Author: Alison

Having a Smooch with some Online Writing Tools

Having a Smooch with some Online Writing Tools

Whilst spending many hours in front of my computer writing, teaching and creating online courses, I must confess to never having given all that much thought to online writing tools and their pedagogical use. The systematic creation of a rubric in my blended or online courses entitled ‘Useful Links’, providing links to useful English language…

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Creative Conversations

Creative Conversations

For a while now I have been thinking about the paper I’m due to give at the RANACLES conference this week in Aix-Marseilles, entitled Blogging: online writing as creative conversationS, based on the online Moodle blogging course that I created last year and that you can find described in detail in the November teaching note…

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A Splash of Colour

A Splash of Colour

A burnt orange month with mellow sienna shades of fruitfulness. La rentrée is over. Classes are settling down and we are all starting to learn each other’s names. Students who follow the second-year undergraduate distance learning class in creative writing at Paul-Valéry University have been introducing themselves via the first MOODLE forum by discussing their…

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Authenticity: The Unicorn in the Garden

Authenticity: The Unicorn in the Garden

Before the holidays, in a rather heated meeting (it was already starting to get hot by then) a colleague asked me if a text I had written and used for an oral comprehension exercise was authentic. For a moment I was flummoxed.  How to answer? My immediate reaction was of course it is. I wrote…

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Dance the Orange

Dance the Orange

Well, as summer continues fiercely hot, I’m reading Color, A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay (2002). This is a fascinating book of colour adventures, histories, facts and stories. As you know, I’ve recently been thinking about colour and writing and so was intrigued when Finlay made a reference to a poem Dance…

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