1.10.08
Last touches of my promotion thesis ...
I have been working persistently for the past years in my last promotion thesis to full professor. It is entitled "Socio-cultural theory and Web 2.0 tools in EFL writing: A case study". After having spent a sabbatical year as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto where I was surrounded by experts such as James Cummins, Merryl Swain and Alister Cumming, I became in contact with the Canadian view of Activity Theory and the sociocultural aspects of Vygotsky´s tenets, a broader view of constructivism.
On the other hand, in the past three years I have participated not only in the EVO Becoming a Webhead sessions but in many other groups that prepared me to handle wikis and blogs as well as other Web 2.0 tools in my courses. These sessions also allowed me to meet many colleagues from all over the World, an opportunity that made posible two international collaborations with students in Sacramento California and also in Nagasaki, Japan. I learned a lot from this experience and so did my students and theirs.
Now I am in the final stage of writing up the last chapters of my thesis about the online collaborative writing course I set up during the third term of the academic year (April-July 2008) where seven students actively participated to reflect on their EFL writing, what it means to write in a foreign language and ways to self-monitor and correct their own texts. This is an example of the activities and materials for our first week of class. My deadline to hand it in is October 15th and I think it will be ready, hooray, yippee, woo-hoo, yahoo ;-) !!!
Labels: collaborative_writing, promotion_thesis, wikis
