Introduction

This blog has been created to help teachers at CERT managed colleges in UAE understand how a course in Academic Communication was designed and implemented last semester at the UAE Naval College in Abu Dhabi, and why it was designed that way.

Its intent is to help organize and direct teacher's attention to various components of the course, and how they can learn to master those components in order to teach those Web 2.0 tools comfortably to their students in their own versions of the Academic Communication course.

This course was the topic of a presentation given recently at a distance to delegates at the 2012 ELTAI Conference in Vellore, India.

The presentation lasts about 15 minutes (not counting the questions at the end) and with apologies for the sound problems in the first minute of the recording (they disappear) please listen to this mp4 excerpt of the presentation:

There is more information at the other links related to this presentation

• The slides here have hyperlinked URLs:
  http://www.slideshare.net/vances/engaging-students-eltai-19july2012-stevens
• Podcast mp4 version of this recording (larger and clearer than the embed here):
  http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/2012-07-23T01_03_41-07_00
• Preliminary write up of this stage of the course with the above video embedded:
  http://vancestevens.posterous.com/a-small-research-project-on-student-attitudes

In addition, a write-up on the course now ended is being prepared for the September 2012 issue of the TESL-EJ  < http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/ >.  The draft version (in progress) is here:
http://tinyurl.com/nc13teslej