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.