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March 06, 2005

my experiment in wiki-ing

Look out, folks. Yours truly is so close to the cutting edge of technology that blogging from Russia isn't good enough -- he needs to set up a wiki too. So, indeed, I've set up a little amateur website for my seminar for English teachers. I'm grateful for any suggestions of resources or readings. In fact, you anyone can edit the resources page!

I'm only on the cutting edge, not the bleeding edge. If I were on the bleeding edge, I'd have a bliki. I'm afraid I'm not postmodern enough to be able to transcend genres so gracefully.

Posted by kshawkin at March 6, 2005 11:35 PM

Comments

Thanks for the link to you seminar site! Might be useful for me. As for suggestions, I would add http://dictionary.cambridge.org to reference resourses. It's a British dictionary, but they also have a separate American English dictionary, and it's aimed at learners, not native speakers, so all the definitions are really easy to understand. Sometimes they overdo it a little, though; my favourite entry:

mammoth
- a type of large hairy elephant with tusks which no longer exists
:)))

A big drawback of this site is that you cannot search for a combination of words (whatever you type into the search slot, it just looks for the first word). At least I couldn't find a way to do it. So if you need "look down on" or, say, "talk the hind legs off a donkey", you can only search for "look", or "down", or "talk", or "legs", or "donkey" and so on, and you get a list of all expressions that contain the word... It's fine with "donkey", but with "look" you'll have trouble finding the right entry. Well, the site's good in all other respects.

http://www.wordreference.com provides English definitions from the Collins English dictionary (I think) along with a French, Spanish, and Italian dictionary. It's good but it's more like a normal dictionary for native speakers, not for learners.

Posted by: Olga_Kh at March 7, 2005 01:13 PM

Thanks, Оля! I'll add these to the page. If you think of any more, you can add them yourself by clicking "Edit Page".

Posted by: Kevin at March 7, 2005 04:24 PM