Survey is live!

After much beta-testing by some lovely friends and getting the all-clear, the English-language version of my survey is up, here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=depShi7qTx5TZCB3SiS_2bZQ_3d_3d
Please, please, please click on the link and take the survey if:

you can speak/read/understand at least a little bit of English

you can speak/read/understand at least a little bit of Chinese

you use the internet to communicate with other people

you are 18 or older
If you have any questions about anything, please email me at estewar4@une.edu.au.


(Did I mention how grateful I will be if you participate in my research?)

Literature and Reflection

So many people have researched how we use the internet and what affect it has on our literacy, our language, our friendships, our family lives, and on our multiple identities.
So what am I doing that’s so different?
Well, I guess I’m taking a lot of what has already been researched for granted. I’ve been using email for fifteen years, IM and chat for ten years, and blog for five years.
(I know, I know. I’m late to the game. But in high school I was living in rural Queensland where there was one internet-connected computer in the community centre. I swapped some admin and cleaning work in exchange for using the internet once a week. I would do my maths homework as I waited for each page to load! But I made up for it. When I got to a (slightly) bigger city, I developed a chat addiction… I had to go cold turkey for a while there. Now there people whom I’ve never seen face to face, but who have been my friends for ten years - not just on Facebook or Twitter, but in RL, too.)
Some of the research talks about teenagers having four or more email addresses. *I* have more than four email addresses, and I use each of them regularly for different, unrelated purposes. This is not a new phenomenon for me. I am not an outsider exploring a strange concept. This is real, normal life.
By the same token, there has been a lot of research into linguistic identities, how some bilingual people feel like they have different identities when they speak each of their different languages.
For me, the idea I want to explore is the combination of the different linguistic identities and online identities. When you blog in Chinese, do you have a different identity or a different persona, compared to when you blog in English? Will you flame on a forum someone in English, but not in Chinese? Do you have English-speaking sock puppets or Chinese-speaking alts? Are you more honest about yourself online when you are speaking your mother tongue?

回来了

I have been travelling in China.
This year I was the proud recipient of the Endeavour Language Teacher Fellowship, which is awarded annually by the Australian Government. I had a lovely time travelling with a group of other Chinese language teachers to Beijing, Shanghai, Yangzhou, Suzhou and Nanjing. I had fun living the life of a foreign student at Nanjing University, and learned a lot about Chinese Internet language from some new friends.
Now I am back and am getting back to work on my research!
The survey is up and is in Beta mode. I decided to go with Survey Monkey… and then had to figure out how to work it. It turns out, I can’t do anything fancy in the text using .html or other codes, but I think it looks okay. I have sent it to some friends for beta testing, and hope to have it up online within the week.
Meanwhile, I am on the hunt for blogs.
If you have arrived at this site and know of any bilingual Chinese/English blogs, I would be forever grateful if you would leave me their URL in a comment or in an email (estewar4@une.edu.au).