Advice on Final Presentations

It is Monday afternoon, and I’m adding some notes to what I published last week!

The Assignment

The presentation format should include about 8-12 Powerpoint slides, including screenshots of your website, and be presented in the voice of: “What I have learned about business English”. The emphasis should be on what you have learned in your two target languages, including, the professional business languages you have found on websites in your field and the professional business languages you have learned how to use in your blog entries when reporting on what you have found on the web. All the wonderful things you have learned about blogging, twittering, and the web should be discussed as they have contributed to this larger individual and course goal.

Keep Your Slides Simple!

So far, I’ve seen a lot of slides that are FILLED with text, and filled with text from my blog posts and not yours, that, as with Manon, I had to wait a long time until I hear what you have learned! This is not your fault! ALMOST EVERYBODY does this, beginning with Bill Gates …

How We Twitter

I’ve invited you to experiment with Twitter to give you practice in using English, to introduce the use of enhanced group communications for learning, to help prepare you for the rich and demanding communications contexts you will likely confront in the workplace, and because Twitter can help build supportive community and is fun!

Many of you have responded vigorously and well, and it has been just wonderful to see all that English being put to good use! As we discussed in some detail last week, and which I will review here, you have been using Twitter to ask and answer questions, to offer observations and express feelings, to respond to the observations and feelings of others, to share sources and links, to plan and organize activities, and to comment on all of the above.

Deep Blogging

As outlined in my previous posts, our study of Business English online has basically four parts. We’ve all now succeeded with the first two, the languages of online design and presentation. During our last weeks I aim to bring everyone successfully through the last, the languages of professional conversation in blogging and twittering.

Blog Writing Exercises

Where the previous post was primarily concerned with the overall blog design, this post includes the handout I also distributed today featuring a dozen writing exercises designed to help you learn the peculiar descriptive, analytical, and evaluative strategies I am recommending you use for your blog posts. Your task, as outlined in the previous post, is to answer each question in reference to the accompanying text in complete sentences much as you would in drafting a blog post. As we discussed, the questions are designed to help you learn what to look for in a blog and how to write it.

Blogging Project Evaluation Criteria

The problems we all face with evaluations is making them fair, transparent, and not too time consuming. This post includes the handout I distributed today in class and where I have developed criteria and activities that will help you help each other.

How Blog

The Importance of Titles

Let’s start at the top of Marlene’s excellent post on Monet, beginning with the title and noting how it is direct and to the point: no long sentences here, but the proper name: “Claude Monet”. This is excellent, but no matter how good it is we can ask “why?” and how she might improve on it.

Your Blog Post As Critical Conversation

Blogs work differently than everyday language, and I think the best way to understand this is as a conversation or narrative with not simply a beginning, middle, and end, but as a dialogue you entertain with your material and your reader.

Designing Your Blog

In this post I will talk about how your blog design — including the strategies you use to search for relevant blogs; how you describe, analyze, and evaluate them; your choice of blog theme, and the way you title and display categories and recent posts in your sidebar, and headers, sub-heads, bullet lists, quotations, and links — involves not only care in word choice, arrangement, style, but also sets up, influences, and basically controls the kind of writing that you do, the presentation that you make, as well as the use your users might make of it.

Assignment for 7.1.08

It’s just great that most of you have already done most of the assignment already, but here I post it so you can find it easily and so be sure to catch up on all the details.

Why Blog?

You’ve learned lots of grammar and done a lot of language games, so you know the basics, but any context outside the classroom is specific, and each of your business fields has its own special concepts, languages and ways of speaking and writing. By looking for relevant websites — websites used by people in your chosen field — you’ll be coming closer to your target English, and by writing about them you’ll be able to enter into a conversation with them.