[Air-l] Korean students

[Bernie Hogan]

Hi Han, 

Thanks for clearing this up. I actually had an intuition that you were a
part of this work, and I think its a sensible idea.  (And I learned a little
about the many new ICT developments in Korea)

I think a lot of this the wearisome discussion could have been avoided with
a little dose of social networks and cultural capital. That is to say,
people who introduce themselves on academic lists often state where they are
coming from and why they are posting.

If you repeat this exercise, why not get students to learn how to make an
introduction, such as "I'm working with Dr. X" or "I'm an undergraduate at X
university studying Internet and society"? It serves your initial purpose
and enables the students to work on the more subtle cultural mechanisms used
by the reader to evaluate who this message is coming from and why it is
relevant.       

I'm posting this publicly to open up a discussion...how do we teach
undergraduates the soft skills of distribution lists? What are the soft
skills of distribution lists?

Take care,
BERNiE

Bernie Hogan
PhD Student 
NetLab, Knowledge Media Design Institute
University of Toronto

I received a message from Han Woo PARK (Dr) at approximately 6/13/06 12:41
PM. Above is my reply.

> Dear AoIR members
> 
>  Regarding the Korean students, I feel sorry that you started to recognize
> them as spammers. As a matter of fact, I asked them to post in order to gain
> some experience about an internationally-running scholarly mailing list on the
> Internet. Although I have taught them the way in which email should be written
> when sending to the mailing list, I have also noticed that they did not
> communicate with you properly. Since students do not have a high level of
> language skills in English, they hardly shared their ideas, information,
> and/or thoughts with international audience.
> 
>  But please understand that they are undergraduate kids and this is a valuable
> learning process. Further, I think that they will be a good component of
> online AoIR community in the future. Arguably, native English speakers tend to
> dominate the majority of conversations being made on the list. Asian people
> who are mostly lurking have also a right to speak out their words. Once
> students are afraid of dropping email just because their English is not good
> enough, they might never express themselves.
> 
>  Lastly, spring semester in Korea is approaching to the end and my students
> will thank all of you for helping finish their assignments. However, it should
> be noted that my sincere apology goes to those who had wasted their time in
> reading some awkward emails of my students.
> 
> 
>  Best wishes,
> 
>  Han..      
> 


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