Yesterday I foolishly promised to answer two questions about my decision to take my blog in a new direction. I’m not one to break promises, so here is my response. Well, at least here is the beginning or a response.
Why this direction?
Why this tagline?
Answering the first question logically requires that I answer the second question first. I wish I’d thought of that yesterday!
English uncensored is something that I’ve been thinking about for some time now. It’s meant to represent two different kinds of censorship. The first is national, or to be more precise, governmental. I have been working with students online from all over the world for several years now, but the frustration of finding that some of my students are unable to easily participate in activities because their government has blocked them from viewing sites such as You Tube has not decreased. I would like to address this problem through my blog and I hope that if I start to provide content that is good enough other blogs might help me by doing mirror posts around the globe to keep the censors at bay. I know little about how this kind of thing works, so I will be learning and posting about it as I go along.
The second kind of censorship which I would like to address is the kind which hides itself under the ‘polite’ mask of political correctness. Any ESL teacher reading this will know that their are certain ’sensibilities’ that we, as teachers are supposed to have. For example, we need to show respect and tolerance for other cultures and for religious beliefs. While I am generally open to showing respect and tolerance toward people and ideas/beliefs, I don’t like the idea of being gagged by this requirement. I would prefer to aim for respect where respect is due, and tolerance when it does no harm. There are certain beliefs which I cannot respect, and certain ways of behaving that I will not tolerate. I’ll be blogging about some of these as I go along, so I hope that this blog will also be a place where I can criticise and be criticised and in the process generate some interesting dialog for both native and non-native speakers of English.
That pretty much covers the “English Uncensored” tagline, but it doesn’t quite explain the direction that I plan to move in. This could be difficult as I’m really not so sure myself yet. I am aware that there is currently a huge percentage of the population gaining access to technology and that a knowledge of English really helps people to break through the digital divide. In the process of writing this blog I would like to explore ways that people who can’t afford to pay for an education can learn, not just English, but about technology and about what the rest of the world is getting up to. So in that respect I am interested in blogging about open source learning, software and hardware.
I have set myself quite a challenge really. I’m reaching out to a target audience that doesn’t speak my language and often doesn’t have access to internet technology. It will be interesting to find out what happens.
