The tunnel maze

Well, it's been a while since I've reflected on progress at the ELC Internet Cafe - things have been getting busy! The last few sessions have all involved trips back to SchMOOze where I have led students into the tunnel maze underneath the Administration Building. If you ever get lost in here, you have to answer a string of grammar questions to get out alive (in which case your name is recorded on a plaque at the entrance) and the interaction with the site is kind of fun.

I've been trying to encourage students to get characters and log in to the site on their own time but when I checked with Mehitabel (the site owner) I found that not many had gotten that far yet. I suppose it's early days yet. Still, if any of you students are reading this, you know I'm checking up on you!

Students have enjoyed the activities in SchMOOze, but we definitely need more time for this. 50 minutes just isn't enough to understand how to use the site, do something worthwhile and have a moment's reflection. Some sort of structured follow-up would be good so maybe I should start collecting email addresses and spamming my students with ideas for learning? But even then, it would be difficult to know if anyone was responding to that. Sigh...

SchMOOze

Today we visited SchMOOze, a MOO (virtual world - in this case a university) set up by Hunter College in New York. I was delighted with the results, as we were immediately challenged to a game of Boggle by Mehitabel, the university president, who also happens to be a cat (!). It's been a while since I've played Boggle, but I don't think that's much of an excuse for being convincingly thrashed. Lucky for the students, they can say that English isn't their first language!

We all had a great time, it was all we could manage to pass the coffee and biscuits around, whilst logging in and finding our way to the Boggle room (we had a bit of help finding it). The students were very positive about the experience which is great - I wasn't convinced that they would like it, considering everything in SchMOOze is text-based and we rely so heavily on images these days. They all said they would use it again, so I'll have to find out if they make repeat visits. It seems to me that it would give them some good opportunities to use their English which they might not otherwise make.

Movie trailers

Another decent turnout today, but I was running a bit late and it was the first time that we had to make do without coffee - let's hope that doesn't happen again!! Today we had a look at some movie trailers, to see whether they can be used for language learning (there's an activity here). We watched one trailer together, for Brokeback Mountain. Students were able to say what the basic ideas of the film were without too much help, but of course the trailer leaves a lot up to the imagination. I suppose that it's a good way of practising prediction and anticipating content based on just a few clues. I wanted to show a spoof of this trailer as well but the site was down - such is life!

Later, students watched some trailers on their own and described them to each other, which was a nice way of practising listening and speaking skills. I was amazed to see the range of film trailers available on the web - everything from the 1931 (or is it 33?) version of King Kong, to the latest offerings. Students seemed to enjoy this activity.

One student pointed out that you can access trailers to all the films currently playing in Hong Kong, if you visit www.yahoo.com.hk, but the trailers have Chinese subtitles. For some students, the subtitles may be useful I suppose - one of the problems with this activity is that there are no English subtitles, so you can't listen and read - but I still think that if you're reading in one language and listening in another, then that's going to slow your progress down!

Concordancing

It seemed like a real crowd of people in the cafe today - after just 1, then 2 in the first couple of sessions, seeing six people waiting to do computer activities was quite a surprise! When I asked them why they had come they initially said that they thought it was a fantastic club, but then later admitted that it suited their timetable and they liked the idea of coffee and biscuits at lunchtime...

We did a concordancing exercise (rather low tech, I'm afraid) and everyone seemed to find it pretty interesting. We established that they all do some writing in their other courses, mostly lab reports, as they were mostly engineers. I was a bit surprised to hear that they also write the occasional essay for more theoretical subjects too. The students could see how the online concordancer could help them to guess which word they might need if they ever got stuck in their writing.

On the whole, I would say that we had a pretty good session, though I will be trying out something different next time a larger group comes in, which is to make sure that people are sharing computers. The interactions that this generates around the computers is supposed to be just as valuable as the actual activities you do.

Online discussion

Today Carmen and George showed up and after chatting for a while, we did an online discussion about travel. It turns out that both of them have been to Thailand and the Philippines and have had a chance to practice their English there. They mentioned that the standard of English in the Philippines is pretty good and that the people are very warm and relaxed. George also said that he would like to go to England because of its great history - he admits that he's a bit worried about speaking to English people though! Hopefully the practice he is doing here will help him iron out any little problems that he might have.... When we finished the discussion I asked the two of them whether they found it useful or not. They said it was a bit odd being in the same room and using instant messengers to communciate, and I have to admit they've got a good point there! I pointed out that they could use the transcript of the session to check for any mistakes they might have made, and to analyse their conversation, but it's still not quite the same as actually speaking to someone, I guess...