General links for ESL/EFL students

These are very popular links for students learning English as a foreign or second language. Please check them out!

http://www.eslcafe.com/

http://www2.gsu.edu/~esljmm/methods/JMlinks.htm
http://www2.gsu.edu/~esljmm/methods/teaching.htm

http://iteslj.org/links/

The following list of links were all listed at Ohio University. It's a good list!
http://www.ohiou.edu/linguistics/esl/activities/index.html
http://english-zone.com/index.php
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/quiz_list.htm
http://a4esl.org/
http://www.englishforum.com/00/interactive/
http://www.better-english.com/exerciselist.html
http://wwwedu.ge.ch/cptic/prospective/projets/anglais/exercises/welcome.html
http://www.smic.be/smic5022/Onlineexercises.htm
http://www.englishlearner.com/tests/test.html
http://www.eslpartyland.com/quiz%20center/quiz.htm
http://www.lapasserelle.com/lm/pagespeciales/half.baked/halfbakedtests.index.html
http://www.edict.com.hk/sitemap/index.htm
http://www.eslus.com/eslcenter.htm
http://www.manythings.org/
http://www.englishlearner.com/tests/index.shtml

Discovering Chat Bots

What is a Chat Bot? Read about them here or here.

What is the Turing Test? Who was Turing?

How is the Turing Test related to artificial intelligence? Do you believe that passing the Turing Test is convincing evidence of artificial intelligence?

What is the Loebner Prize?
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

What does A.L.I.C.E. stand for?

You can talk to "Alice" here. Click on the animated Bot and you will go to a chat with her.

Human: You are pretty good!
ALICE: Thanks you are a nice person, unknown person.
Human: What is your URL?
ALICE: My URL is http://www.alicebot.org.
Human: Thanks!
ALICE: Don't mention it.

Many Chatbots are listed at chatbots.org

For what purposes are chatbots being used or planned for?

Try talking to ELIZA. What do you think about ELIZA? Tell me about your conversation. What was the purpose of ELIZA? Do you think the software is effective at it?

These bots are related to ELIZA. Try?

How is Jabberwocky different from other artificial intelligence chat-bots?

George, from jabberwacky, won the 2005 Loebner prize for the most human chat bot. You can talk to George…

I'm not like all the rest.
Are you OK?
I am fine, thanks :)).

Or talk to Joan…

You cannot talk to God on the internet, but you can chat with a chatbot called iGod.

Human: Baka yaro!
God: Do you have any idea what I am talking about?
Human: No
God: Me either :-).

The newest and best chatbot is Elbot. What did Elbot do in October 2008?

What is Artificial Solutions?

What is a "virsona"?

An educational chatbot is Abraham Lincoln!

Simon Laven has a great list of chatbots, well-organized by type, with a good, simple explanation of each.
http://www.simonlaven.com/
His site includes some non-English bots.

I like Egon, a chatbot for learning English. Egon is a pizza-loving dragon AI. 

The Personality Forge is a site where users design different personalities for their bots. Here is a list of some of their hits. Be careful! Some of these bots are dangerous!

There is another list of Chat-bots at botspot, and here are some more from Google Directory, and AI Dreams.

You may find some other Open-Source chat-bots listed here:

You can chat with humans on the web, too!

Learning about yourself: Career=Job=Work Interest

Vocabulary for the Career Interest Quiz
To prepare for the questionnaire, you should know the meanings of these words.

Words you probably already know:
arrange, bicycle, blind, cards, check, clerk, engine, fence, greeting, improve, instrument, invent, manage, photograph, program, radio, repair, replace, risks, theatrical, track, weights

Academic vocabulary:
adults, analyzed, area, assemble, community, compute, computer, conduct, construct, conventional, corporation, create, data, design, energy, equipment, estate, file, filing, finances, identify, invest, investigative, job, jobs, participate, project, research, restore, structure, sum, team

Rare or difficult vocabulary:
abused, ace, alcohol, audit, automotive, career, childcare, counsel, counseling, disabled, drug, enterprising, handsaw, interview, jet, lab, mural, payroll, prism, processor, quiz, quizzes, satellites, script, seminar, switch


The Work Interest Quiz
http://www.myfuture.com/toolbox/workinterest.html
Answer the 60 questions by clicking the ones that sound interesting to you.
Click submit.

This will give you a list of types of jobs you may like, such as
Realistic, Social, Investigative, Conventional, Enterprising, and Artistic.

If you click that word, you will see a list of jobs. Some of these will have links to more information.

What jobs were suggested for you by this questionnaire? Do you think they would be good jobs for you? Are the results of this questionnaire different from what you expected? How? Write a blog post about the results. Try to write 100 words or so.

Do you want to try another? How about this:
Career Clickers Expanded
http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/careers/exploring/Pages/IndepthCareerInterestInventory.aspx

Were the results similar or different?

Vocabulary list for Career Interest Inventory (expanded)

Words you may already know:
arrange, brick, calculate, cleaning, compose, dance, deliver, disease, diseases, information, kitchen, medicine, packages, performing, phone, radio, responsible, sick, taxi, threatening, treat, treating, treatment, weather

Academic words:
assemble, assist, bonds, chemical, compute, computer, conduct_[4] create, data, design, edit, enforce, filing, identify, maintenance, medical, predict, procedure, psychological, research, statistical, tasks, transfer, volunteer

Rare or difficult words:
announce, artwork, audition, biological, bookkeeping, broadway, cab, cabinets, choir, counsel, crew, criminals, database, diagnose, electronic, infection, laboratory, magazines, movie, movies, non, orchestra, patients, profiles, routines, senior, software, spreadsheet, symphony, truck, walkway

Do you know of any other career/job/work interest survey/questionnaire/quiz on the internet? Try it and see what kind of results you get.

Career Clickers Express
All you do is click the things that sound like fun.

LearnMoreIndiana has career interest surveys of different kinds and different levels of difficulty.

Lots of links. Try One!
http://www.washington.edu/doit/Lessons/Career/prep.html

For people interested in health careers, there is the Virginia Health Careers Manual
http://www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/ahec/careerinterestchecklist.asp

When you have finished, please make a blog post about your results. Please write 100-150 words. Which survey did you do? Did you do both? Were the results the same or different? Were the results what you expected? Have you ever taken this kind of test before? What results did you get then? Are the new results different? What kind of jobs did the test indicate might be good for you? Do you agree? Do these jobs sound interesting to you? Are there many of your type of job available now?

October 16 Class Notes

Today our scheduled task was to begin Knowledge of Self activities. These include finding out about your learning style, your personality type, and your career aptitude by completing several online questionnaires. It is a way of using the internet as a kind of mirror for self-discovery.

I have had to delay these activities because I had only received 3 students' blog links! It is important for you to send the link to me because I need to see your blog in order to know that it exists. If I can see your blog, I can evaluate your participation in the course. Without the link, I do not know if you are doing anything. Many of the projects we do in this class will become posts on your blog. The blog is a kind of notebook or portfolio for you to keep and display what you have been doing. 

It's a little funny, too, because when I walked around and talked to you, everybody seemed to be working on it, so I wasn't worried, but the e-mails never arrived. Hello? 

You can send the URL or "link" to your blog to me using e-mail, or you can send it by clicking on the COMMENT button on the bottom of this post or any of my posts. When you comment on my class blog, it sends an e-mail to me. You can control this (comment moderation, e-mail notification) for your own blog in your Preferences.  

As I write this, only 7 students have been able to create a blog and send the link to me. These seven are listed in the sidebar of the class blog. If you are unable to complete the task, the class will go on, but you will have received a zero for the two class periods of work. If your blog does not appear there, please e-mail me again. 

Please experiment with using your blog. You can try a different blogging platform, as I suggested, and write to compare the two. You can experiment with the layout and design of your blog. Maybe you want to add a custom header. Try changing the font or font size in your header. Upload images or embed YouTube videos. Look at other students' blogs listed on the right to get more ideas. Some have added daily sunsets, calendars, pictures they took, and other features. 

Some students have uploaded a photo to use as a profile picture, and added a short profile. This is good, but you do not have to give your age, your birthday, or your e-mail address if you do not want to. You should be careful to remember that the blog is public, so do not write anything there that you would not write in some other public place. There will probably not be many visitors to your site, however, so do not be too afraid or paranoid. If you use Wordpress you can see daily stats automatically (how many visitors to your site, etc) but if you want to do this on Blogger, you need to take some extra steps. 

It may be a good idea to link your blog back to this blog or to other student blogs. The Blogroll Widget in Blogger is a very convenient way to do this. That is how I added the student blog links ("feed") that you see on the right side. 

Blogging Task

Today is the day for starting a blog. As we said in class, a blog could be like a notebook, journal, diary, a place to do some writing, or it could even be a place for your photographs and movies or movies that you would like to link to. The easiest blogging platform to use is Blogger. Another site is Wordpress.com. There are several others, too.

First, make your blog at Blogger. (If you have already made a blog at Blogger, go in to it to refresh it, make some new posts, and make another blog at Wordpress.com. Then you will be able to compare the two services.)

When you have made your blog, tell me about it. There are three ways you could do that.
1. Send me an e-mail with the URL of your blog in it. For example, this blog is at http://i-e-e-p.blogspot.com/
2. You could send an INVITE or Notice to me from inside Blogger. Send it to my Bunkyo e-mail account. (That way you do not have to sign in to your e-mail.)
3. You could tell me about the blog that you have made by posting a COMMENT on this post! (It's also faster if you don't want to sign in to your e-mail.)

There are many things you can do in your blog that are not possible with a physical notebook. Your blog is weightless, so you do not have to carry it around. Many people can read it, but if you don't want many people to read it, you can control who sees it. For example, you could limit it to only people who are members of Blogger. You can insert hyperlinks to most of the world's information and insert pictures and movies. You can also change the color of text, italic, bold, change the font, and so on. You can add your own header (banner image) and customize the sidebar with "widgets". I have added a poll, clocks, and a game of Hangman to the sidebar of this blog. If you are good with HTML or CSDS, you can customize the coding of your blog to make it more individualistic and unique.

Please help others with the task if they are having trouble!

As an advanced task, make another blog at Wordpress.com. How is it different? Use it and find out. Let me tell you some advantages of Wordpress. Wordpress has more storage, 3GB compared to 1GB for Blogger. Wordpress gives you a word count as you are typing. Wordpress has a calendar that looks very nice. Wordpress allows you to upload Microsoft Word DOC files, PDF files, and even your own MP3 files, so if you are making a music blog, you would want to use Wordpress. One advantage of Blogger is that you can edit the HTML and CSS. You cannot do that in WOrdpress unless you pay extra money.

For an even more advanced task, try to make a blog which is readable on a cell phone. Make a Tumblr blog. Make a bilingual blog, with 2 languages in two columns! Only your imagination and perseverence can limit you.

Update: I created a copy of this blog by importing it into Wordpress. What do you think? Do you like Wordpress or Blogger better? http://ieep.wordpress.com/

Another update: You can read about some other blogging services here.

E-mail: Using it… better

Today we did some tasks using e-mail.

1.

We wanted to set the Sender's Name, using the Roman alphabet, so that when you send mail, your name appears and not a number or some strange characters !@#$%^&*+)(?{}±—‚·°‡flfi›‹€⁄. (Kanji appear this way sometimes because many people in the world do not have Japanese characters/fonts in their computers, or they are not decoding the kanji properly.)
Then you will be able to communicate better with other people by e-mail and they won't accidentally throw your mail in the trash!

2.

We wanted to add a "Signature file", a short bit of text which is automatically added to each e-mail. This is convenient because you do not have to type your name and address or other repeated information into every e-mail! You can type it once, and it will be added to every e-mail you send from the Bunkyo IMP mail!

3.

I asked you to use this chance to write me a short self-introduction.

4.

You can set your Bunkyo e-mail to Forward or Redirect your mail to another address. IF YOU DO THIS, YOU SHOULD ALSO SET IT TO LEAVE A COPY IN THE UNIVERSITY E-MAIL. I forgot to tell you that. That way it is like a back-up.

5.

By the way, it is best to write something in the Subject Line of an e-mail. Today, something like "E-mail Task" would be OK.