Multilitteratus Incognitus

My first blog post for the UMass Online blog is now live, check it out here I think I may have approached the subject here before, I don't really remember, but orientations are, I think, pretty important when you are entering an academic program.  It really sets the tone for the program, both in term of curriculum and all the administrative minutiae that we as students have to deal with (and if done right, it creates connections to classmates, alumni, and outside organizations!) What do you think? Have you been to an orientation that rocked?  Have you been to one that's been sub-par?  What's worked for you as a student and what would you like to see?

Over the summer I started working on my field experience, one of the last requirement for my MA in Applied Linguistics.  Honestly, last summer I would have preferred to have gotten the practicum waived and taken phonetics and phonemics instead, but now I am glad that I have to take it.  I am getting a lot out of observing a seasoned (and pretty awesome) instructor do what they do best.  Over the summer, to get out of the "teaching" requirement (which seems to have been absent in previous semesters... but anyway...) I was thinking of creating an eLearning module, perhaps using something like captivate, where I would be able to use communicative approaches to teach content and language.  My initial thought was to teach a little bit about the Apple of Discord and Paris' choice.  This would have coincided with conditionals, so students could learn a little more about what supposedly happened that lead to the Trojan War and the events in the Iliad, and they would h...