However, there are other things to be considered in choosing a topic. Is the goal to be achieved important enough? Is the variation significant enough? I did not think about these questions carefully when I was choosing a topic for my project. Language is an important subject, but language variation may not be regarded as important by everyone. Some teachers may think that the variation is not significant enough to be studied since English speakers from different parts of the world have no difficulty in understanding each other. This may explain why this project did not get as many participants as expected.
Not much refinement work done on my proposal. I drew up the proposal and sent it to the K12 net manager. She posted it in some channels immediately. I should have communicated with more people and let them read my proposal and give comments before I sent it to the net manager. A refined proposal may have been more realistic and more attractive.
I did set a timeline for the organization of the project. The deadline for the three stages of the project were specified. It turned out that the timeline was not well observed. People kept coming in and participated in the discussion without introducing themselves. After the project was over, I asked myself if it was necessary to have a question-asking stage first, and then a question-answering stage for a project like this. Participants are impatient to wait for two weeks to answer a question. They want to respond immediately. If a question is not answered immediately, it tends to be forgotten and unanswered. A flexible timeline may be more suitable for this kind of project.
One problem of running a project in a K12 network is that a message will be automatically deleted after a week or so, and a late-comer will not be sure what is going on in the channel. I often found a message asking me what was happening in the channel. I did two things when this occurred: a) reposted the project-description message which had disappeared; b) email the message sender the project description and invite him or her to join in. Some of them later became new participants. I also sent mails to those who promised to join in the project but did not show up. Some of them asked me to send more details to them and I did, but they still did not show up later. I did send some cheerleader and ping messages. They seemed to be effective in keeping the project going.
While the end was drawing near, I sent out a wrap-up message to coordinate the completion of the activity. All the messages appeared in the channel had been saved in one directory. I wrote a summary of them and posted it in the channel. That is the fruits of the project. To let wider audience benefit from it, the net manager published it in K12.Language.Art channel. It is now being read by K12 language teachers and students world-wide.
By running the project, I learned not only language knowledge, but also the ways to make a project successful. While giving a proposal, one needs to be flexible to allow changes that may be necessary later. Ask friends and colleagues to read your proposal and refine it before putting it to work. It is important to get teachers interested in the project. If you get one teacher, you get a whole class. I asked two K12 teachers in our class to make their students join in my project. They promised, but their students did not show up despite my reminding mail to them. I assume that their students were too busy working on some projects. I learned a lesson: not to expect everyone as your participants just because he or she said that he or she was interested in the activity. No one has any obligations to join in your project. If he or she wants to quit, he or she doesn't have to tell you. One of the great difficulties I can see in running this kind of project is to get and keep participants. We need to use appropriate strategies and tactics to invite telecollaborators, and make them stay until the end of the project.
