English at Terry’s

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This is my second try at posting via scribefire.

I feel better – and that’s the most important thing – now that I’ve separated my blogger’s blog and my learner’s blog. One rule of blogs is to update regularly, so I have added a couple of text sidebars for This Day in History and  A Thought to Think About.

I had a problem with the advanced editor on my learner’s blog – it wouldn’t appear – so I asked a question on the edublogs troubleshooting forum. I got a reply within a day and the suggestion worked. That was good!

Less good is that I still have some queries, but I have asked edublogs and will see what turns up. My avatar doesn’t appear on any pages or posts, and yet it appeared in the troubleshooting query. It may be that the theme I have chosen for both blogs isn’t ‘complete’ yet, whatever that might mean. This was a comment from a previous troubleshooting post.

Navigating through the blog takes forever, though. A couple of minutes just to get from, say, Presentation to Write is not unusual. This is partly I guess because of the usage of the intranet now that students are back. It might be easier to work on the blogs from home. 

After mucking around (yes, that’s the right word) with this blog for quite long enough, I’ve decided to begin a separate blog. The new blog will be for non-native-English speakers, and the blog you are reading now will be for anybody else.

This is partly the result of trying to decide who for and why I am writing. (Damn, I’m glad I’m an English-language native! Why can’t we say the previous sentence? And can you make it clear to someone who is trying to learn English?) Very important decisions these, whenever you wield language.

Who am I writing for? Learners of English, anywhere in the world.

Why am I writing this blog? To help these learners learn. To give them a chance to communicate in English with other learners.

How will I do this? By sharing my enthusiasm for English and the world. By trying to engage people and encouraging them to comment. By directing them to other blogs, websites, events, my own institution (EIT).

There are quite a number of further decisions I will have to make, but I can face them in media res once I have the site at least ticking over in some form.

In other words, I guess – and more literally than usual – watch this space!

I have been trying to write a new page and post on it. No luck so far. I see the new page – World Holidays – and I added a post to it when I set it up, but I can’t add any more posts to that page. Maybe it’s not possible.

I’ve changed my blog template because I didn’t think the type on the previous one was all that readable. I’ve also added a blog log. I don’t know how that will work out. It seems to depend on there being enough readers to make the site appear popular. I’ll try and find other blogs that use it and see how it looks there.

Okay, I’ve decided to post in this format, but it’s not the default so I’m going to have to set it each time I write a post – I guess.