Week one

Week one

During this week I asked the participants :
1- To open their own blogs in http://www.blogger.com

2- In the first post, I suggested to put a photo of theirs and a short introduction.
These are the results:
(María Lujan's blog) http://theticworld.blogspot.com/
(Eugenia's) http://marueugeo.blogspot.com/
(Rosaura's) http://rosaura-etch.blogspot.com
(Matías') http://mbasilico.blogspot.com
( Jorge Etcheverry's blog) http://share-the-net.blogspot.com/
(mine) http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com

3-Participants started thinking about the topic they are going to write: music, your favourite sport team, literature, movies, etc. They are asked to read "How to write in a blog?"

Week Two
Students started posting to their blogs
They have added the links to other students' blogs and dropped comments.
We started chat meeting sessions once every two weeks.The participants are students or working people who do not have much free time, so I prefer to give them time to do the proposed activities.

Week Three
We started talking about TAGS , what they are and why do we tag.
Participants inserted tags in their postings.

The organisation of contents in this stage of the project will be managed by the use of tags at the foot of every posting. Tags will have the function of identifying similar groups of topics to facilitate searching and accessing every existing page related to a particular topic in this project.

This method of organisation is adopted because it bests suits the nature of the project.

Each posting will carry as many tags as appropriate. The purpose of the tag will be to label a page for quick retrieval; it is not an attempt to make an exhaustive classification of every posting.

No capital letters will be used for tags. Hyphens will join two words that make up a sense unit.

Week Four
We explored http://www.technorati.com/, opened and created our accounts.
We followed these steps:

• Go to "My Account"
• Click on the "Blogs" tab
• Go to "Claim a Blog" and write your blog url
• You'll see "Begin Claim" and will get a choice for next step, just pick the simpler, "Post Claim".
• Activate the claim using "post claim".
• Follow Instructions.
• Once you have successfully claimed your blog, complete the Edit Blog Settings form, where you'll need to write the tags that will describe yours, and HERE, include Writingmatrix.
• When done, you'll see "My Claimed Blogs". Click on "Ping".
• You can now check for your blog's new content. Your blog will now appear in your "Blog Directory search".

Apparently, if you want individual postings to appear in your Tecnorati search, each posting should be tagged.
We still need to confirm this.

Week Five
This week we have started studying and exploring RSS. I see that participants are not very much enthusiastic with this topic. I think they enjoy more meeting new people in our chat sessions than learning new Internet resources.
Maybe I am mistaken and it is a question of time.
I have sent them some material - I am including it in the section RSS- and some homework to do, but they have not done it yet :(

TASK:
1- What is RSS? and why is it important?
We talked about this topic in our previous chat session. The participants who were present can give the answer with his/her own words. If further reading is available at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

2-Start an account at http://www.bloglines.com 

The chat session was very positive this week has been. Prof. Vance Stevens was in Texas, so he was able to join us on Friday at 22:00 ( Argentinian time). I also invited Doris Molero's students and three of them join us: Gabriela, Ricardo and Beatriz. There was also a new participant from Argentina: Sandra Ordóñez who is doing an effort to catch up our activities.

We chatted for two hours and a half!! Vance and Matías explained us trackback and pingback : two concepts we found a bit difficult to understand.

Slides by Vance about Bloglines:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/07june/bloglines_help.jpg

Week Six
Unfortunatelly we are not working very hard now... We are in the middle of the year and daily life ( work and studies) do not leave us much time for blogging. Nevertheless, we go on with our chat sessions. In the latest one we talked about how to write in a blog and suggested some further reading ( look at my blog http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com)

There is a new participant: Bárbara from Bahía Blanca. She is a journalist and has two blogs: one in English: http://barbaratp.blogspot.com/
and another in Spanish: http://noticiasargentinas2007.blogspot.com/

Week Number...
Well, our work is not so organized as at the beginning of the project. As I have said in Week Six , this second part of the year has found us busy and with more complicated topics such as Pingback and Trackback.

Nevertheless there are good news: I have presented this project in the Escuela de Lenguas (School of Languages) of the National University of La Plata ( See September post in my blog: http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com there is a video). Matías Basilico and I met for the first time f2f that day. It was really a pleasure.

We presented WM in K-12 Online Conference.

Very good news , there are two more participants in my group: Joao Alvez ( a teacher of English and German from Portugal) and Ksenia (from Russia).