A4 Notebook: an online community for EFL teachers in Asia
By ted , Section New Scoop Sites [] Posted on Fri Apr 04, 2003 at 12:00:00 PM PST
A4 Notebook is a place for EFL teachers in Asia to share their experiences and expertise. If that is you, great. Even if that isn't you, please have a look around: anyone is welcome to participate

Well, that was the hype, next the reality. I haven't dirtied my hands with Scoop too much. Cory at xlan.org took care of the install and stuff. I just started poking around a bit. I have no perl, but html and the site controls will get me pretty far, I think. The content is still a bit thin on the ground. That is to be expected, but I hope things will pick up soon. School starts next week here in Tokyo and I am scheduled to do a presentation about the site at a new job on the 12th. There are quite a few mailing lists for EFL/ESL teachers, but many of the discussion sites leave a bit to be desired. There is a constant battle between spam and responsiveness. Admin-moderated sites just don't respond quickly enough. Corporate sponsored sites are always suspected (rightly or not) of heavy-handed deletion of posts and/or users. Some sites or lists can become flooded by students looking for free homework advice. Using Scoop should really help with these problems (Thanks Rusty et al.). I hope A4 can find the right balance. Why did I create this site? First, even if nobody else wants to, I will use it for putting my own ideas and writing out on the web. Second, it is a good way for me to combine my interests in teaching and computing. It provides a much needed new rationalization for spending time and/or money in Akihabara. Third, I need some guinea pigs. I plan to use Scoop to create a similar site for EFL learners in the very near future. (Watch for B5 Notebook. Coming soon to a browser near you!) I wanted to experiment a bit before subjecting my students to error messages or mistakes. That's all for now.

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