TEFL Alice is Missing

At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises.  Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include: 

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Streamlining the Workload, Part 2

So, here’s a Part 2 I never expected to post.  Last time, I wrote about streamlining some of the “paperwork” (or, really, data wrangling) for dealing with attendance tracking, grading, and so on. Experience tells me that not everything there works: for example, I couldn’t find a way to include the Student Numbers students input into their Zoom registrations in my attendance records. (Sigh.)  Still, a lot of what I discussed there did help. Generating attendance records goes much more quickly when you know how to use a Pivot Table, and when you’ve given strict instructions for how people should …

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Streamlining the Workload

One focus of my work at my day job this semester has been to make working online a little more manageable. I thought I’d share some of the tools I use to do this, as well as to have them here in case I need them later.  The past few semesters, a series of policy changes have made it hard to make things manageable, or to scale labour in a reasonable way. The administrators I deal with don’t really seem willing or able to recognize that online teaching can involve more time spent on stuff that we wouldn’t have to …

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Rankings and Ratings for Beer: Lessons from the Classroom, and Lessons On the Classroom

I posted earlier today on Facebook regarding the topic of ratings collection design systems for beer ratings websites like BrewAdvocate (below, referred to as “BA”), based on my experience designing grading rubrics for teaching and student evaluation purposes. I was posting in the context of others arguing that the ratings systems on various enthusiast rating websites were relatively less meaningful in the fine gradations; that a been with a 97% quality rating may not be “better” than a beer of a 95% rating. I responded as follows: Yeah, also because people’s rankings are affected by others’ rankings, and by reputation. I …

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