Activity Stream. what's up these days?

zhenlijiang

September 30, 2009, 12:38 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi CPod--this isn't a complaint (though it may sound like one)! Just wanted to ask when you think you'll be able to give the AS your attention again.

Intermediate level has always been kind of low-activity anyway, but the last time a teacher / staff member posted a comment there was September 11; the last time anybody's post was marked green/pink was September 10. Other levels also seem to have similar absence of teacher participation. Also, seems like there haven't been any new lesson-related prompt questions in a while.

I'm assuming all your teachers and staff are currently extremely busy with other, higher-priority things.

Since the AS was introduced to give us a place to practice writing Chinese and be able to do so by making brief comments that don't have to pertain to any specific lesson, and I believe I've personally had fun and benefited quite a bit from it, if you've reviewed and had any change in policy (maybe there's been a shift and the conversation boards are now considered just as good a place for us to practice our writing--?) I'd be interested in hearing about that.

It would be nice, if you are keeping the AS alive and mean for it to thrive, to have some more feedback again. The teacher participation / response was very good for a brief period; if you can maintain a more consistent level of feedback I would keep encouraging more people to drop by and participate (I did use to all the time before).

Thanks for listening! Cheers

bodawei

September 30, 2009, 01:59 AM

@zhenlijiang

I think I got a teacher response on only one occasion so i dropped out pretty early. Maybe I should have persisted. It is a good idea if it is actually supported. Maybe we are more likely to get a teacher response on the community boards? But if you want your writing corrected.. I have been corrected more often by other poddies than teachers.

Keth

September 30, 2009, 06:18 AM

I think the AS is a great idea and I have enjoyed using it.However I agree that we need to change the prompts more quickly and we also need more teacher feedback in Intermediate.

zhenlijiang

September 30, 2009, 03:16 PM

Bodawei，user11695,

As I've always understood and acknowledged, it is of course necessarily labor-intensive and takes many man-hours for our Chinese sentences to be corrected.

Before I got out (to hopefully make room for students who wouldn't feel comfortable visiting higher levels yet), I often dropped into Elementary level to chat with a native speaker who's often been kind enough to help me with my Chinese (I help him with Japanese and sometimes English)--in other words, the mutual benefit arrangement so many native Chinese speaker trial users here propose on any given day--"I'll help you with Chinese, you can help me with English"--was actually working well there (but of course it's because the Chinese guy's English is already good, making communication not too frustrating). That's been a lot of fun and very beneficial.

You couldn't make any native speaker regularly come to AS and help us with our Chinese obviously. But it would be good if more did come by and stuck around long enough to engage with us (this is wishing now).

HelenShen, thanks for coming by today. I of course did not post this to put you or anyone else on the spot. I do know you all are busy, with so many new Guided Plan students to take care of.

My question to CPod still stands though. Do you still consider AS worthwhile? When do you think you can attend to it again? I'm not asking you to hurry it up necessarily. I just would be interested in some insight on this.