I've just found the first blog entry I ever made, on a blog called My Blog.



4/16/2002 6:03:36 AM | Dennis Newson]


Just returned to X from a week in England, where I heard about Blogger on Radio 4. "This is something for me", I thought.

I want to give it a spin and see how it works out.

I'm not doing too well on the blogging course - for the simple reason that I have been away for 10 days and am due to go away again on Friday. It's to be noted that the course has a synchronous element and, personally, I've always found one of the great attractions of emailing and e-lists is that they are asynchronous - you can write when it suits you and others can read when it suits them. To be fair, though, this is true of blogs as well.

Of course, it is fun playing with all the possibilities on offer and fun to see oneself "up in lights" with the html and the uploading done for one.

Still.... When I'm a bit more adept at switching from Blogger to Bloglines, sending photos to the correct site, managing to contribute to a discussion in the correct place etc. I want to turn my attention to the 64,000$ questions: "How can blogs be used in EFL, and can they do something that other resources can't - or can they do something better?

Dennis in suit 

Typical. I created an RSS feed from this blog, which is working. But I can't remember or see how I managed to do this!

Typical. I have an RSS link to this blog which feeds into my reader. But I can't remember or see how I did this!

Glad to say I've manaaged, by re-doing, to get the URLs I quote to land where they should and not with Microsoft. Learning by making mistakes? Interskills - c.f. interlanguage?

Very disappointing. I marked two links. When I copy the URLS and paste into Opera, they both go straight to the intended pages. From within BLOGNOST, though, one is unavailable - although it is a Blogger address, and other ends up in the Microsoft Word update page!!

There is a lot of basic stuff I need to learn. I've tried, for example, to get rid of pages, but they always come back!

If anyone stumbles across BLOGNOST, be assured it will be tidied up, getting rid of some repetitiveness and deleting one entry that never belonged to BLOGNOST in the first place.

I'll get better next year.

I'm still trying to find out what I can about TEFL and blogs - boning up on blogging.
There is the first TEFL blog I ever came across - ages ago - written by Jeffrey Hill:

http://englishblog.blogspot.com/

This has been discontinued, but the archives are there, and there is a follow-on site.


There is a useful, short article at:


http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej22/int.html

Why BLOGNOST?

BLOG from WEBLOG is obvious.

I used to have an email address containing DENOS (denos@uos.de) - Dennis of Osnabrueck, the town in Germany where I live. This was to distinguish me from another Dennis. (The two of us were running the list CETEFL-L - Central and Eastern European English as a Foreign Language List).

So far: BLOG(de)NOS.

The 'T' was added to remind one of the Russian word GLASNOST.

BLOGNOST

Q.E.D.

I've just changed the title of this blog to BLOGNOST.