I'm Jeremy Slagoski, Community Manager of the TESOL ICIS, updating the interest section on our YouTube playlists and online access to the community.

TESOL ICIS YouTube Playlists of Films

Over the summer, our community was quite active with a discussion on lists of films for cross-cultural and intercultural communication. Through many community members’ contributions, I was able to create two playlists of film trailers. There are 92 feature film trailers to view here and 24 documentary trailers to view here. If you’d like to add more feature films or documentaries to this list, please send them to me via the TESOL ICIS listserv.

Online Access

In May, TESOL ICIS started a blog. I haven’t posted anything new since the end of May because I assumed many of us would be away for a summer break or vacation. Although we had many visitors in May, we haven’t had much activity since then. See Figure 1 for a chart showing how many views and visitors our blog received beginning July 11. I am sure one reason for this is that we have not posted anything new.

Figure 1. ICIS Blog analytics.

We also revived TESOL ICIS’ Facebook page, which I later learned is not very interactive by design. (Facebook groups are interactive, but more on that later.) Our Facebook page acts like a shop window for visitors to view and like whatever we post (which is not much, because I prefer more interactive interfaces). Anyway, the Facebook page has grown significantly in the same time period. Because this is open to the public, we have received many likes as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2. ICIS Facebook analytics.

Because I’m an administrator of this Facebook page, I get a notification on my personal Facebook page when we get a new like. And as Figure 2 shows, it seems like I get notifications almost every day. Many of the people who like our Facebook page are not official TESOL ICIS members, and I’m sure that some of them are not even TESOL members. However, most of them are not in or from the United States, so we are reaching a more international audience with this page than we are with our other online entities.

Finally, our Facebook group has 55 members, which seems to closely match the number of people active on our TESOL ICIS listserv. I believe nearly everyone in this group is actually a TESOL ICIS community member. If you haven’t joined the Facebook group yet, please do. Ramin Yazdanpanah and I have been adding content to stimulate discussion every week or so for this group. From my perspective, it seems slightly more active than our TESOL ICIS listserv. I don’t get lovely statistics for this group like I do for the other two online entities mentioned earlier.

I’ve also been a part of the beta testing group for TESOL’s new online community page/forum. The first stage of beta testing is wrapping up, and then a second stage will be beginning soon to address community management, so I’ll be more involved in the second stage.

That’s all for me right now!

Best,

Jeremy