I created a newsgroup with Yahoo Groups and invited all male and female colleagues at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to register. The aims of the newsgroup were to share college news, discuss academic issues and student and faculty problems, learn about each other's publications and academic activities. Although messages were sent to the college's 160 faculty members, only 28 (17.5%) faculty members registered. They posted a total of 73 messages (between May 10, 2004 and October 9, 2005), with 50% posted by the dean and 34% of the messages posted by the author. Messages posted were mainly about conference calls and university memos. 71% of the members did not participate at all and since October 9th nobody posted anything. I posted several messages about academic issues to trigger discussion among the group members, but no comments or responses were posted. By contrast, I am a member of a Korean Teachers' Education and Development newsgroup. The Korean newsgroup has 133 members. They posted a total of 685 messages (between May 21, 2002 and November 23, 2005). The Korean Group discuss all kinds of academic issues related to the teaching and learning of English in general and EFL teaching and learning in Korea in particular such as: Students' response on the project and others, a list of MATESL-like programs, creating collaborative teacher communities, action research to collate and write a class activities book for 20, writing for TEC--distance learning article writer wanted, advice for teaching freshmen English classes, putting faces to names and names to faces, good teacher characteristics, expressing feelings, mandatory English, ESL/EFL teacher standards, professional development summer options, call for National Executive Council candidates, courtesy IATEFL discussion board, in addition to conference and course announcements, job vacancies, surveys and digests and others. The study will investigate the causes of inadequate participation among the COLT newsgroup members. Findings of a survey that show why the COLT faculty do not interact in the COLT newsgroup will be reported.
Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf
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