Welcome
This site provides information about Mystory - Digital English project, an experimental course in academic English which is aimed at international students on pre-sessional courses and asks them to
- reflect on the issue of ‘self’ by perusing topics of family, career field/major, entertainment or community history;
- build personal digital narratives/artefacts meditating one of the above;
- create academic narratives exploring the background of the topics;
- acquaint oneself with and/or develop digital literacy.
The project proposal is based on Ulmer’s idea of Mystory (Internet Invention by G.Ulmer, Longman 2003) and aims to help international students wishing to gain entry to a university in an English-speaking country reflect on their identity and thus gain a better understanding of themselves as learners and visitors to a different (academic) culture in order to foster self-directed learning and alleviate possible consequences of the culture shock.
This is achieved by creating two streams of written discourse treating the same topics from different angles, namely personal and academic, and thus let the students be better able to distinguish between the levels of stylistic formality, a common problem at the entry level. Last but not least, the students are to become more conversant with digital literacy (Ulmer calls it 'electracy').
At the moment the course is in its planning stage and the ideas here and on the course wiki are meant to be a tentative proposal. The proposal is subject of a poster presentation at IATEFL Conference in Glasgow, 19-23 March 2012. This website intends to enhance the poster presentation by offering more detail and so help the conference participants (both actual and virtual) to gain a better insight into the course content, rationale and design.
Any constructive feedback, questions and suggestions for improvement are welcome - please use the contact form for this purpose.
HOT OFF THE PRESS - Dec 2013
The project is going to be trialled with a group of overseas students at the University of Glasgow. We're kicking off on 6 Jan 2014. I'll be documenting the process using a blog on this site!
Excited but anxious if it is going to work. Keeping fingers crossed.
Also, since I am going to experiment with Critical Response Process as form of feedback, the site is going to be updated soon to include related information and theory, especially in reference to designing multimodal texts. So watch this space!