
John (no sound card) together in the Excite chat room, where Ying Lan played us
some music created by an elderly family of blind musicians. By then we had
became quite comfortable working the Tapped In and Excite text and voice
clients together. Moral from mainland China and Ying Lan from Taiwan conversed
in English and a little Chinese and wanted to know how each had developed their
spoken language skills. Both made use of online movie scripts, it turns out,
and this sent us to Google in search of some suitable sites. Finally, when all
the students had gone, Maggi and I went off in search of Palaces and found one
we think we could visit next week: plantation.chatserve.com on port 9998.
Perhaps we'll see everyone back there then.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Puerto Rico, Michael in
Australia, and Ying Lan from Taiwan
Friends and students
present:Moral from China, and Rif was chatting with Vance in ICQ before the
class started.
March 25,
2001 - wfw010325.htm - Clocks in the
northern hemisphere had just sprung forward and those in the southern
hemisphere had just fallen back an hour, putting those affected two hours apart
from one another, and this could have affected attendance at our weekly
session. Ying Lan and Vance were not affected and appeared at what was for them
the normal time. For Maggi it was an hour later than usual, while Michael
joined us an hour earlier in the evening compared to when he usually did.
However, Webheads is not affected by clocks going forward or back; Webheads
meets at noon GMT, which does not fluctuate during the year.
I was alerted to the start of our online class by Ying Lan's voice
calling from my computer. Most of the chat took place in our Excite chat room,
and was therefore not recorded. However when Ying Lan left, Michael and Vance
and Maggi tried to get into the Palace at plantation.chatserve.com but it
wasn't 'up' at the time. We therefore tried another Palace Maggi and I had
found the week before, xsia.com. This Palace doesn't let you hang out for long
at its gateway, but hurries you down a path to a village where the first three
huts on the right are hot-linked to other areas. Michael and Vance decided to
try the Waterfall and Hang Glider rides. The Hang Glider ride is expecially
recommended, and Michael and Vance got to where they could do it together
(whiile Maggi waited at the village). Michael questioned the pedagogical value
of these rides but nevertheless wanted to have a second go. Meanwhile, Juani
appeared in Homestead and on Yahoo chat and gave us the good news that she had
been acceped for a Fullbright Teacher Exchange Program, and would be spending a
year in Mississippi while an American teacher enjoyed a year in Chile (lucky
American teacher, Vance said -- great opportunity for that teacher and for
Juani!!) By then, Vance had to dash off to participate in a running event, so
if there's more, Maggi or Juani can tell us about it.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan from
Taiwan
Friends and students present:Juani from Chile
April 1,
2001 - wfw010401.htm - Today's chat
was one of our best, with enthusiastic participants tuning in from six
continents. After John sent a voice message on Wimba saying he would be along
after breakfast, Maggi and I met in
ICQ. Maggi had heard from Tomas, one of our
ex-Webhead students, and she tried to forward me a picture he had sent her. We
were discussing the picture when Larry Keenan, who is selling access to
HearMe-like chat rooms, came up on Maggi's ICQ, so she went to see the rooms
and chat with the salesman.
Sue had meanwhile appeared in Homestead but Maggi and I didn't notice
her, so she got Vance's attention on
Yahoo. She asked where to join us and we asked her to choose, so
she chose Excite. However, when she
arrived there, we discovered she was in hands-free mode and recycling our
voices from her speakers through her mic. She managed to get out of hands free
for a few minutes and hold a conversation with Moral who had by then joined us,
but when her computer went by itself back into hands free, she decided to leave
Excite so the rest of us could voice-chat there, and we decided to all
go to Tapped In and text chat
with Sue there.
By now Vance, Maggi, Michael, John, Ying Lan, Moral, and Sue were all in
Tapped In and all of us but Sue in Excite. We found this to be a good way to
chat, typing in Tapped In and talking to each other in the Excite voice chat
room. Ying Lan discovered how to send us all what was written on the whiteboard
in my office (there was a note from Jerry Bicknell
there), and John reminded us how to flash web sites on each other's screens. He
showed us the Tower of English
site, and Vance displayed the web site of
the language center where he is CALL coordinator.
We were having so much fun that we again didn't notice a visitor to the
Homestead chat room until she
had already left. It was Sophie, and fortunately she came back at about the
time that Juani showed up. Juani's news was even better than last week's: she
is now going to Colorado instead of Mississippi. The teacher from Mississippi
didn't want to go to Chile! Can you believe it? All those lakes!?? She'll never
know what she missed, and Juani will have a better time in Colorado, where the
climate and mountains are more like those of Chile. Sophie said she had come
along because of Vance's voice message earlier, and she talked about
the
conference she's holding in Cyprus in May where
Vance will be
a plenary speaker. Michael might even come up if he can get funding. Vance
thought it would be a good idea to broadcast the conference in a voice chat
medium like Excite while flashing the graphics he plans to use in a chat medium
like Tapped In, as we had just been doing in the Webheads chat. We were
discussing it as all the Webheads one by one took their leave.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan from Taiwan
Friends and students present: Sue in
Japan, Moral in China, Sophie in Cyprus, and Juani from Chile
April 8,
2001 An odd day in Webhead-land: for the first time in
almost all our history, and certainly in recent memory, there were no students
present in the chat today. Three tutors arrived faithfully and chatted away.
Michael was not there because his computer had crashed and he was putting it
back together bit by bit (byte by byte would have been a little more
efficient). We'll be back next week of course. These things happen in
cyberspace.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and John in Puerto Rico
April 15,
2001 - wfw010415.htm - In this chat we
had Ying Lan from Taiwan, Moral from Kunming, China, and Vance and Maggi,
American expatriates (living away from their native country). As usual we
talked about a lot of issues concerning our respective countries:
- Ying Lan told us that a university in Taiwan had been raided recently
by police. Police arrested students who were found to have downloaded mp3 files
from the Internet. Ying Lan said in Taiwan software piracy was a big problem.
You can buy pirated cds in the night markets there. Vance thought that selling
other people's work was wrong but that artists should want their music to be
heard even if people didn't pay for it, that they should make money in other
ways (performances, songbooks) and not expect people to pay to listen to their
music (for their own use, not for resale). Others in the group thought this
might be unfair to the artists. What do you think?
- When Moral arrived we talked about the US surveillance plane (spy
plane) that collided with a Chinese jet, causing the death of its pilot. Moral
thought the US government was too abrupt at first about the loss of life and
seemed to want only its plane and crew back. In the West of course, we've seen
films of Chinese pilots flying wing to wing with the slower planes and it's
easy to see how an accident could happen even with the larger plane on
automatic pilot, as we've been told. Basically it comes down to what we've been
told by our governments. The US government tells us that all countries carry
out 'surveillance' flights along each others' borders, including the Chinese,
so this was nothing unusual, but Moral pointed out, what if this plane had been
forced to land on American soil (actually, we're also told that Russian
'surveillance' planes have had to land in Alaska, and the crew are fed and sent
on their way). In any event, it seems to me to be a good example of governments
trying to manipulate the opinion of their people, and how differently things
can appear from where each of us stands (but in spite of that, we are still the
same as people as we were before the incident). What do you think, from where
you stand?
- We also talked about corruption in China and elsewhere in the world.
Maggi didn't think people should be put to death for this as they are in China.
Toward the end of the chat, I had to leave for a moment, but when I got back,
the others were talking about relations between China, India and Tibet.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, and Ying Lan from Taiwan
Friends
and students present: Moral in China, and Felix from Brazil
April 22, 2001 - wfw010422.htm -
No students appeared tonight, but all the teachers were there, so we
used the time to hold a little staff meeting. Dave Kees had joined us and
wanted to bring his students to our chats when we weren't using them (but any
time is fine, even if we're in the chat areas). When Michael arrived we talked
out how he destroyed his laptop and what he's doing to repair it. We also
talked about the pros and cons of giving English lessons free on the Internet
(someone had written one of our lists to say we were in competition with
already poorly paid teachers). And we discussed how we might all participate in
the plenary talk that Vance will be giving in Cyprus on May 5th, and which will
be audio streamed live from Cyprus thanks to a little help from Eric, a Webhead
in UK. Finally, we had a look at GroupBoard, which is a chat room that allows
us to draw pictures as well as chat. We examined its capabilities and its
ability (or inability in some cases) to log chat, and we decided to ask all the
Webheads to create a picture in using GroupBoard, and save it, and we would
retrieve it and put it on each person's Webheads web page.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and John in Puerto
Rico
Friends and students present: Dave Kees in China
April 29, 2001 - wfw010429.htm -
We had a nice chat as usual. We discussed what Ying Lan had been
reading. Vance talked about the plenary address he's giving in Cyprus next
Saturday. He explained how it was due to Webheads that he went to Barcelona and
met Sophie from Cyprus and got invited to give a talk there. And because Eric
Baber was in the live Webheads chat in Barcelona, he offered his server so that
we could audio-stream the presentation from Cyprus. So it's because of all the
people in the Webheads group that very productive things are happening. And
Webheads can hear the presentation and join in the chat as well. I'll send more
information by email.
Two mysteries occurred during the chat. See if you can read the logs and
figure them out. First, there were some very
strange people in the GroupBoard
chat room. Can you figure out who they were? And John had to leave the chat
abruptly. He said it wasn't an emergency but he had to fix it in the next 30
min. Now we're all trying to figure out what you would have to fix in half an
hour's time. Any guesses? But you won't find the answer to that one in the chat
logs tonight! Send your guesses to efiwebheads@yahoogroups.com!
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
May 6, 2001 - wfw010506.htm -
Our regular online class today coincided with online presentations given
at the conference on "Implementing Call in EFL: Living up to Expectations" at
the University of Cyprus, Nicosia:
http://www.paddocks64.freeserve.co.uk/CompSIG2/cyprus.htm.
If you go to that website you can find links to listen to presentations which
were streamed live: http://www.nll.co.uk/cyprus. As this
conversation was taking place, Vance was assisting at a presentation in Cyprus
where the audio was being streamed and online participants were interacting in
the chatroom at the url given above. Vance was interacting with them as well as
talking to Webheads in the Homestead chat room. Eventually he told the
participants in the Cyprus conference that there was a Webheads class on at
http://www.homestead.com/vstevens
and some of them went there in their browsers. Ying Lan and John meanwhile had
gone to the conference url and were listening to the presenter and interacting
with those present in that chat room.
I sent an email about from Cypris to the Webheads class. Here's what
I said:
"Michael and I both did presentations at the
conference in Cyprus recently, and our presentations are archived at
http://www.nll.co.uk/cyprus . I
haven't heard mine yet but I don't think the archived version is complete. I
was the first to go on and there was someone at the controls who was unfamiliar
with them and I think he had to reboot in the middle of my presentation. But
Michael's should be there. I'll check them both when I'm back home on Saturday.
" The audience for mine were pretty responsive. When I
said I was going to sing, someone in the audience pulled out a harmonica. We
were accused later of prearranging that, but it was completely spontaneous.
Several of the presentations were streamed worldwide out from the conference,
but Michael in Australia streamed one IN. He had been on the program but had
not traveled to Cyprus, but because we had set up the technology for
broadcasting on the web, he was able to give his presentation anyway.
"Michael, your presentation was oppostite
Sophie's. She had a room packed with people while our
presentation had only half a dozen. But those who were there agreed it went
well and was an interesting demonstration of how silly we all are to feel we
have to gather all in one place to hold a conference. Presentations can be
easily viewed and heard by people at their computers wherever they are in the
world.
"Michael's talk also took place during Webheads'
weekly online chat class. Michael, I don't know if you went to the Webheads
chat afterwards, pretty late for you in Australia, but several people listening
in on the conference did go there and talk to Ying Lan and Felix and the others
in the chat. And Ying Lan was present at Michael's presentation.
"So Webheads are having more and more fun online and
we continue to become better known worldwide. I can't thank Webheads enough for
being such a great group and helping to make our online events possible.
Technology helps but 'people' is the most important ingredient."
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Felix from Brazil, Juani from Chile, and Chris Fry and David Smith from the
Cyprus conference
May 13, 2001 - wfw010513.htm -
The Internet was acting up this Sunday night. Michael in Australia and
Ying Lan in Taiwan were both having more difficulty than usual making and
keeping contact with the usual Webheads sites. Ying Lan was able to reach us
only in ICQ, and even that kept cutting out on her. We tried to chat all of us
there, but ICQ was not letting Michael or Maggi into the chat with Ying Lan and
Vance. Neither of them could get into Homestead either, though Maggi and I were
able to get there from Germany and the Middle East, and later Juani arrived
there from Chile. GroupBoard too was working for only Maggi and I. Our Excite
voice chat has not been working since May 1st. In the end, I suggested the
Palace. I was able to reach two Palaces, one at plantation.chatserve.com and
the other at mycorner.xsia.com, both on port 9998. But by then, Maggi had gone
for a nap, Ying Lan had decided to give up on the Internet, and Michael had not
restored the software to his laptop after the curiously caused disk crash he
had last month. When Michael couldn't reach http://www.download.com to get the Palace
browser, he decided to give up too. I was collecting the logs and preparing to
go myself when I noticed that Juani had come to Homestead, but we had missed
her! So it was a bit frustrating for us, but we did manage to talk about the
big fire (burning for 30 hours!) in Taipei, a seminar Ying Lan had attended
<http://www.cmw.com.tw>, and the
conference that Michael and I presented at in Cyprus <http://www.nll.co.uk/cyprus>, Maggi
wondered if it was Mothers' Day in Taiwan, and Michael and Vance agreed to
"nicely hassle Sophie for the goods." (Now what can that be about? Sophie
wonders ... will she have to read the logs to find out??)
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Juani from Chile tried to
join us
May 20, 2001 - wfw010520.htm -
The chat tonight was taking place in Homestead, with Maggi and John in
converesation when I arrived there around noon GMT, and Ying Lan popping by
shortly after. Moral meanwhile found us on ICQ and made his way to Tapped In,
where he feels most comfortable at his connection speed. Michael and John
joined us at Tapped In while Juani appeared in Homestead.
I tried asking John why he left his last chat with us so suddenly. His
last words on April 29 were that whatever
the reason was, it was something that had to be fixed in the next 30 minutes.
But John preferred to deepen the mystery rather than answer the question. So
Webheads, this and another MYSTERY still remain UNSOLVED. You can still visit
the chat log at http://www.homestead.com/vstevens/files/efi/chat2001/wfw010429.htm
and see if you can solve the TWO MYSTERIES given there.
At the chat this Sunday, we found that all three students present, Ying
Lan, Juani, and Moral were all experiencing changes in their lives sure to
bring them opportunities for a better future. So another challenge to you is to
read these chat logs, find out what happy event has taken place or is about to,
and then write a note of congratulations to each of your three fellow
webheads.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Juani from Chile and Moral from China
May 27, 2001 - wfw010527.htm -
A lot went on in the chat this Sunday evening. We started early with
Rif in Turkey gathering his education students together in his office for their
first online session with Webheads. Rif got in touch in ICQ but soon moved to
Homestead. John and Maggi arrived and we all went to Tapped In for convenience
in keeping logs. Rif's students were very interested in our method of teaching,
and they took turns asking questions from Rif's laptop. They sent pictures, and
we showed them GroupBoard, and Rif tried downloading and installing the Palace,
but in the end couldn't connect to one. Ying Lan had by then joined us in
Tapped In, but Rif had to log off just as Michael appeared, soYing Lan showed
us a video of an author speaking about his new book, The Invisible Continent
(about the Internet). We all had to go a little earlier than usual, which is a
shame, because according to the time stamps on all the messages, Juani came to
see us just minutes after we had logged off. She did manage to catch Rif
somewhere in cyberspace though, and find out what she had missed.
The mystery tonight is: read the logs and find the joke that Ying Lan
told. Once you've read the joke, tell us, was it funny? Ying Lan wants to
know!
Here's what we wrote about the class to prepare ourselves for
it:
Arif Altun is a teacher and academician (assistant
professor) at the department of computers and instructional technology in the
Department of English Language Teaching at Abant Ýzzet Baysal University
in Turkey. He completed his dissertation work on Computer Assisted Language
Learning (CALL) at the university of Cincinnati.
You can meet Rif and see his picture at
http://www.homestead.com/vstevens/files/efi/rif.htm
Rif has a class of students who want to learn more
about CALL. The students are particularly interested in what Webheads do in
their weekly live online class. So I invited them to join us at noon GMT
tomorrow.
Rif's students have made a list of questions they
would like to ask us. I don't think our conversation will be 'formal' but we
can discuss some or all of the questions they would like to ask us. Here are
the questions:
Q1. There are some advantages and disadvantages of
learning a foreign language in one’s own country. How can a learner
decrease the disadvantages of learning a foreign language in his or her own
country?
Q.2 We learned various methods and techniques in our
Methods course. However, we are still questioning which method to follow? Or,
should we have to follow a method? Is it useful to use a method, or should we
compose our own method by using different techniques?
Q.3 As learners of English, we mostly think in our
own language while speaking in English. What would you suggest us do in order
to avoid thinking in the native language when we deal with the target language?
Q.4 Our biggest problems are intonation and
pronunciation in English. How important do you see pronunciation and
intonation? What should we pay attention to –an accurate pronunciation and
intonation or fluent one?
Q.5 Language is a social phenomenon. Teaching methods
and techniques do change as well. As prospective teachers of English, what
should we do in order to be up-to-date and follow the recent developments in
the field of language teaching and learning?
Q.6 We believe that personal factors are important in
language learning process. Do you think there is any ability so-called
“the ability of language learning”? Also, do you think this can be
considered as an important factor in language learning and language teaching?
I look forward to seeing as many Webheads as would
like to join us at our usual meeting places at noon tomorrow,
Sunday.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Juani from Chile, Arif from Turkey, his students
Habibe,
Nilgun, Zeynep, Hacer, Demet, Gonul,
Neslihan,
Emel, Turkan,
Esra,
Dilek, and Kadriye; and ShakiFanatico™, who happened to be in the
Palace
June 3,
2001 - wfw010603.htm - Webheads continued to
enjoy meeting online again another week. Eight hours before the class was due
to begin, Juani was about to go to bed at midnight in Chile and Vance was just
getting to work in the morning in Abu Dhabi. Juani noticed Vance on Yahoo and
we talked about Rifle, Colorado, where Juani will be living for a year in the
USA. We had intended to talk more about Rifle during our regular chat class,
but that chat was almost too busy for Vance to participate in, and the topic
for the night had already taken root when Juani arrived. But Vance did look it
up while it was on his mind that morning, at so in the first part of the chat
logs, there is a url of an Ask Jeeves page with lots of links about Rifle,
Colorado.
When it was time for our regular class,Ying Lan was first to join us,
and we were talking about her waning prospects for marriage and her trip to New
York when Aum arrived. We were welcoming Aum, whom we hadn't seen in a long
time, when Maggi noticed Juani on ICQ so Vance contacted her on Yahoo.
Meanwhile Michael and Rif had joined us after first passing by Tapped In. By
then the conversation in Homestead was getting into differences in male and
female attitudes to sex, so when Moral arrived in Tapped In he was disappointed
not to be able to join us in Homestead. Moral is using IE5 but somehow it's not
supporting the Java applet needed to run the Homestead chat (either that or it
could be a firewall problem, which could also be blocking Java chat applets).
Moral got us talking about the 1989 Tianenmen Square incident and about the
Chinese government's suppression of the students there and of the present-day
Falun Gong sect. Vance tried to get the Homestead chatters to move to Tapped
In, where it is easier for him to participate in the conversation because he
doesn't have to constantly cut and paste the logs there, but Aum wasn't sure
about how to get into Tapped In and the conversation there was too interesting
for the participants to want to move it. Just as it was getting most
interesting, Rif's wife made him get back to work on his paper, and
Michael's decided she had better take over the Internet connection herself, so
both men retired leaving Vance alone to argue the male perspective in the
battle of the sexes with Maggi, Ying Lan, Aum, and Juani.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Juani from Chile, Arif
from Turkey, and Aum from Thailand
June 10,
2001 - wfw010610.htm - It was a wild yet
productive day in the Webheads online classrooms. The teachers Maggi, John, and
I were in Tapped In and Homestead at the appointed hour, with Michael and Ying
Lan joining later. In Tapped In we were discovered by Phil Benz, an online
teacher of some repute (Maggi and I are both participating in an online
workshop with Phil as facilitator). The first thing that Phil noticed was that
my office needed sprucing up, so he determined to teach us how to do it. First
he took us on a tour of his office, which is where Ying Lan found us when she
came to /join vances. Phil has developed a virtual maze of nooks and crannies
in his office which he creates first in ASCII and then produces the graphics
for them, and he delighted in showing us all the way to the bar where we could
sample his rums and coffees. Then it was back /home to Vance's office, by way
of /reception where we picked up BJB to assist us. Phil was projecting
tutorials on office maze creation on all our screens when Michael appeared and
wondered what was going on. Ying Lan meanwhile had moved out to ICQ where she
was telling Vance about her weekend adventure hiking in the mountains and
staying overnight with the local people there, which is when Felix appeared,
also in ICQ. Due to these distractions in addition to recurring demands from
the night-class teachers at his real office, Vance was having trouble
concentrating on the exact and exacting instructions for creating his new
office layout. Actually things would have worked well except that the
instructions included typing a dot or full stop and pressing return, and Vance
took this to be a bullet or a spacer, which must be a common error (funny they
didn't choose some other character to be a significant portion of the
data-entry routine). Meanwhile Felix had joined us at Tapped In, and some other
people had arrived in Vance's office with whom I was unable to talk at all
while trying to interact with the Tapped In server in the course of following
instructions to revamp my office. In the end Ying Lan got sleepy and left, John
had to go to church, and Phil departed right as I was having another go at
trying to figure out what the server was trying to tell me which was preventing
me from following directions as given in the instruction sheets. The two
newcomers left as I was trying to get back to the conversation, but Michael
stayed on to figure out how to create his own icon or avatar to represent him
at Tapped In. With Michael talking to Maggi about her new learning node at KIKO
(Knowledge In Knowledge Out) I had a bit of a breather and was able to
concentrate on task and install my new office drawing in a few seconds and
keystrokes.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Felix from Brazil, Phil from France, BJB from Pennsylvania, SusanneN and DiaLog
from the Tapped In Help Desk, Renata from Germany, and IvanHernandez-Romero
from Mexico
June 17,
2001 - wfw010617.htm - Today's chat, as
usual, took place in not all the usual places. Sue started my day with Webheads
when she found me hanging out on Yahoo at my office, and I prepared her for the
class by walking her through logon to Tapped In. Sue asked if we were still
doing voice chat, so we tried the Telcopoint site, and to my surprise found it
working. I emailed Webheads the good news, and eight hours later, dashed back
from a meeting at work to find Maggi, John and Sue in John's office at Tapped
In. They waited till I told them via ICQ that I had reached my Tapped In
office, still under construction despite the efforts of the week before, where
they joined me shortly. Ying Lan soon arrived at Homestead, which we were all
watching, and she too joined us at Tapped In. Michael appeared, enroute almost
to his WebCT conference in Vancouver, and mentioned that he'd read from my
email that my Telcopoint voice chat room had worked for Sue and I earlier, so
we all tried it. Michael was unable to access it, but all the others were
eventually able to enter, though John didn't have a microphone. Our final
surprise of the day was to find Mark there. Mark was a teenager from Denmark
who had somehow discovered our site through a search at a Danish chat portal.
Mark didn't have a microphone either, but he turned out to be a nice fellow,
and he left a record of his side of the chat in a Telcopoint text chat window,
which I saved, adding what I could recall of the voice part of the chat.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present: Sue
from Japan, and Mark from Denmark
June 24,
2001 - wfw010624.htm - There wasn't a lot
going on at Webheads this evening. Michael was away in Vancouver for the WebCT
conference. Ying Lan was feeling tired, so Maggi recommended remedies. Vance
was freezing in his office despite 38 degree heat outside, which got him
talking about Abu Dhabi before a/c. John told us he had talked to Nicia the
evening before, but had to leave early to go to church. Our meeting broke up
earlier than usual and I was about to log off when Juani appeared. It was her
birthday and she was expecting her family to come by and spend the Sunday at
her house.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Puerto Rico, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Juani from Chile
July 1,
2001 - wfw010701.htm - The chat today was
one of our liveliest ever, with people dropping in from all over the world (we
had participants throughout the day from Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, USA, Puerto
Rico, Germany, Denmark, France, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, China, Taiwan,
and Japan). Antonio started my day by dropping by nine hours before classtime,
just to say hello and tell us about
his plans to visit Dublin. Closer to class time, Vance found BJB in Tapped
In. BJB is organizing a sort of online conference August 8, and Vance paused to
write a 'blurb' for the Webheads
presentation (or short description of what our session would be about).
Meanwhile, John had arrived in Homestead , and he and Vance stood by there to
catch people coming there and help them reach us in Tapped In, where the main
chat was.
All students who joined us by way of Homestead were able to move over to
Tapped In, and with so many guests joining us, The Tapped In chat was very
lively. While we were waiting for others to arrive, SusanneN showed Ying Lan,
John, and I how to create virtual
pets and drop them into the chat. Juani joined us just as we were cleaning
up after our pets, but when Dave Kees appeared,
the mood got technical, with Dave
asking how he could create forms and a CGI bin. Peter happened along about that
time to answer Dave's questions with insights into
PHP and a sample British Council web
page. Peter then got us back on personal matters with a
projection of his family homepage, but
Dave couldn't see it, which got us talking about the Great Firewall of China,
which blocks access to many websites (such as all Geocities ones). At about the
time that Maggi and Aum arrived, Peter projected an interesting
chat site with 24-hour a day
streaming video, where we met
Zaratustra and discussed the potential of streaming video chat for
Webheads. We broke up after two hours of satisfyingly wide-ranging
interaction.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Puerto Rico, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Antonio from Mexico,
Juani from Chile, Aum from Tailand, Dave Kees in China, Susanne from Denmark,
Peter Williams in Japan, Philip Benz from France in a cameo appearance, BJB
from the USA and DarioJ from Caracas who just happened to be in Tapped In, and
Zaratustra in the video chat
July 8,
2001 - wfw010708.htm - Tapped in was down
today, so we met in Homestead. Felix was there early looking for urls he could
use in his reading comprehension class, so John and I made a few suggestions.
Webheads were mostly thinking about their summer plans, so we talked about our
vacations, coming up for Vance and John, with Michael just back from Victoria
and British Columbia. Michael showed us his pictures at
http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/Vancouver/pix.htm.
Ying Lan has an upcoming trip to New York, and Maggi has a summer project
developing a learning center at KIKO. We talked about Webheads participation in
the online Tapped In Summer Carnival August 8, with more information at
http://www.tappedin.org/info/sc/sc01.html,
and Vance reminded everyone that our present Homestead chat site was due to
work only through Sept. 30, and after that we would have to use the copy of the
site at http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/
(the chat will look the same, but the url will change).
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Felix from Bahia
July 15,
2001 - wfw010715.htm - Vance was in Houston
visiting his parents this Sunday, but got up at 7 a.m. to meet the Webheads as
usual at noon GMT. John was also on vacation but still in Puerto Rico. He was
waiting in Homestead and Tapped In, where Ying, Maggi, and Michael appeared
shortly after. Vance's cat Muscat was still there from July 1st, but was so
hungry it ate John's recorder.
We had an interesting discussion of China's recent success at securing
the Olympic concession for 2008, and Ying Lan expressed relief that the
mainland would therefore not attack Taiwan before then (but we reminded her
that Russia attacked Afghanistan just before the Moscow Olympics of 1980). We
also had a discussion of vocabulary in context, especially collocations, and
Vance brought up the concordance tool at
http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/scripts/concordance/WWWConcappE.htm
to look for what words commonly follow 'overly' and 'dear'. Ying Lan needed a
template for an 'agency contract' and Maggi helped her to locate one on the
Internet. Toward the end of our chat, Peter Williams dropped by from Japan, and
we also had another visitor in Homestead whom we missed because we were all in
Tapped In. But who was that visitor? Was it you?
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
Peter in Japan
July 22,
2001 - wfw010722.htm - My second Sunday on
annual vacation, I was away in Big Bend National Park, in a remote part of
Texas near the Mexican border, in a comfortable lodge without phone or TV.
However, John Steele did make it to class, and he was kind enough to send me
his record for our logs. - Vance
Tutors online
today:Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto Rico, and Ying
Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present: Sue, briefly, and
Juani from Chile
July 29,
2001 - Still on vacation, I was
out walking in the Swiss Alps at the time of this chat. John and Michael were
also occupied elsewhere that day. When asked about the logs, Maggi had this to
say: "met in reception at tapped in, just Ying and I. Felix tried but couldn't
get threre. There were others there <in the reception at Tapped In> so I
didn't keepa log."
Tutors online
today:Maggi in Germany and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and
students present: Felix tried to join them from Brazil
August 5,
2001 - wfw010805.htm - After a slow start to
the day, the chat rapidly filled. Rif was busy at work, but wanted to use
Webheads as a part of one of his projects, and he expressed interest in joining
us at the Summer Carnival August 8th (live, online at Tapped In). Phil Benz
popped by and got us talking about designing Bots to automatically converse
with students and other users in Tapped In. Michael is about to do a
presentation on online moderation, and Phil, who has moderated 25 Tapped In
sessions, was a source of expertise for him. Juani dropped by freshly arrived
at her new home in Rifle, Colorado. Sue came with questions about language
schools in the USA, specifically Texas A&M. Sue has never been to the USA
and so we talked about how we might get people like Juani and Denilson and Ying
Lan, who have all been there, to share information via Webheads for the benefit
of those who were thinking of going. I suggested that Sue start a conversation
about travel to the USA on our Webheads eclass list. But Sue's great
contribution for the evening was to get us all
TALKING again, using Yahoo
Messenger's voice client. We had tried Yahoo Messenger before, but now you
can do conference calls using Yahoo Messenger, and it includes group text chat,
and even allows web cam access (someone mentioned that it might not be a free
service for long, either). Finally, as I was leaving the chat, Felix appeared
and said he was packing for yet another job in a different city. Good luck
Felix!
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present: Sue
from Japan, Juani from Chile, Rif from Turkey, Felix from Brazil, and Phil Benz
of Tapped In fame, living in France
August 8,
2001 - wfw010808.htm - In an ex-officio
session, Webheads were participants in a Summer Carnival hosted by Tapped In.
Webheads have recently begun using TappedIn (http://www.tappedin.org) as a home base for
its Sunday chats. TappedIn is a supportive community of educators whose
chat-enabled website and overall synchronous communication environment are
highly appropriate to Webheads. TappedIn held its
latest annual "Summer
Carnival" on August 8, 2001, and invited Webheads to participate. As you
can see from reading the transcripts of our presentation,
participants in the event were keenly interested in Webheads and found their
views compatible with the principles and methodology of the Webheads learning
community, so much so that we have been invited as a result to be listed on the
monthly TappedIn calendar at
http://www.tappedin.org/cgi-bin/calendar/calendar.cgi.
This event, like our participation in the conferences in
Barcelona
a year ago and in
Cyprus
in May, appears to be another milestone in the continued viability of Webheads
as a credible model for at least one mode of online learning. Each of us should
pat each other on the back for being a part of this learning experience.
Through events such as this we are becoming more appreciated the better
well-known we become, and this is due to the participation of each of us.
Thanks to all of us Webheads for that.
Tutors online
today:Vance in Abu Dhabi and John in Puerto Rico
Friends and
students present: Juani from Chile, Rif from Turkey, and Bridget from
Jamaica in the wings, as well as a welcoming sampling of denizens at Tapped
In
August 12,
2001 - wfw010812.htm - After our
presentation at the TappedIn Summer Carnival, Webheads are becoming more
recognized at TappedIn. Rif and John were the first Webheads to arrive, and
they talked in Homestead with Susanne, back for her third visit with Webheads.
Rif had left by the time Vance had logged on to Homestead and TappedIn, where
everyone gathered from then on during the session. Today's chat was especially
informative because Susanne and BJB both know a lot about the TappedIn
environment. Since we were sitting in Reception at TappedIn, we got to 'listen
in' on their advice to newcomers who dropped by while we were there. When Vance
had to go, Maggi, John, and Moral moved up to John's office for a short chat,
and when that broke up, John went back down to Reception to get more advice
from BJB, which I've included here for three reasons: (1) it shows us a few
tricks readers of these logs might want to know about; (2) it conveys something
of the comfortably supportive flavor of TappedIn; and (3) Webheads kept coming
up in all the conversations recorded here.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present: Rif
from Turkey and Moral from China, and friends from TappedIn Susanne, BJB, and
Eleanor
August 19,
2001 - wfw010819.htm - We started out this
evening with a tutor's meeting. It so happened that only the 5 'official'
Webheads tutors were present, so we talked about the upconing
ELToc conference and Webheads' part in it (I
have been trying to arrange for all 5 tutors to co-present so that they can get
credit for their long-term commitment to Webheads and also get to attend the
conference for free; other Webheads will be able to attend our presentation for
free, and also an hour each side of it, which includes a keynote address from
Dave Sperling, who runs Dave's ESL Cafe.
Meanwhile, talk centered around Ying Lan's experiences in the recent typhoon in
Taiwan, and Michael's own presentation on e-moderation for the ELT0c
conference. When SusanneN arrived, we granted her wish for a tool she could use
to draw us a picture, and she used
our
GroupBoard chat toolto draw us a picture of a stunt she had seen recently
in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. After the tutors had left, we hung around
hoping Rif would appear so we could wish him a happy birthday, but when he
didn't show up, we sang Happy
Birthday to Rif anyway (Susanne thought it logical that he should NOT be
spending his time online on his BIRTHDAY). Susanne and I were discussing
Active Worlds and its availability on
Macs when Phil appeared, and we wound up the discussion talking about why we
were interested in online communities such as Webheads, on concept mapping
tools such as Inspiration and IHMC
Cmap Tools.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in Puerto
Rico, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students present:
friends from TappedIn Susanne, BJB, and Phil
August 26,
2001 - wfw010826.htm - The chat tonight was a
freewheeling session held, in typical Webheads fashion, in two locations
simultaneously. We were gathering in Reception at Tapped In when Sue and Ying
Lan decided that they wanted to try the Yahoo voice chat. As we went about
setting it up, Lian and DavidW dropped by reception and decided they'd like to
try too. It was a little complicated keeping the conversation going in Tapped
In and trying to listen to the voice chat, especially as the newcomers were
downloading and setting up the program and had to be added to our buddy lists.
I tried to stay involved at Tapped In while Michael moderated a very active
voice discussion on Yahoo. Moral meanwhile got ICQ voice going, but only one
way (he could hear me). Ming slept through it all but caught Vance next
morning.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Susanne from Denmark,
Moral from China, Sue from Japan, Lian and DavidW (who happened by Reception at
Tapped In and stayed), Heiach (who just wanted to play fantasy games), BJB (who
hqngs out in Reception at TappedIn), and Venny, Carolyn, and Ariol (who had
come for a Webquest session). Ming was online but asleep.
September 2,
2001 - wfw010902.htm - It was another
freewheeling, active, and experimental night with Webheads. I caught a glimpse
of Ying Lan on Yahoo on my way to class and engaged her in voice chat before
joining her and BJB at Tapped In, where Lian, Maggi, and Michael soon joined us
in a discussion of expressions in English. Meanwhile I noticed Rif on ICQ and
invited him along, and he in turn invited Gulsen, at which point we projected
the URLs, with pictures, of the Webheads present. Christina dropped by and
started a discussion on conferences and texts for CALL.
Michael was just inviting us to join him downloading (15 meg) and trying
out a new chat environment he seemed to like from http://groove.net/ when I was dumped from Tapped
In, and by the time I had clawed my way back in everyone else was either gone
or going. The moment Maggi left, Susanne arrived followed shortly by Sue, who
was connecting from Osaka on her way back home to Okayama after visiting her
newborn neice in Kyoto. Sue and I tried voice chat, but with disappointing
results (connectivity not so good tonight). By then Venny, our newest Webhead
member, had joined us from Taiwan. He and Susanne started exploring the
Webheads site and ended up in Homestead. It was getting late for me though, so
I had to excuse myself in the middle, it seemed, of a thoroughly enjoyable
chat.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Susanne from Denmark, Sue
from Japan, Lian from China, BJB (lives in Reception at TappedIn), Venny from
Taiwan, Rif and Gulsen from Turkey, and Christina and hi who passed by at
Tapped In
September 9,
2001 - wfw010909.htm - The commentary this
week is by Susanne Nyrop:
I was unable to attend the Sunday class today
because we had some guests for lunch, but as I got the script in my mailbox
sent by BJB, I spent some amusing time reading the conversation and following
the links in my after dinner break :-)
First of all I enjoyed the wonderful photo tour of Abu Dhabi following
in the footsteps of Vance. I liked it, both the interior and the outdoor
sceneries. And the way you set up the follow of pictures was very easy. Thank
you for sharing your private life surroundings, Vance!
http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/apt2corniche/balcony.htm
(I have neither a digital camera nor a scanner yet. But some day, I may
prepare a virtual tour using some of my digitized photos from a travel to
Vancouver Island last year. Especially I was impressed by the rainforest at
Tofino. I also enjoyed the whale watching, but you can barely see them on the
photos :-))
There was an interesting discussion about what to bring for Ying when
she will go to the US for a year of studies. Will it be possible to find a
second hand rice cooker in New York area? JohnSte (usually in Puerto Rico but
currently studying in Pennsylvania) Peter (in Japan) and Maggi (in Germany) all
agreed that rice tastes better when steamed while Phil (in France) told us he
need hot spicy sauces to enjoy rice. I can add from my Danish kitchen that my
husband does NOT like rice or pasta so we are mostly potato eaters. Some days
ago I cooked a great chicken soup with fresh veggies*, and today I added some
mealy potatoes. Yummy!**
* veggies is American and/or Canadian slang for
vegetables.
** Yummy is American slang for delicious!
Next stop I went to visit the virtual village of Ardèche (in
France) created by Phil and some of his colleagues for EFL learning purposes
http://www.ardecol.ac-grenoble.fr/viva/boulangerie/index.htm
I actually joined the café table discussion with Michael about the
refugee scandal in Australia. I did not get the necessary inspiration for
getting deeper into the local gossip in the bakery about that greasy large
packet the mysterious mad painter Bob was carrying around, so I hope for
someone else to take up the thread Peter has so brilliantly spun. Phil
expressed a hope that more international people will join the party to impress
his students on Friday. Go have a look! There is no fancy 3D virtual reality
tricks here, just a low tech slow connection friendly interface with clickable
drawings of a typical French village. It looks like a great idea, full of
imagination and open ends. I enjoy this kind of online playgrounds. I guess
your students will enjoy this site, Phil!
Last but not least I followed the link to the amazing cave paintings of
the Chauvet grotte in the Ardèche, not far from where Phil lives.
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr
I cannot believe there has been artist Neanderthal painters 30.000 years ago.
But at least that is what the archaeologists say. They may have been a cave
bear clan. As the cave has been closed carefully and no vsitors are allowed, it
is great to have some pictures online, But unfortunately I did not get into the
National Geographic source also mentioned. I wonder how come?
As you can see, I joined the party long after you all left. And I
really felt inspired to go on with my next writing task. See you, probably,
next Sunday!
Yours,
Susanne
PS
Suddenly I realize that this groupmail might even go to my
Webhead homepage. At least, the mentioned links may be available from there,
until Vance has edited this class transcript! So yes, I feel good about that
idea although this text was not meant to be publicized :-)))
PPS
You may not believe this but today I remembered to check my
spelling in the email feature (I usually never do, as my version of Eudora
email cannot handle Danish text) Now, I don't know if the suspicious few words
and names underlined with read will eventually show up in the mail? Better try
and see how it works! (It didn't catch 'read' in the sentence above - Vance
LOL :-))
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, John in Pennsylvania today, Maggi in Germany, Michael in
Australia, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students
present: BJB (lives in Reception at TappedIn), Phil (often at Tapped In),
Peter (joins us when he can), DaveW (frequently drops by Tapped In), Florence
(happened by), and Ming (awake early out in Oregon)
September 16,
2001 - wfw010916.htm - Understandably, the chat
tonight was a lot about the disastrous terrorist destruction of lives and
property just 5 days earlier. Sue was concerned about her plans to study in
Texas, and Ying Lan told us of the survival of her colleagues whose offices in
New York were near the World Trade Towers. Much of the chat cannot be recorded
here because it took place in the Yahoo voice chat area. The connection was
good for a change, voices were clear, and we had as many as 8 people in the
voice chat: Sue and Peter in Japan, Ying Lan in Taiwan, Vance in the UAE,
Michael in Australia, and Moral and Lian both in China. We were also joined
there by Hoang from Vietnam, whom Ying Lan had met online and
invited.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Sue from Japan, Moral
from China, Juani from Chile, and BJB (lives in Enchanted Forest at TappedIn),
Peter (joins us when he can), Lian (who Vance found on Yahoo), Hoang (from
Vietnam), and Dario, Redy, two Bills, and Walter (who all happened on us at
Tapped In). Gloria, Felix, and Susanne all got in touch shortly after the
class.
September 23,
2001 - wfw010923.htm - The chat was the
usual spontaneous Webheads adventure in global communication through various
chat clients and modalities. As I wrapped up my work at my office at noon GMT
(4 p.m. in Abu Dhabi) I saw Felix appear on ICQ so I said hello before joining
the others at Tapped In. I told him we were planning to experiment with Groove
from http://www.groove.net Michael and I
had connected using Groove a few days earlier. It lets you do in one single
space what we do now using a mix of programs such as TappedIn, Groupboard, and
Yahoo voice chat. In Groove, you can communicate with others using microphone
and text, you can show pictures or urls instantly on each others 'Groovy'
browsers, and you can share a drawing tool without having to multi-task in many
different windows. At least that's how it would work if everyone was on Groove
and in the same shared space. John and BJB had both downloaded Groove but none
of us could figure out how to connect with each other, so we waited for Michael
to appear and invite us to the Webheads shared space. But when Michael arrived,
we had confusion over Groove user names (two Vances, and BJB in Groove was not
our BJB) and then it took so long to download the Webheads shared space.that
Michael had to leave before it was done. Maybe we'll try again later.
Meanwhile Ying Lan appeared. She had two serious problems. First, the
typhoon that had just pelted Taiwan for 2 days had flooded the Taipei metro and
seriously disrupted train services on the island. Her second serious problem
was that she had to clean her room (many people say, "So many books, so little
time," but for Ying Lan, it's " ... so little space."). She had to get rid of
some books so she could make a place to sleep.
Lian appeared and asked to start a voice chat. Felix had rejoined us by
then, and he decided to try and project his web cam over Yahoo. It worked,
as you can see in the graphic
here. So in typical Webheads fashion, some of us were at various times, and
with varying success, chatting in text at Tapped In, talking in Yahoo voice
chat, distractedly trying to get Groove running, and at one point watching
Felix talk to us from his place in Brazil. The latter was indeed an interesting
success (I'm thinking of getting a web cam now for my laptop!).
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Pennsylvania, Michael in
Australia, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students
present: BJB (lives in Enchanted Forest at TappedIn), Lian from Wuhan, and
Felix from Brazil
September 30,
2001 - wfw010930.htm - The chat today
branched into many cyber-locations as usual. Sue found Vance in Yahoo and got
him into Tapped In by telling him people were talking about him there. While
Rif in Turkey was preparing for a videoconference with Claire Bradin, Phil B
was showing us around http://www.stuffedincommon.com where
BJB and Susanne started their own chat classes, and Susanne even explored
further into Sonexis, starting a class there and enrolling anyone who would
provide an email address. Paolo from Italy appeared after many months away and
in he voice chat, explained the secrets of pizza, which Ying Lan was very
interested in. Lian and Moral chatted mostly in the Yahoo Voice area, where
they suggested we have a topic for each class, and Lian convinced Moral to try
inviting foreigners to his house in order to make friends while practicing
English. DavidW had just been to Manhattan, which he said was returning to
normal, and he suggested a web site with pictures of someone who lives in the
area. Gwyneth appeared and said some nice things about Webheads, and BJB helped
out whenever asked. Last but not least, Michael emailed that he'd been at a
music festival.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Ying Lan in Taiwan, and Michael emailed
from Australia
Friends and students present: Rif from Turkey,
Sue in Japan, Moral from Kunming, Susanne from Denmark, Paolo from Italy, Lian
from Wuhan, BJB in Pennsylvania, James from Reading, Phil in France, and DavidW
and Gwyneth (denizens of Tapped In)
October 7,
2001 - wfw011007.htm - As Webheads met,
Global Learn Day was halfway through its day-long journey round the globe.
Vance had given a presentation earlier which Moral had attended. As we started
our meeting in Tapped In, those present drifted over to the online
presentations and listened in. Dianne was interested in Help Desk portals so we
asked Michael for information on TAFE when he appeared. James is interested in
learning more about Webheads for his PhD studies, so he talked to John about
the research he is doing and which he has nearly completed, and we looked at
the YahooGroups site for statistics on the drop-off in email to
efiwebheads@yahoogroups.com. When Felix arrived, we talked about his new job in
the treasury of a company in Bahia. Toward the end of our chat, Ebony arrived.
Ebony is a student with an assignment to complete on Tapped In and she got us
talking about the subject of disrespect of unworthy teachers toward their
unfortunate students. Ebony promised to send us a copy of her reflection paper
for EDU 111 and if she does, we'll publish it on our website.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Pennsylvania, and Michael in
Australia
Friends and students present: Moral from Kunming,
Sue in Japan, BJB in Pennsylvania, James from Reading, Phil in France, and
Dianne and Ebony (visitors to Tapped In), and Susanne from Denmark, who left a
message
October 14,
2001 - wfw011014.htm - The chat this week was
an unusually good one, with a wide range of participants expressing themselves
on topics ranging from the current world crisis to how best to conduct
Webheads, and how to maintain passion for what we are doing no matter what the
state of the world or where or how Webheads interact.
The success of this chat was due in no small part to Susanne, who was
caught a few days before our meeting cat-napping in Vance's office. But while
there, she prepared a surprise party for Webheads, sent out invitiations, and
perhaps set a pattern for us where Webheads might in future meet in Reception
at Tapped In and then for the last hour go up to Vance's Office for a more
focused activity. The focus of Susanne's activity, which she had prepared in
notices laid out around the office, was to get feedback on how Webheads was
serving its online community through its website, YahooGroups list, and weekly
online Sunday noon chat sessions.
Meanwhile, Vance, enjoying his trademark Chaos Navigation, was dragging
willing participant Webheads off into voice chats where, following on Felix's
lead a few weeks back, he was able
to successfully broadcast his web cam. Even so we were able to channel much
of our text chat into Tapped In and with Susanne's preparation, come together
in Vance's Office for a party with virtual food and beverages (Ying Lan
couldn't resist the pancakes), and complete with virtual pets (including
Mus-cat who was returned safely bearing only minor psychological scars).
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, John in Pennsylvania, Ying Lan in Taiwan,
and Michael checking in briefly from a hotel room in
Australia
Friends and students present: Susanne from Denmark,
BJB in Pennsylvania, Sergei from Belarus, Venny from Taiwan, Lian from Wuhan,
Phil in France, Moral from Kunming, Yaodong from southern China, Paul in the
UK, Donna in California, Dianne from Tapped In, and Peter and Sue in Japan.
October 21,
2001 - wfw011021.htm - It was a pretty tame
Webheads class tonight, with the chaos browsers pretty much behaving
themselves. Phil dropped by just to tickle Vance's ribs, Aum joined us after a
long absence and asked some very deep questions about Webheads, such as who
supports Tapped In and who the teachers and learners and lurkers were (to which
Vance replied with some constructivist theoretical mumbo jumbo). She promised
to send us a description of the festivals taking place in Thailand soon. This
also led us to a discussion of our Wimba voice bulletin board at
http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/wimba.htm
(and after the session, Susanne, Michael, and Vance all left messages there, so
visit the site to see and hear them). Meanwhile, Ying Lan's brother had deleted
the browsers from her computer so he could play computer games. She couldn't
join us at Tapped In, but she talked to Vance in voice chat and to Michael in
ICQ about existential malaise and her concerns over her move to New York. After
Ying Lan left, Juani arrived from Colorado and described snow to Aum, who has
never seen it. Susanne and Vance indulged in some fun chaos navigation in and
out of Vance's office at Tapped In, causing almost everyone else to leave, so
we decided to move down to Reception to meet with Yaodong and his student from
Liuzhou, China. James and John didn't actually join us for any of this, but
sent excuses in email, so we forgive them.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, Ying Lan in Taiwan,
and John sending email when he finally woke up in
Pennsylvania
Friends and students present: Webhead members Aum
in Thailand, BJB in Pennsylvania, Yaodong in Liuzhou, China, Susanne from
Denmark, Juani from Chile/Colorado, and James who couldn't find us but sent
email, plus a cameo appearance by Tapped In groupie Phil in France
October 28,
2001 - wfw011028.htm - Ever the organizer,
Susanne had declared that today's Webheads class would take the form of a
Halloween party. She announced the event in advance, some emails were
exchanged, and Webheads were encouraged to arrive in Halloween costumes. John
the 7-headed monster won the prize for the most imaginative costume. While
waiting for all the guests to arrive, some of us went into the voice chat,
where Vance ran his web cam as much as his computer would tolerate the drain on
its resources. This and the fact that someone had spiked the cider (that is,
put 'virtual' alcohol in the drink we were serving) distracted us from properly
warning newcomers to our group about the party that was getting started. We
were having so much fun enjoying ourselves in chaos navigation that by the time
we moved up to Vance's office, not everyone in our group was acting strictly
academic (apologies from yours truly). Thus one newcomer left us without being
able to properly assimilate what he was experiencing, although others who
remained on to the end praised our creative fun-making and agreed that it might
have some application to language teaching and learning.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and John in
Pennsylvania, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students
present: An-Lian from Wuhan PRC, Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Rif from Turkey,
Peter in Japan,| Felix from Brazil, Susanne from Denmark, BJB [Webhead] in
Pennsylvania, and visitors to Tapped In Dan, Fan [Luisa], Chris, Matthew, and
Fan, and Sue checking in the following day
October 31,
2001 - wfw011031.htm - We held a
pre-conference practice session bringing together Yaodong's class of students
in China with Rif's in Turkey in 'intuitive chaos navigation' voice and video
enhanced chat.
This was a practice session for the live conference event
coming up November 7, 2001, 12:00 GMT, at the Teacher to Teacher conference in
Abu Dhabi, Concurrent Session #1 at
http://www.mli.ac.ae/conference/t2t2001/schedule/default.asp.
In its most ambitious endeavor to date, Webheads managed to connect two classes
half a world away from each other using live voice and text chat, and 2-way
video web cams. Using his co-presentation as a catylist for the event, Rif got
his class of computer-assisted language learning students in Bolu Turkey
interacting with Yaodong's English language class in Liuzhou, China. Each side
took photos, and some of these and other records of the event are presented in
this web page.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi
Friends and students present: Webheads
Felix in Brazil, An-Lian from Wuhan PRC, Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Rif from
Turkey, Susanne from Denmark, BJB [Webhead] in Pennsylvania, Sue in Japan who
caught our video cams, and students in Rif's and Yaodong's classes in Turkey
and China.
November 4, 2001 - wfw011104.htm -
Vance's comments: Today's chat favored the chaos navigators.
There was plenty for people to talk about in Tapped In, but in a parallel
universe, Sue, Vance, and Felix were broadcasting their web cams (which one of
Vance's colleagues at work saw by chance, prompting him to say hello). Yaodong
had a class of students in voice chat taking turns at the microphone, and the
voice chat filled with Webheads as well, including James who persevered through
downloading the software and joining us, to his own amazement and delight. Dan
seemed pretty amazed and delighted just watching from the sidelines (will Dan
be the next Webhead to buy a web cam?). Susanne's comments: Don't you
think we stopped todays' marathon session just because you had to leave for
lunch! Dan and I had a great exchange of his first expressions of Webheads and
my research ideas, our visitor Joanna from Malaysia (who talked to you about
coral diving) stayed for another while, and later a guest from Greece
introducing himself as "Press" which made me alert just in case it would mean a
kind of journalist or reporter. DavidW came back for just another chat,
too.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: An-Lian from Wuhan PRC,
Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Susanne from Denmark, BJB in Pennsylvania, Sue in
Japan, James in Reading, Phil in France, Dan in Wisconsin, and David in New
York; and visitors Paul in Abu Dhabi, RongG, ShunL, M.E., Marianne, Joanna,
Leah, and Press, and 30 students in Yaodong's class in China.
November 7, 2001 - wfw011107.htm -
The logs record interactions taking place before, during, and after a
Webheads presentation at the MLI's Teacher to Teacher Conference in Abu Dhabi
on November 7, 2001. The logs record preparations for the chat including last
minute attempts to get Yahoo Messenger working and on-the-fly fallback on
Netmeeting and MSN Messenger. The text chat during the presentation alludes to
talks broadcast live to the conference audience from Rif in Turkey and An Lian
in China. The logs record the reactions of others who could in some cases
neither see nor hear what was going on. Participants agreed however that the
presentation went well and was worthwhile despite technical glitches, which
should not cloud the thrust of what we are doing, bringing global communities
together for peaceful and scholarly purposes online.
Participants: Vance in Abu Dhabi, John in
Pennsylvania,Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Susanne from Denmark, Peter Williams in
Tokyo, David Weksler on the Eastern Seaboard, An-Lian in Wuhan PRC, Rif and his
students in Turkey, Fan and David Xiaofeng presumably from China, and a late
checking from Dan in Wisconsin
November 11, 2001 - wfw011111.htm -
The chat log we were able to capture here is interesting in the way the
play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is interesting. Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are the two gentlemen sent to accompany Hamlet on his sea
voyage to make sure that he would be arrested when he reached his destination
(but in the end, they were themselves killed). Many of us are quite familiar
with Shakespeare's play Hamlet from the point of view of the audience. Tom
Stoppard depicted the action behind the scenes, backstage, where two gentlemen
who have minor roles in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, become the stars
of Stoppard's play, discussing what could possibly be happening on the front
side of the drapes. Similarly, the transcript for today reveals the backstage
dialog taking place in Tapped In which allows us to infer what was happening as
I was speaking via streaming audio at the ELT Online Conference, and while John
and Michael were copresenting along with many Webheads helping take questions
in the simultaneous text chat. Meanwhile some people were coming to Tapped In
from the ELT Online Conference to see what it was that the presentation was
about. You can download Vance's talk from this location:
http://lightning.prohosting.com/~vstevens/webheads/stevens.wma
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in
Pennsylvania, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students
present:Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Susanne from Denmark, BJB in Pennsylvania,
Dan in Wisconsin, James in Reading, Sue in Japan, An-Lian in Wuhan, PRC, Rif in
Turkey, Aum in Thailand, and drop-in guests Colin, KeniK, DavidWar, Geoff,
Nora, Ang, Mmoley, and DavidW
November 18, 2001 - wfw011118.htm -
For most people in the chat today, the navigation was not too chaotic.
Only Vance was under any kind of pressure, meeting with Yaodong and his
students in China via MSN and Yahoo instant messengers, and joined in Yahoo by
BJB, Ying Lan, and James, where we were able to hear voices and broadcast
webcams. Other than that, we met in Tapped In, where we met Roslyn from
Tasmania, who joined Webheads soon thereafter. Ying Lan had a problem with a
teacher in Taiwan who did not behave professionally toward her, causing a lot
of discussion among the teachers present. BJ showed us her picture (at last)
and Arthur McKeown, whom you can find out more about at
http://www.arthurmckeown.com/ (now
I know why he greeted me in Arabic). We also discussed the ratio of native
speakers to non-native speakers in our class, and how people benefit from
Webheads whether native or non-native speakers of English.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, John in
Pennsylvania, and Ying Lan in Taiwan
Friends and students
present: Yaodong in Liuzhou PRC, Susanne from Denmark, BJB in Pennsylvania,
Roslyn from Tasmania, Dan in Wisconsin, James in Reading, Sue in Japan, Arthur
from County Donegal, Phil in France, and Nicia checking in later from Belo
Horizonte in Brazil.
November 25,
2001 - wfw011125.htm - The chat today was not
too chaotic, and we had a good mix of native and non-native speakers. Once
participants had gathered, we talked about business English, and we discussed
how we could deal with ethical issues arising from our posting our chat logs on
the Internet, possibly without the knowledge of all participants (see the
notice added to our heading from now on). Marina whom we hadn't seen in a long
time joined us for voice chat, and we
showed her our video cams. Most participants preferred the relative safety
of Tapped In on this one, and stayed there.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, Maggi in Germany, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present:David in Rochester, Sara
from the UAE, Sue in Japan,Yaodong and 30 students in Liuzhou PRC, Susanne from
Denmark, BJB in Pennsylvania, Dan in Wisconsin, Sue in Japan, Arthur in
Belfast, Lian in Wuhan, PRC, and Joanna from Malaysia, Rif from Turkey, and
Marina joining us after a prolonged absence from Italy.
December 2,
2001 - wfw011202.htm - Of the chat today, Susanne
said: "it was a very quiet day because nobody seemed to be playing around with
other fun communication webtools." I (Vance) was on a break for national day in
the UAE, but BJB dropped a recorder and left it for me to find in my office and
James sent in his Tapped In logs, so from the two, we have the record below.
Yaodong had proposed a topic but it turned out he was showing his students
another MOO at this time, so the discussion was led by James and Roslyn. James
was interested in the ethics of posting our transcripted Sunday meetings on the
Internet, and those present agreed that the disclaimers on our web site and in
the Tapped In calendar would probably head off misunderstandings, though it was
suggested to possibly hold meetings in my office, where further notice could be
posted as well (but BJB said she thought this wasn't necessary due to low
traffic at Tapped In when we meet). There was also discussion of the literature
on synchronous communication, particularly its various modalities, and the
transcripts contain some interesting URLs referring to resources on these
topics.
Tutors online today:
John in Pennsylvania, Michael in Australia, and Ying Lan in
Taiwan
Friends and students present: Susanne from Denmark, BJB
in Pennsylvania, and James from Reading, and Tapped In visitors Roslyn from
Tasmania, MHecker from Berlin, and Arthur in Belfast. Sue in Japan had had a
chat with BJB earlier.
December 9,
2001 - wfw011209.htm - Susanne I had to
stay offline today but she went to Vance's office that evening and mailed the
log recorders to herself. Then she wrote this summary (Thanks!! Susanne:-)):
John told us that Maggi had to stay offline because she has hit her back,
please recover soon, Maggi! And John has got some pains in his fingers because
of his way of handling his mouse. Take care, John! Your finger powers are
precious - did you try to use the mouse with the other hand; I have trained
myself to change between right and left to reduce the repetitive stress
injuries that may follow excessive use´s of mouse and keyboard. Vance,
Yaodong and Marina were busy experimenting with webcams and voice chat. Arthur
said he's delighted with the Wimba voiceboard. Vance's computer slowed down
several times because of all the tech stuff. Ying initiated a longer
conversation on how shopkeepers selling fruit on each side of the same street
may compete for the same customers. This topic became even more intereting when
Vance added that in the Arabian souk, similar shops in the same neighborhood
would sell the same kind of goods, while in Australia, Michael meant that you
need a public license to open a shop saying it is not too close to another shop
selling goods of the same kind. Ying lan discovered that in her city, she could
count eight banks in the same street. Also, thre were some questions about the
mystery of the disappeared load of merchandise in Ying's company that we
discussed in an earlier session. Later, Juani from Chile who is currently
staying in Rifle, US, told us how strange it was to drive in snow for the first
time, so the differing weather conditions around thw world made another topic.
Mathias, Marcel, Sonja, RoyStar and Eva from Berlin, Germany visited us, asking
the same question as all their fellow students of psychology; How do you use
Tapped In for teching? BJ was trying hard to make these students do this in a
separate room where she joined them, I think this particular class has spent a
lot of time in Tapped IN lately, logging in one by one and all asking
immediately for personal interviews with teachers. Probably, the regular Tapped
In helpdesk would have liked their teacher to lead some kind of session
instead.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi, John in Pennsylvania, Maggi in Germany, Ying Lan in Taiwan,
Michael in Australia
Friends and students present: BJB in
Pennsylvania, Arthur in Ireland, YaodongC and his class in China, Dan in
Wisconsin, David in New Jersey, Juani in Rifle, Colorado, Marina in Italy, Rif
in Turkey, Sue in Japan; Mathias, Marcel, Sonja, RoyStar and Eva from Berlin,
Germany, and RobertBY, passerby
December 11,
2001 - wfw011211.htm - Yaodong in Liuzhou
China has been very active / energetic in exploring online synchronous
multimedia tools for bringing his English language students in contact with
others in the English-speaking world. He announced to the Webheads list that on
Dec 11 he planned to demonstrate his skills in online connectivity to an
audience of peers in China, 6:30 a.m. GMT. He asked me if I would like to
appear online at that time. Since it would be during work hours, I replied yes,
if I could involve our students at the MLI, http://www.mli.ac.ae. Meanwhile I spoke to
teachers here who thought it would make an appropriate activity for their
classes. A class of nine students was thus chosen to appear in my office 3 at a
time during the time of the event. The interesting thing from the point of view
of these students is that the three groups each ended up getting completely
different experiences.
Tutors online today:
Vance in Abu Dhabi and Michael in Australia
Friends and students
present: Yaodong from Liuzhou, PRC, and Rif from Bolu, Turkey
December 16, 2001 - wfw011216.htm - Vance was away in Oman
today, and there was no evidence left of any chaos navigation. The only record
left was a recording in Tapped In which Vance has posted below. It seems that
the main topic of discussion was color and its connotations in different
cultures, though the weather was a secondary topic. Susanne was cooking in the
kitchen. Ying Lan was still waiting for her visa to the USA. James was about to
leave for Spain and Wales. Maggi was feeling better after a bout with back
problems. Perhaps someone who was there would like to add a commentary?
Tutors online today:
John in Pennsylvania, Maggi in Germany, Ying Lan in Taiwan, and Michael in
Australia
Friends and students present: BJB in Pennsylvania,
Arthur in Ireland, Susanne in Denmark, Dan in Wisconsin, David in New Jersey,
James in Reading UK, and visitors to Tapped In Venny from Taiwan, and drop-in
guests Karin and Elizabeth
December 23,
2001 - wfw011223.htm - Today's chat was
cozily crowded with numerous Webheads gathered round the yule log the day
before Christmas eve. With many newcomers having joined us as well, the chat
illustrated perfectly Vance's characterization of emoderation having much in
common with herding cats. Some attempt was made to 'stay on topic' when BJB and
Vance tried to negotiate getting the classes of DanielKa and Shunichiro hooked
up with Webheads in the middle of Maggi and Felix's discussion on international
commerce and SAP financial software. Ying Lan told us of her visa problems and
the death from cancer of a close friend with two kids. Susanne was concerned
about how to protect oneself from scam emails Vance told stories of a recent
trip to formerly remote mountain villages in Oman that now have roads, and of
an evening spent with Portuguese girls on a remote island off the coast of
Brazil. Felix joined us and got us trying to work out when carnival is. We were
thinking to form a virtual samba school when DavidW arrived, sending everyone
over to virtual ballroom dancing. Yaodong came on with his Webcam and he and
Vance had a voice and webcam conversation on Yahoo. John missed the class
because he was on his way home to Puerto Rico for the holidays. Michael's
holidays were so relaxing he simply forgot what day it was.
Tutors online today:
Vance in the UAE, Maggi in Germany, and Ying Lan in Taiwan; John in
Pennsylvania and Michael in Australia sent their excuses
Friends
and students present: BJB in Pennsylvania, Arthur in Ireland, Susanne in
Denmark, Dan in Wisconsin, Sue in Japan, Joanna in Malaysia, Felix in Brazil,
Yaodong in Liuzhou, PRC, DavidW, MdA in Hyderabad, Daniel and Richard from
Uganda, Shunichiro in Japan, and Robert and George
December 30,
2001 - wfw011230.htm - Webheads gathered in
Tapped In and started talking about each other and about the weather. All the
snow about got them reaching for their virtual hot toddies. Talk soon turned
seasonal, to fireworks and what we're doing New Years. Ying Lan started telling
us about a barbeque she had where she built an igloo of clay and cooked sweet
potatoes inside. This made her flatulent, and she had to release gas in an
important meeting. This got us on the topic of farting, and Vance told a fart
story that Michael read out loud on Yahoo voice chat and everyone seemed to
appreciate. Integral to Vance's story was cassava, or tapioca, which BJB seemed
to know something about, as she sent around urls relating to cassava poisoning
and cassava-related diseases.
Tutors online today:
Vance in the UAE, Maggi in Germany, Ying Lan in Taiwan; John in Pennsylvania
and Michael in Australia
Friends and students present: BJB in
Pennsylvania, Arthur in Ireland, Susanne in Denmark, Dan in Wisconsin, Yaodong
in Liuzhou, PRC, DavidW somewhere in the eastern seaboard, MdA in Hyderabad,
Kemal who dropped in, and Bridget, spotted online
Our most recent
logged chat is here
You are welcome to join us at any of the
locations given at the top of this page!
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Last updated: April 21, 2002 in Hot Metal Pro
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