Baw2010: Week 2

This second week was very accidented. (The proof is that I'm posting this almost a week after!) During week 2 BaWers were supposed to chat and join mini voice sessions at YahooMessenger (YM) and Skype. I hadn't used YM for mini voice chat sessions. I had only used it for text chatting and not for a long time. I've used Live Messenger for text chatting, but not as frequently as I used to. Skype had been my favorite synchronous communication tool for video and voice conferencing; however, I don't remember the last time I chatted or had a video conference with anyone there. But during this second week, I used them again. I had a mini session with Larissa Olesova (a Russian teacher living in the US) and Carlos Barrera from Ecuador at Skype. At YM, I chatted with Jose Antonio Da Silva from Brazil and Sanja Bozinovic from Croatia. I also joined a mini session with Larissa, Arjana Blazic from Croatia, Sue Annan from UK and Chaouki Mkaddem from Tunisia. We visited Chaouki and Larissa's offices at Vyew. I read and commented "The Use of Chat in EFL/ESL" by Teresa Almeida d'Eça (http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej25/int.html), a must for anybody who wants to learn more about synchronous online communication or CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). I attended a live session with Michael Coghlan on "The Changing Nature of Synchronous Learning Environments and Teaching Effectively in Online Synchronous Environments", which I could hardly listen to due to the fact that I had decided to record the audio from the screen. The result was that it was well recorded, but I missed the direct audio preventing me from following the live thread and making any coherent comment in the chatlog. But nothing was lost, since all audio sessions are recorded. (Thank God!) I guess I completed all the tasks except for the creation of my virtual office at Tapped In. Larissa told me I could do that later on. I tried to do as much as I could but, my PC was crazy and I spent a lot of time trying to fix it. So, there's a lot to catch up! I wouldn't like to finish without expressing my gratitute to my Baw fellows and the excellent performance of our Week 2 moderators, Larissa and Jose Antonio. Congratulations on a well done job!