20130720, Minutes, by Bill Chung
We have 16 members joining the 7/20 meeting in Taichung. In the session 1, after everyone introduces him/herself, people start chatting and divide into several groups. Fiona suggests that we should unit together. Then, it becomes that Kitty shares her European traveling experience to all members. Although I agree Fiona’s opinion, it is a little bit difficult for people in such large group chatting together. Next time, maybe we can try to divide into more than one groups which consist of 3~5 members. In that way, everyone can have more chances to talk and know each other deeply.
In the session 2, all the members are divided into 3 groups and Thanks to John and Fiona to be the volunteers as the hosts for the other two groups.
In my group, I change the procedure a little bite and try to lead members learn more from the articles. First, we read questions so that people can know what we will discuss later and get the answer from the article. Second, when we read the article, I ask each speaker a question in the article. I hope through these questions we can learn more from the article, such as new words, phrases and sentences. Finally, we start to express our opinions. Although I did not talk my opinion too much, I did summarize these opinions one by one to let everybody in my group get the main idea easily. Unfortunately, time is not enough to discuss all the questions. Then, we get together again and members in each group choose a representative to share their conclusion. Here, I have two suggestions. First, spending some time on discuss the article and learning something from it. Second, setting up time limit, such as 1~2 minutes for each to describe his/her idea. The limit can depends on the situation, such as how many questions this time and how many members in the group, etc. By this way, it will be easy for the host to control the progress.
I am glad so many members like this topic and thank each participant. Almost every member can talk his or her point of view of it. In fact, after 5:30pm, some members still stay and discuss these questions about another 2 hours.
Bill Chung
