The project was scheduled to run from Mar 6 to April 16 with three stages. In the first stage, students would post questions, and in the second stage, the concentration would be on answering questions. The third would be the summary stage. It was an open project. Any K12 students could participate in it.
I sent my project proposal to Helen Sternheim, K12 network manager. Having reviewed it, she gave me a reply that the project was worth running in a K12 channel. What I needed to do was to advertise it to get more participants. She posted my proposal into several channels, including K12.Chat.Teachers, K12.Language.Art. I got some responses immediately. One teacher said that her class was exchanging email with a class in New Zealand, she would let her class join in this project. One interesting response was posted in K12.Language.Art channel. It came from Australia, written in a dialect I could not understand. I posted a follow-up message asking someone to translate it for me, I did get a translated message:
G'day Rongchang!
(Goodday Rongchang)
Hooly-Dooly. Sat down this arvo and read your billydoo. Thanks for giving us the drum. Bonza project. (Good heavens! I sat down this afternoon and read your msg. Thank you for providing us with the information. Great idea for a project.)
I hope that oodles of sheilas and blokes take part in this project. (I hope that lots of females and males take part in this project.)
I strongly advise all readers of this echo to take a gander at the project description, fair dinkum! (I strongly advise all readers of this echo to take a look at the project description, really.)
Got to go and have some tucker now, so I'll shoot through. Ooroo! (I have to go and have some food now so I'll have to leave you/go.)
I got another similar message after this one. Some teachers showed interest in participating in this project. I also asked some of the K12 teachers in our class to see if their students could participate in my project. Two of them promised that their students would.
My application for a channel was approved. Helen assigned this project to K12 .Sys.Channel9, and helped me to advertise it again. The project started as it was planned.
Not as many participants coming in as I had expected. None of those teachers who had promised me showed up. It was a bit disappointing. A few days later, I got some participants. They asked some questions related to English language variation. Some of those participants sounded like K12.teachers. I also advertised it in the channels of high school students in the hope that some individual students would like the project and join in. I looked at some other language channels and found some interesting messages there. I reposted some of them into K12 .Sys.Channel9, which aroused some interesting discussions. Gradually, I got more participants.
After the first stage was over. I summarized all the questions asked, and posted a list of questions in the channel:
1. Why people use "aren't I" instead of "am I not"?
2. Is there such a thing as Black English?
3. Can "data" be regarded as noncountable noun?
4. Are there any differences between "owing to" and "due to"?
5. Is "She does this differently than you" standard English?
6. Why is "I" capitalized?
7. What does "The dog is in out back" mean?
8. Why do Americans use 'regular' for 'normal'.
e.g. "I get regular when I keep having prunes for breakfast."
9. What is the difference between 'insure' and 'ensure'?
10. Can "when" be used with past perfect?
11. Why do Americans use "bring" instead of "take"?
12. How to tell the difference between adjectives that end in -ly and -ly adverbs?
13. What is the distinction between "little" and "small"?
14. Can "they, them, and their" be used in singular reference?
While these questions being discussed, new questions kept coming in. Some questions were discussed more fully. As a moderator of the project, I watched the channel with great interests. I myself learned a lot from the discussion. English language is changing dynamically. There are geographic and historical reasons.
The project was extended for one more week. I saved almost all the messages. At the end of the project, I gave a summary of the discussion that had been going on for nearly two months. The summary was posted in the Channel, and I also sent a copy to Helen Sternheim, the K12 net manager, which concluded my English Language Variations Project.
