Monkeybrain Lives Again

As
a teacher and a blogger, the Dowbrigade dreams of the day when he will
discover a blogger in one of his classes. We could blog about running the class and he or she could blog about being on the receiving end! Alas, despite a preponderance
of students from contries where Blogging is reportedly a big deal (South
Korea, for example, home to 8 of our current class of 14), up until today
we
haven’t caught a glimmer of recognition when we asked, as we always do,
"Does anyone know what a Blog is?"

Today, however, we met our latest class, young adults from
abroad studing at a major American university, with whom we will be working
daily until December. To our surprise, for the first time, when we asked
the Blog question, two hands went up. We take this as a definite sign
of
progress.

They look like a lively bunch, quite fluent and interested
in all aspects of American culture and language, so we have decided to
use a blog in the teaching and administration of the class. We will be
using Monkeybrain,
our teaching blog, and any readers interested in Blogs in Eduacation
may want to check it our from time to time over the next 12 weeks.

At first, we will just be posting articles, postings
from other blogs and assignments, but we plan to make the students editors
by mid-semester and get them posting as well. Besides the Koreans, we
have
two Japanese,
a Chinese, a Spaniard, a Venezuelean and a Colombian, and all of them
are recently arrived in the States, so we should have some interesting
takes on the campaign and American life in general.

Monkeybrain