Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: digital storytelling

  • Words of Culture, Culture of Words

    Nowhere better can you find the nuances of culture than in the words that are used. Nancy Friedman tracks those at Fritinancy. This year we get a bonus, wordS, not just word.

    My favorite: The Fall of the Broman Empire, on the X-odus of people from Musk’s vanity website. Others include 4B (from Korea), Debank, social tonic (laced with THC), Pretendians. I have a couple of young HENRYs in my family tree. And there is the Hawk Tuah girl.

    I can tell Nancy has been around a while at this game because she is writing on TypePad, a platform that had its heyday many years ago.

  • 100 Heartwarming Stories

    From the BBS, many with short video clips, and most short and simple enough to be used in ELT classes.

  • Rotating Sandwiches

    Rotating Sandwiches

    At least 6, and maybe 8, of these Rotating Sandwiches are not sandwiches. But controversy aside, this is a great resource for language teaching. Besides our yes/no, we can compare, we can guess the prices, we can list ingredients, we can make recipes. I’m sure there is more. Thanks to Kottke for the link.

  • Seaweed for Cows

    Got too much red algae? Feed it to the cows. It reduces methane by 40%.

  • Repurposing

    Repurposing

    kevinryan.com blog will return to personal musings of Kevin Ryan in Tokyo (aka tokyokevin). The audience I will now aim at is more specific in one way, and more general in another.

    I have a lot of students who wonder what is going on in the world. And the language learning world. And their world, but through English.

    So from now on I will be posting about interesting things I find on the web, and for language learners. I will write in simpler English to make it easier for non-native speakers to understand.

    My model here is either kottke.org, where Mr. Kottke has been posting interesting things for 25 years, or NextDraft, a daily newsletter of 5 interesting things in the news. Dave Pell makes it interesting by making the titles of his news with lots of puns.

    I’m going to invite my students to read (not require, mind you), and comment on these posts. I hope to bring a lot of stuff I usually post in Facebook here.

    I plan to follow Cory Doctorow’s practice of post once (in one place) and then add links in messages to all different social media. (What’s the term for this? I can’t find it.

    Looking forward to posting more here. Also, see my other blog about technology in language teaching at EdgeOfCALL.net.