Leadership and Values in Language Education - Al Akhawayn ...

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42Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferencetowards face-to-face communication (or voice communication by phone) orbecause it has not yet become a regular daily practice for some of them.I hope that one day we can hold real general council meetings online throughonline discussion. By that I mean to have ‘a specified/ agreed agenda’ of themeeting, discussion of the points of the agenda within a specified period of time,a moderator to organise the discussion and recapitulate main points, a reporter,etc. This will surely save us time, energy and money, given the fact that themembers of the board live in different cities.4.2.2. Other MATE YahoogroupsThere are other MATE yahoogroups for different types of groups and fordifferent purposes. All of them represent a very important network and contributeto a positive change in attitudes towards and uses of online communication.Among these, the following can be mentioned:• Mateteams yahoogroup: for communication among the national board, theregional boards and project managers;• Mateict yahoogroup: a special interest group for members interested inICT in ELT;• Citizenship yahoogroup: a special interest group for members interestedin citizenship education• MATE supervisors yahoogroup: for ELT supervisors/inspectors;• MATE middle school teacher yahoogroup: for ELT teachers practicing inlower secondary schools;• Regional boards yahoogroups: each regional branch has its ownyahoogroup to deal with and manage local issues and affairs.The problem with these yahoogroups is that they are not structured andmoderation is almost absent. The most important activity is exchanginginformation/news and documents.4.3. Online environments (nicenet)Nicenet is a free service provided by www.nicenet.net. It is described by itscreators as a “free web-based learning environment for classrooms, distancelearning programs and collaborative academic projects.” It is “a sophisticatedcommunication tool that brings powerful World-Wide-Web based conferencing,personal messaging, document sharing, scheduling and link/resource sharing to avariety of learning environments. Nicenet provides the ICA free of charge with
43Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferenceno advertising.” (http://www.nicenet.net/ica/ica_info.cfm). MATE has used thisplatform for threaded discussions and online conferencing. Though its use hasbeen limited but with its potential as a pedagogical and collaborative tool, nicenetis always a useful service to the association and its members.4.4. MATE Website: www.mate.org.maThis is a very important online communication channel as it facilitates contactbetween MATE and its members as well as with the rest of the world. Thewebsite is also equipped with an automatic counter that gives detailedinformation about the people who visit MATE website, such as their origin, theamount of time they spent on the site, whether it is first time visit, the initial pagewherefrom they entered MATE website, the most popular webpages, etc. Thesedata are very informative and can be helpful in the management of the associationand in conducting some action research.The website is an important means of communicating activities and events notonly nationally but also internationally. It is the mirror that reflects the visibilityand presence of the association in the professional and associative world. It is truethat at a certain time (two years ago), the website stopped to convey its objectiveas it stopped to be updated and most often it was deserted. But when life has beenbrought to it, it started to be consulted regularly. Whenever there is a futureevent, we receive a lot of emails from different members requesting moreinformation, but once the event is published on the website the number of emailsasking about that event drops dramatically which shows that the website plays animportant role as a means of communicating information.4.5. Combination of two or more online communication channels:The role of online communication in managing MATE affairs andcommunicating with members and other partners is even more amplified whentwo or more channels are combined, e.g. email and website, personal emails andyahoogroups, or by using all the above mentioned channels together. To give alive example of that I take the example of Middle school teachers’ seminar. Itwas prepared, announced and managed almost 100% online, which represented aturning point in the life of the association. Teachers expressed their desire forparticipation and sent personal information to the organizing committee. Thelatter made the final selected list of participants based on criteria announced viaemail and the website and in most cases without any face-to-face contact.Similarly, the 27 th national conference was announced and managed almost 100%online. The call for papers was posted via email and the website. The programme,fees and venue were communicated online. The same thing for responding to
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