You are on my main website. On this page, you will find links to my other websites, blogs, and online materials.
My main blog is for whatever reflections, information, and news I want to share with colleagues related to teaching and learning languages and particularly ESP (including EAP) and Educational Technology (You can also reach my main blog via the navigation menu above).
This website is the online component of my blended course English for Urban Planners, which I designed for a group of city planners of the Municipality of Bursa. For this course, I only developed the “Best City” section. My students were lucky enough to be sent by their department to Curitiba, the often so-called “Best City” and a longtime model for sustainable urban planning, which I introduced to them in my course.
As this is a topic very near to my heart, I’ve tremendously enjoyed creating the website and the material and giving the course. It is interactive and contains video, audio, and text files as well as a crossword puzzle, a clozed text quiz, and PDF files. There are also learning tips on many of the pages, which students can click to read and, thus, it is hoped, improve their learning strategies and, as a result, become more autonomous learners.
I hope to find the time to write up and publish the rationale and theory behind this website, and describe how it can be used with the face-to-face component.
This is again the online component of a blended course. This one was designed for my students at the taxi association of Bursa. The Municipality had decided to do more for tourists who visit the city and improving the taxi drivers’ English was one of the steps they wanted to take. On the website, there is a page for teachers, where I link to articles, a book chapter, and a video slide presentation in which I describe in detail the course background, rationale, the blend (online, mobile, classroom), and description of how the material (podcasts, etc.) was created.
On my Teaching in Second Life blog, you can find lesson plans, my reflections on teaching in the 3D virtual world, and a lot of information about language teaching and teacher development in Second Life. If you would like an account of my first teaching experience in Second Life, you can read my article Starting a Second Life.
Related to my Teaching in Second Life blog, there is a wiki, which two of my online colleagues and I created to share our learning experiences in Second Life. It is now being continued by members of the SLExperiments group (see below).
The SLExperiments group has grown out of the original group of three and has developed into a self-sustaining community of practice with more than a hundred members, which I am very happy about, particularly because I have been inactive for the past year or so. The group has, as its main online space, the wiki (above) and on the AVALON community site (AVALON was a European-Union funded project). It is also possible to join the group in Second Life (search for the SLExperiments group).
This is the "hub" for all my websites, courses, blogs and other online presences. At the same time, it is a showcase of my work. It is work in progress, including the content and design, and will continue to evolve with new content, pages, and links being added over time. Be sure to also check out the About page for more information about me.