Suez Canal University, Egypt Dear OWCp members ,

By Meteab Al-Zahrani

It is my pleasure to inform you that OWCp was presented in TESOL conference in Baltimore, MD. It was a co-presentation with Dr. Shaker, a professor from Suez Canal University, Egypt. On my part, I talked about OWCp in general, its importance due the limited resources, huge number of students in the English classrooms, and due to the lack of real interaction and collaboration in EFL classrooms. I also talked about OWCp theoretical background and how OWCp was technically created using the most needed interactive features to serve English learners from all over the globe. I focused on Arab English learners' attitude toward online collaborative writing, and on their reactions toward sharing writing and getting feedback from online peers and classmates. At the end, I had some students writing sample presented using the audio interactive voice.

Dr. Shaker talked about his students experience in the project and the effectiveness of such Collaborative writing projects in improving EFL learners' writing. Dr. Shaker also focused on the importance for more projects of such type to help learners interact in English. On the second day, I attended sessions that focus on similar work we do at OWCp. A few presenters presented their students' experiences using e-mails to exchange writing. Other presenters talked about the chat rooms and how their students engaged in such collaborative group discussions to help each other exchange ideas. I was given the opportunity to talk in these sessions. I shared our experience in OWCp. The presenters and their audience liked the idea of interactive and collaborative writing with peers from different cultural backgrounds. Some asked me to go to the computer lab in the Electronic Village just to show them how OWCp works and how they can join the project with their students. We went to the electronic village computer lab as a group and I was given the opportunity to do a sort of unscheduled and unplanned small workshop within the conference for those interested professors who showed high interests to know more about our experience in OWCp. I took them in a virtual tour in the project, and we met some members online. Now the good news I want to share with you, some of those professors already registered to OWCp. Some will register with their students after they review OWCp. Some professors who showed high interests to join OWCp with their students were:

1. Dr. Christine Meloni, a well known in the field of CMC and teaching English as a second/ foreign language. Dr. Christine was the featured guest speaker in the Three TESOL RIVER

Conference which was held at IUP 1998. She gave the preliminary speech and in that speech she gave a well known statement that became frequently quoted by many researchers in the filed of CMC. She stated that "Technology will not replace teachers; teachers without technology will be replaced with teachers with technology". I have known Dr. Christine Meloni since 1998 and we had sort of collaboration in building and exchanging ideas about projects for students in the Internet. Dr. Christine was a member in my 1998 old project which was called "English in 2000, new avenues in creating virtual collaboration among learners and teachers on the Internet". She praised my work in that project in TESOL Matters. TESOL Matters listed that project as a model a long with another project created in Japan. http://www.tesol.org/pubs/magz/wanw...wanweb9906.html . Dr. Christine has similar project on the Internet but it is not interactive one. You can visit her project by clicking on this link http://home.gwu.edu/~meloni/eslstudyhall/. Dr. Christine has presented many papers in many conferences and this is one of her papers on the net http:// exchanges.state.gov/educatio...ing/mel0501.htm . We will be so glad to have Dr. Christine and her students from Gorge Washington University to join OWCp to create more collaboration among Arab EFL learners and English native speakers. 2. Dr. Jerry Gebhard, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a well known author who has published several books in the area of teaching methodologies and cross cultural communications.

He is going to review OWCp and will join us this summer for his graduate methodology class to apply online instructions with OWCp members
Dr. Gerhard page in OWCp

http://www.owcp.net/gebhard/info/index.htm

3. Dr. Pamela Mc Pherson, National Center for English language teaching and Research. Dr. Pamela will hopefully join us from Australia with her students. I was pleased when she stated that she wants her students to interact with Arab EFL learners to increase their awareness about Arab World, and the Arab cultures.

4. Dr. Books an American professor who will join us from Japan with her students. She is very excited about sharing writing online and getting feedback from online peers. She said that she is going herself to be an active member since she likes to have friends from different parts of the world. 5. Dr. A Sehilou a professor from Emoria State University, 6. Dr. Alal Radu, a professor from Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine 7. Dr. Halyna Kaluzhna a professor from Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine http://www.msses.ru/win/faculty/alc/iwe/ Those professors liked OWCp interactive features; text based interaction, audio-video conferencing, text and voice chatrooms, and above all the idea of keeping track of each member activities in the project to measure students' progress and to evaluate and assess their' learning. I would finally like to thank all OWCp members and moderators for their great work in helping