My personal experience of meeting strangers on the Net

In respond to Trinity's earlier post, gotta share a bit on Omegle.

Omegle is a website which offers you chances to talk to strangers around the world. When you click on Start a chat, another user at random will be picked by the system and then you can have a one-on-one chat with each other.

I was first introduced to Omegle by Trinity. She told me about how popular this website is in China as people use it to meet new friends and most importantly, to practise English. We were thinking about incorporating it into our wiki page. But before that, I suggested we ought to get on a trial before consdiering letting our students to use it.

In fact, it was my first time using website like this one to chat with strangers. But there got to be a first try. So... I started randomly chatting with strangers. The first two strangers were guys who weren't interested in chatting but only interested in asking about my personal information, wanted to get into even 'deeper' talk. Then, I quickly disconnected converstation with the two guys.

After playing around for 10 minutes, I was about to quit the site but I ended up giving one last chance to meet a 'more normal' person. I succeeded! I was randomly assigned to talk with a stranger from South Korea. South Korea has been one of my favourite cities, so that gave me extra motivation to chat with that stranger. She was an undergraduate studying English literature at uni. Bingo! Her major was similar to mine.We shared common liking about food and travelling. And now we've become friends on facebook.

By luck or whatever you call it, I have made a new Korean friend through Omegle. A friend that has a similar education background but different in cultures. A friend that we still get into contact on facebook. That's an interesting experience that I would tell my students.

But Trinity and I agreed not to introduce it to our students. The world is big, there isn't much people have a simple mind as we do, just hope to practise English on Omegle.

I would say, as an English teacher, we do take up an important role. We have the responsibility to protect our students from falling into traps on the Net.

Thanks to all teachers in the world.