Welcome

This site provides more 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.