Planning your workload

Now that you have started working with blogs, you should keep using them and considering ideas related to blogs for language learning. You also need to be able to add more to your repertoire of ideas. You are aiming towards being able to make a choice about which technologies will be the most useful for your own course design.

As you will be adding more and more technologies, you should timetable your work to be able to look at a resource in just a couple of days. As you progress in the course, we would like you to consider other ideas such as virtual worlds and mobile platforms. As you work, you need to share your findings with the others, and discuss the choices you are making. It is important that you keep notes about the resources both as you discover the potential and the limitations, and how you feel as a learner doing this. When you start to create your own course you need to be aware of what kind of support your learners will need.

Also, don’t abandon the previous resources! You have now created a blog, and you should keep this going. It would be sensible to timetable your work so that you spend some time every day both reading blogs and writing your own blog posts. As you know, it is expected that you should spend about 15-20 hours a week on your own study related to a Master’s course. Here is a suggested plan for work for a week:

Friday, Saturday, Sunday	4 hours	review the blogs created by classmates; reply to at least one other person read the pages about wikis; read the wikis for the course; make one addition or change to the OLL sandbox wiki create my own wiki write a new blog post (suggested topic: the kinds of blogs I have read and why I think they are interesting / not interesting)
Monday	3 hours	read a selection of wikis that have been created (both related to this course and “outside” wikis) write a blog post about wikis (this could be about interesting wikis you’ve found, or what your initial thoughts are about wikis) download Second Life (SL) or access it on a university computer create an avatar in Second Life write a blog post (suggested topic: my experience of SL)
Wednesday	3 hours	review what others on the course are saying about wikis by reading their blogs; reply to at least one blog post read an article of current research about wikis; make notes and post ideas to the discussions or on your blog (make sure you tell us where to find this!) learn to move in Second Life
Thursday	3 hours	read an article of current research about SL; make notes; send a comment to the discussions write a blog post about SL; write on wiki about SL; do a short comparison of technologies: send a comment to the discussions (or write a blog post) about the advantages/disadvantages of using blogs, wikis and discussions for sharing ideas
Friday	3 hours	review current research on SL, blogs and wikis post to the discussions about this week’s topics review blogs and wikis created by others on the course; reply/respond to at least one arrange to meet others in SL in the next few days (organise a student meeting time – use the wiki to do this?)

You can find two other versions of a weekly timetable / plan on the wikis for this course. The tutor course notes are on one wiki, and there is also a “sandbox” wiki (this means it is for development, for playing around etc):

• on the course notes wiki
• on the course sandbox wiki

You may like to comment on the value of these three different versions of a timetable: this page (where you can only read), the course notes wiki (made a a list) and the sandbox wiki (you can make changes or create your own alternative). Which do you find works best for you? (send a comment to the discussions).

You should have already received information about accessing the sandbox wiki – if not, please get in touch with the tutor.