One class Blog or your own individual Blogs?

I had two main purposes in setting up this class Blog this term:

1. To create a place where we could practise writing down our ideas in English on a regular basis. We could just keep a private journal to write in, as Quest suggests, but why keep your ideas about things that interest you when you can share them with others, who might share the same interests, or find a new interest?
2. To discuss issues of interest that arise from what we talk about in class, or that come up when we're writing an essay question of something. You all ask good questions, and sharing our ideas on them is a good way to learn. It gives you an opportunity to work things out by reflecting on them and getting other people's ideas. And that's what students do at university: in seminars, in research groups, and so on.

An alternative to having one class Blog would be for everyone to have their own Blog. My initial decision to try a class Blog was that it meant everyone's response writing was in one place, rather than spread out over several Blogs.

What do you think? Would you prefer to continue this way, or to set up your own Blog? A hybrid alternative is to keep this Blog and also set up individual Blogs, to which I could put a link from this Blog.

Please let me know what you think. If you have another completely different idea for an effective way to practise writing for fluency, please let me know. I'm more flexible on this than on the formal written work I assign.

Of course, one other aspect of writing fluently is writing for exams, where you have to both write quickly, and worry about the usual considerations of academic writing. For that, we do the occasional exam. The first of those will probably be this Friday or next Monday.

Maybe just only a month or two.

I can't argue Steinbeck is a beautiful place. There have mountain, nice weather, plenty of garden and peaceful town. living there would make me feel very fresh. if environment around you is good, it will make you healthy as well. having a trip or a vacation at that place might fill energy back to everyone who exhausted from their work. I wish to have a holiday on a place like there for a month. I'll stay in a tiny rental house, laying around all day, renting a car and drive looking for many beautiful views, take a lot of nice pictures and spending my time w/ my family there. However, living there in a long time is not what i want. Steinbeck is too peaceful. A small town like this might be too quiet. I'll get boring in a short time, so my answer for the question is "No, I don't want to live in Steinbeck."

Would you like to live in Steinbeck's Soledad?

According to Stienbeck, Soledad is a place that is in the rural area and still abundant with beautiful nature. There are many large green trees, animals, streams or rivers . This atmosphere remind me when I was in the Vancouver, Canada last 3 years ago. I love this environments. It looks fresh and relaxed when I think of green areas and many green mountains. Moreover, in the rural area like Soledad give me a feeling of slow pacing society and people can do their activities without pressure. I can appreciate with the beautiful natural environment. When I compare it with the complex and rush society like life in Bangkok where I live, it is very diffirent. I rather like life in rural country that I can spend my time doing everything. So when I read Stienbeck book, I feel relax and fresh ,and if I have an opportunity, I would like to go there for a few weeks to enjoy my life,escaping from the busy society. But i don't want to stay long because I don't like the sytle of people in the ranch that seems a little bit strang and not friendly for me.

No, thank you. A large city, please.

Although the setting of Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men is peaceful and beautiful, I wouldn't want to live there. I think it sounds great for a visit, but I'm sure I would quickly get bored. I grew up in teh country in Australia, where my parents have a farm a bit like the ranch in OMM. We even used to hire labourers to work the sugar cane, just like George, Lennie and the other men do on the boss's ranch. It was a wonderful place to grow up as a child: there were lots of things to do on the farm, there were horses to ride, cattle to herd, chickens and ducks to care for (I didn't like that so much), and it's very beautiful. A wide river curves around three sides of the place, and my brothers and sisters and I used to swim in it, go fishing, and row boats. The river was bordered by natural forest trees, which were home to koalas, spiny ant eaters, and a lot of snakes. The koalas were pretty, but also pretty boring. The snakes were a lot more exciting, but one day my youngest sister was bitten by one, and got seriously ill. Thankfully, we live only about a ten minute drive from a small town with medical supplies, including antivenin for snake bites, so she was OK.
I still thought the snakes were pretty interesting after that, but I was a little more careful of the most poisonous ones: the red belly black snakes and the brown snakes. There were also carpet snakes, which are a bit like the beautiful Burmese pythons that are found in Thailand, only the Australian versions don't get quite so large.
My father had also left an area of our property unfarmed, it was a little patch of wild forest growth in the middle of neatly ploughed and planted fields and cattle paddocks. It was a wonderful place to explore, and there were different edible fruits and berries there, but again we had to be careful because some of the berries looked attractive but were also poisonous.
Oh dear, I started writing about why I wouldn't want to live in a place like that! And it's true. I love my home, and I'm glad I grew up there, but as soon as I was old enough, I moved to the middle of Sydney to go to university, and I loved it. I think the country is great to visit, but my own preference is for the central area of large cities. I was very happy living in the middle of Sydney, and I love living on Silom Road.
And I think that's almost my fifteen minutes of response writing.
I hope it's reasonably clear, but I know it isn't very well organised. The paragraph breaks were a bit at random, as you've probably guessed.
And you? Which would you prefer? the Soledad area of California, or Bangkok, or somewhere else?

Wikipedia: to use or not to use?

This is a brief follow up to part of what we discussed in class this morning.
If you're a regular Wikipedia user, like me, you have probably noticed that there is a "toolbox" on the left hand side of every article, just under the Wikipedia search box, and that the last tool in the box is to "cite this page". That's the tool I used to create the page we looked at this morning listing the different citation styles for the Wikipedia entry on Of Mice and Men.

The other page we looked at was Wikipedia's warning against using its articles in academic writing, and that page neatly lists and explains the points you covered when you brainstormed the pros and cons of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an excellent resource, but don't cite it to support your ideas unless you're sure it's appropriate, which it sometimes is. I use it so often it's one of the permanent links on my browser tool bar, next to Gmail, but I don't often use the "cite this page" tool.

Ancient Egyptian dream interpretation

Do you know what your dream means?

This week I had to do the presentation about dream as I study in level 4 in listening and speaking class and our group chose The culture in dream interpretation becaues we thought there are more varity and in my opinion I think it is good becuase I can choose a country that I am interested in and present about their culture, so we planed to present 3 cuntries; Thailand, China, and Egypt. I took a responsibility in a part of Egypt to present about Ancient Egyptian dream interpretation; thus, I had to do searching the internet and I found a good information about this topic. If you want to know what Ancient Egyptian dream interpretation is, you can cick this link, http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dream.htm

I am happy to do this presentation because Egypt is my favorit contry.

I got the Egyptian picture from www.crystalinks.com/egyptdreamscrying.html

Did you decide to read this?

Does the title above tell you what this Blog post is about? Before you read any more, what do you think I'm going to write about?

I stole the above image from the magazine New Scientist, in which I read an article a few days ago that has had me thinking about it ever since. In "Brain scanner predicts your future moves", Ewen Callaway reports on recent research using fMRI which allowed scientists to predict what a person was going to do up to seven seconds before the person herself knew what she would do. The article seemed relevant to psychology, which is what we're reading about in Quest at the moment, although it is about normal rather than abnormal psychology. But that wasn't the reason that the ideas in it have held my attention for several days.

What has had me thinking for a few days is what these results mean for our ideas about the human mind. If a machine knows several seconds before we make a decision, before we even think about making decision, then can our decision really be our own decision? In case you're getting worried, when you read the article, you will also see that the machine and linked computer are only successful "about 60% of the time – slightly better than a random guess." Today. Some of the questions that I've been asking myself are: what does this mean for our idea of our own mind? What about our consciousness? Our freedom to choose?

Of course, the scientific issues that the researches are focussed on are to do with how the brain functions, and they are also interesting. There is a lot of equally fascinating work being done in psychology and neuro-science these days, and the results are often as important for philosophy as they are for science.

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References:

• Callaway, E., (2008, April 13). Brain scanner predicts your future moves, in New Scientist. Retrieved on April 30, 2008, from http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13658-brain-scanner-predicts-your-future-moves.html