Toronto 2015

April, 2015, Toronto. With dresses and high heels in my suitcase, I had to wear the long jacket during my entire stay in the city which was boldly colder than Buffalo. You thought it would be a perfect season for some lady look...but NO! You were being naive.

For three days, we had to run quickly between two buildings which were connected by a long bridge and eight escalators. The schedule for the convention was so tight that there was only 15 minutes for us to shuttle between sessions. I felt like a journalist, trying to dig as deep as I could in the shortest period of time. Computer, iPad, iPhone, notepad... I used everything that I could fit into my backpack to record, take notes and make the most of the session time.

The convention was impressive in two ways. First, at the speech by the end of the Master Students' Forum, some student asked Dr. Nieto how she managed to balance her life and work, she said that she didn't have a personal life to balance with. She didn't like night clubs or parties, and she worked like a dog. I suddenly realized that for all the days I had been struggling, I wasted my time by neglecting one simple truth: we choose our own life, and the result will always be "win some and lose some". I had been going back and forth on whether I should go on and spend another 4 or 5 years in academia, and I had so many concerns, family, money and friends. I tried to find the best path to solve all problems once and for all. But it was not the way that life was supposed to be. Life is like, make the choice and take all the consequences. If I really want to do something, I should be strong enough to take all the shadow parts of it. During the convention, I saw so many scholars enjoying every session: it was their choice for life. Maybe they had their own problems back home, but at the convention, they made everything worth it. We don't have to balance; we just need to make the choice and take everything that comes along with it.

The convention taught me a lot for my professional development. Equally importantly, I learned a lot from the academic sessions. There were so many sessions everyday, and we got to choose whichever interested us personally. I was attracted to sessions concerning writing and technology. I was extremely amazed by how technology was being used in writing teaching, like MOOC and some other tools that teachers introduced, e.g. Crocodoc. They were both eye-opening tools. Writing is being taught to students in a totally new way. Teachers and students are interacting with a variety of online tools and making writing a fun job. Teachers may find technology extremely helpful in giving feedback and even pre and after writing. I am totally confident that I may be able to establish my own online writing center some day.

Teaching is becoming not only a career but also a life to me. I am really glad that I made the decision. I will move ahead until the day when students don't need me any more. Toronto is my starting point.

Good night, Toronto. Tomorrow is gonna be great!

Reconsidering what tweeting means to language learners

I was quite confident in my last post when I said it could be quite demanding and stressful for language learners to tweet in English, since twitter feed only allows 140 characters. But now, I am reconsidering my point. As a matter of fact, I realized that I was too negative about challenges. 

Chinese language is loose, scattered and flowing wherever thoughts go. I told my students to be concise and straightforward for millions of times when I was reviewing their essays. As a learner myself, it took me so many years to give up detouring in sentence writing and intentionally written long sentences (still trying). Maybe a limited space would be a new and better way for students to rethink their syntactic structure and reshape their writing. 

There is a famous metaphor about Chinese and English. Chinese is like grapes and English is like bamboo. Grapes expand to all directions in small units and bamboo goes straight from one section to another logically. Maybe twitter's linear text input space may reshape Chinese speakers' languaging process and improve their cognitive level of thinking in English. 

 

Happy Chinese New Year

2015 Chinese New Year Gala CCTV--Chinese Kungfu Show

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone! 

Diigo and Pinterest

my Pinterest link
my Diigo link

I like both tools, although in different ways.

Features they share are:

multiple tags;

reference to resources;

following others and being followed.

Diigo is an integrated resource organizer, and Pinterest is a casual notepad. Diigo has multiple functions that Pinterest doesn't have: upload PDF, read PDF files in an editable reader, set up a mini-blog where you may interact with your friends, link to websites and message with your friends. Another thing I like to mention about Diigo is  that it has a special feature of PDF reading and editing. It is quite useful for us who have to read so many articles. It would be wonderful if we could upload them and organize them with tags so that we might be able to find them more easily later.

Pinterest is like a notepad I keep random things. It is a fragmentized resource manager, which is quite useful in a way that we can keep the pieces of ideas, inspirations or information which would just slip away if we couldn't find a good place to net them.  Since I have a habit of keeping such information on notepads, I find it a good fit for me to pin things I like while reading or pin useful sharing from others. It is a different way of integrating information.