شبكة المعلومات العربية التربوية

I created a newsgroup with Yahoo Groups and invited all male and female colleagues at the College of Languages and Translation to register. The aims of the newsgroup were to share college news, discuss academic issues and student and faculty problems, learn about each other's publications and academic activities. Although messages were sent to the college's 160 faculty members, only 28 (17.5%) registered. They posted a total of 73 messages, with 50% posted by the dean and 34% posted by the author. Messages posted were mainly about conference calls and university memos. 71% of the members did not participate at all. By contrast, I am a member of a Korean Teachers' Education and Development Newsgroup. The Korean Newsgroup has 133 members. They posted a total of 685 messages. They discuss all kinds of academic issues related to the teaching and learning of English in Korea such as: Students' response on projects, a list of MATESL-like programs, creating collaborative teacher communities, action research to collate and write a class activities book, writing for TEC, advice for teaching freshmen English classes, putting faces to names and names to faces, good teacher characteristics, expressing feelings, mandatory English, ESL/EFL teacher standards, professional development summer options, call for National Executive Council candidates, in addition to conference and course announcements, job vacancies, surveys, digests and others. The study reports the causes of inadequate participation among the Saudi Newsgroup members based on findings of a survey. (As Provided)