Adventures of stevenlichen

In today’s Second Language Learning session, Professor Mike Beaumont arranged a few in-class activities to give us a feel of today’s themes — constructivism, social interactionism, social constructivism and social constructionism. One of the most memorable tasks, in my opinion, was as follows:

Individually, note down: three “values and beliefs” you have as a teacher; three “individual characteristics” of yourself as learner; and one “feeling” that I (the teacher) have conveyed to you (the learner) in these classes (not to be disclosed to me).

This task fits well in the paradigm of the lesson but also helps exemplify what social interactionism means,  i.e. the view that we “are born into a social world, and learning occurs through interaction with other people” (Williams and Burdern (1997: 39).

What I found interesting is how I find myself as a learner. The three characteristics I came up were: 1) the spirit of sharing; 2) introspective and 3) proactive, in which “the spirit of sharing” carries the most weight.

Yes, as a learner, I have always believed that there really is nothing to hide. Once you’ve hit upon an idea, share it! Through sharing, you automatically get feedback that you could reflect upon and evaluate. The rationale behind is the fact that there is always room for improvement, hiding imperfect ideas is groundless and useless.

How, when and where should I share my Thoughts? — You might ask. Well if you are adventurous enough, please try to avoid big, established social network sites such as MySpace because your contribution to that bit of cyberspace will hardly be noticed and therefore discussed; rather, you should turn your eyes onto innovative, developing network site such as http://www.thoughts.com/ where you are bound to get feedback from people like you via engaging yourself in photos, videos, podcasts, and chat in the community forums. Moreover, you could create blogs for free and decide for each blog post if it should be public, private, or only viewable by your friends and family. In addition, it features free unlimited bandwidth… http://www.thoughts.com/ is literally all that you might need to create a well-rounded cyberspace identity which you could build on later for the purpose of sharing and self-improvement.

Embrace the spirit of sharing, folks, real learning takes place when ideas are shared and perfected!

Reference:

Williams, M. & R. Burden (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach Cambridge: CUP Chs 1-4

Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, held its first labor fair of the lunar new year a few days ago, but the job-seekers gathered there appeared not to be as enthusiastic as their counterparts of years past. For the first time, the number of job-hunters fell far short of the number of vacancies advertised at the fair: 4,000 versus 7,000.

The employers could only raise their salary standards - on average, to 1,160 yuan ($155) a month, representing an increase of 13 percent compared with previous years endowment.

Similar phenomena also appeared in other cities in the Pearl River Delta area, one of China’s major manufacturing centers. The area has for years been the largest employer of migrant laborers from the country’s rural areas.

The changes sweeping over the job-seeking public have prompted some economic commentators to cry out in alarm that China is losing its advantage in cheap labor. But some others have argued against such worries, saying that on the whole, the country’s labor supply still exceeds the demand.

Though they contradict each other, the two sides share a common concern: the impact of changing labor costs on China’s exports, which have been a major engine driving the nation’s economic growth.

In my opinion, we should be pleased rather than worried about the situation. Manual laborers can now expect better wages, which is good for both social justice and the wellbeing of the economy.

Most of the manual workers employed by manufacturers in coastal regions are migrants from the country’s impoverished rural provinces. In the past two decades or so, they have contributed greatly to our nation’s economic development by working diligently, for whatever their employers would like to pay.

Their pay has been capped at too low a level for too long a time. An investigation in 2004 found that the average monthly wage for migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta region had risen only 68 yuan in 12 years.

In the past few years, that level has risen at a comparatively faster rate. The national average monthly wage for rural migrant workers rose from the 539 yuan in 2004 to 946 yuan in 2006.

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By Raymond Zhou

There are many ways to interpret the sex photo scandal of Hong Kong pop stars. But the core of the matter, as I see it, is the wrangling between the law and morality.

On the legal side, it is not hard to pinpoint who broke the law. If you take your notebook computer to a repair shop and the repairman makes a copy of your hard drive without your permission, that is stealing, pure and simple. For those netizens who disagree, let me give an analogy: Say you call a cable repairman to your home to fix the line, and he gets curious about the contents of your closet and removes something, that would be against any rule of ethics or law. There is no way you can explain it away by saying you stumbled upon it or the item you took could be incriminating evidence against the customer.

If the repairman happened to notice Edison Chen’s photos - the actor at the center of the scandal - which he felt were immoral or illegal, he should have called the authorities instead of snooping around other people’s private lives.

What Chen did with his lovers was not illegal if (a) the women were not coerced, (b) they were not underage when the photos were taken, or (c) he did not intend to publicize the photos. From what we know now, it seems to be the case. So, from a legal perspective, Chen and the starlets were victims.

Yet, when you search and research online, the predominant reaction is against Chen, and not the one who filched his digital files. That is because the digital thief did not seem to have any commercial or malicious intention. He just shared his loot with some friends, and one of them could not resist the temptation to share it with the vast online populace.

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