WELCOME TO "READING AND WRITING THROUGH THE INTERNET
Dear
students,
Thank
you for choosing "Reading and Writing through the Internet" as one of
the courses you will be taking this term!
"Reading and Writing through the Internet" is
guided by the insights of a language learning theory that proposes that
languages are best learned when they are used for real communication. As its
name says, this is an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course aimed at
encouraging students to find out how much they can practice and learn by taking
advantage of the technology that has made our world even smaller: the internet.
This will be a distance education course.
As to the second point, there are a few implications. There will be no specific
location for our classes to take place — our place will be the virtual "space"
of the Internet. Also there will be no specific time when all of us should be
getting together. This means that students will be able to choose the most
comfortable hours to dedicate to our activities, being also able to work from
any place where a computer with an Internet connection is available: FALE's
computer facilities, their workplace or even the convenience of their own home.
Below you will find some important information about
the organization of this course. Please read them carefully, and send us a
message in case of doubt.
***COLLABORATIVE
WORK***
Even though you will probably be working on your own
most of the time, collaborative work will be an important component of this
course. To make this possible we will work with a discussion list. A discussion
list is an Internet system similar to a club. It allows members of this "club"
to send e-mail messages to a system that then sends copies of this message to
all the other members of the list. In our case, this will be our "on-line
classroom". What you say (through your e-mail messages) will be read by the
teachers and your classmates. You will be sending the list weekly reports of
what you do (see below), thus sharing part of your work with everybody else.
Because of that the e-mails you receive from our discussion list will also be a
learning opportunity.
To be included in our group you must be enrolled at FALE-UFMG. If that is your case, send a message to Ricardo's class online_rw-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or to Vera's class rwonline-subscribe@yahoogroups.com in order to subscribe yourself to our discussion list.
Please, send all the messages related to this course to
the following address:
Ricardo's class: online_rw@yahoogroups.com
Vera's class: rwonline@yahoogroups.com
and, please, don’t send messages to your teachers’ personal addresses. Every message must be sent to the list. Also, you can visit our discussion list website at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/online_rw (Ricardo's class) or
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rwonline/ (Vera's class)
There you will find all the messages sent to the list neatly organized by month.
| Group Email Addresses | |||||||||||||
| VERA'S CLASS RICARDO'S CLASS | |||||||||||||
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***NETIQUETTE***
See our netiquette with some rules to organize our group interaction.
***ATTENDANCE***
If this were a regular course, you would be expected to be busy with four weekly hours of coursework at FALE. Even though this is a distance course, we still expect you to dedicate at least four hours of your week to our activities. Failure to post a task-related message on the time due will imply your being classified "absent" from the week's activities (4 absences registered)
***ASSESSMENT***
1) 30 tasks: You will be assigned two tasks each week.
Click
on tasks to find the weekly tasks
All the tasks must be posted at http://www.voy.com/163514/ (Vera's class) or http://www.voy.com/163811/ (Ricardo's class) till Wednesday and will not be considered for attendance purpose after that date. You are supposed to keep a copy of each task.
At the end of the year, you are going to choose your 10 best tasks which will be included in a portfolio. (50 marks)
Failure to post task-related messages on the time due will also have implications for your grade. Each of the selected tasks will carry 5 marks, but only if they have been delivered on the time due. If one or more of the tasks you choose for the portfolio has been posted overdue, the marks it will carry will be affected as follows:
****Tasks posted on Thursday --> 4.0 marks ****
****Tasks posted on Friday ---> 3.0 marks ****
****Tasks posted on Saturday --> 2.0 marks ****
****Tasks posted on Sunday ---> 1.0 mark ****
2) "Making Contact": Exchanging e-mails
with keypals and/or internet chat (bate-papo). Further details coming soon. (10
marks)
4) The final “paper” will be a
homepage. (30 marks)
5) Self-evaluation (10 marks)
Please keep in mind that the process rather than the
product will be analyzed for assessment. So, don't be afraid of making mistakes
when working with those activities.
***BIBLIOGRAPHY***
Internet resources (WWW) will be the bibliography of
this course. Part of this bibliography will be suggested by the teachers, and
part of it will be generated by you. To start with, you will be receiving a
suggestion of two websites almost every week. We'd like you to visit these
websites and use them as learning tools.
We hope you enjoy your term and discover the usefulness
of the internet for language learning!
Cheers,
Vera Menezes and Ricardo Augusto