Technical Writing

e-Learning down!! January 14, 2008

Can’t access the UTHM e-Learning tonight so I can’t upload materials to my UMB 1042 page.  Screen keep on showing Problem Loading Page message.

Commenting on blogs January 14, 2008

I spent the night surfing the students’ blogs and giving comments on some of them. I also links some of the blogs to this site. Too tired and sleepy but seeing the students work and effort has given me extra motivation to continue to stay up.

Plan B executed January 14, 2008

Last night, as I was preparing lecture materials and handouts for Week 2-3 lectures, I realised that I am actually running out of time. Including this week’s meeting, I will be meeting the students for only 3 more times! And I still haven’t started on Proposal Writing! So this morning I decided to go ahead with topics for Week 4 and 5. I plan to do an extra class for Narrative and Descriptive Writing at some other time.

So this morning’s class with the 2 BFC students went well. And also the session with 2 BPC in the afternoon got on smoothly and I guessed the students in both classes understood the lesson clearly. I also received writing assignments from 2 BFC students and I admit I’m flattered to see the efforts of some of them. I also got the list of their blog addresses and you can view them in the left column of this blog.

In both classes, I exposed the students to the 8 elements of a research proposal. After almost an hour of explanation, I asked them to work in groups…5-6 in a group. They were then asked to brainstorm  on the possible topics for their research. I also showed them the steps in narrowing down of a topic to make their selected topic to be in a smaller scale, more researchable and manageable.

The groups also came up with names for their groups…Catmen, Exotic, Kenanga…? (Hmm..what a name..) etc.

Introduction to blog: 2 BPC January 10, 2008

In my second meeting with the 2 BPC students which took place at the Language Lab. I introduce them to 2 blog services, Blogspot and WordPress. For all of them, the blog session was a new experience though some said that they do have blogs in their Friendster. I told the students to use the blog for their free writing activity. Their blogs will be evaluated at the end of the semester and the best blog stands to win RM 50. Well, that’s how much I can afford to allocate for a class taking into consideration that I’m teaching 3 1042 class this sem.

I noticed that all of them prefer to use Blogspot probably due to the extra themes available from Finalsense. Received some queries from some students about how to copy and paste HTML scripts from Finalsense and to create links to other websites. I guess Blogspot is less user-friendly than WordPress especially if you are not familiar with HTML.

Welcome to UMB 1042 Blog January 10, 2008

Hi and welcome. I create this blog to share my experience in teaching Technical Writing. I am an ESL lecturer at the Tun Hussein Onn University Malaysia (UTHM). For Semester II 2007/2008, I am teaching this subject to students of the Environmental and Civil Engineering Faculty (2 classes) and Electronic and Electrical Engineering (1 class).

Hello world! January 7, 2008

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!