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We don't see too many reports on the effectiveness of ICT in teaching and learning modern foreign languages. These two reports have recently appeared:

1. BECTA: Impact of ICT in schools: a landscape review:
http://tinyurl.com/2cdfka
This report is about the use of ICT across the curriculum, but there is a substantial section on modern foreign languages.

2. QCA: The use of ICT for teaching and learning languages:
http://www.qca.org.uk/17307.html

The BETT 2007 show in January this year included a seminar programme in which four sessions for teachers of modern foreign languages took place. Read the report here at the Languages ICT website:
http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/news/bett.htm

More news reports on recent activities are available at the Languages ICT website:
http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/news/ict_news_update.htm

"Death by PowerPoint" refers to the over-use of PowerPoint as a presentation medium both in business and in educational contexts. Do a search in Google and you will find numerous occurrences of this phrase.

When PowerPoint first began to be used as a presentation medium it looked impressive: the "wow!" factor. But after you've seen 100 presentations it gets as boring as any other medium. What you have to bear in mind when using any presentation medium is that you still have to work hard to get your message across, particularly in the foreign languages classroom, where you have to combine presentation with lots of practice with your students.

See the TES article (1 September 2006) by Michael Shaw, who writes:
"The problem - dubbed 'Death by PowerPoint' - arises where the popular Microsoft program is used to teach dull, didactic lessons. Where once trainees were told to avoid "chalk and talk", the new hazard is 'click and talk'."

He continues, citing Roger Higton, Lord Williams School, Thame:
"The teacher may feel very pleased and think they are up-to-date and modern – but the student will glaze over within the first 30 seconds. Students find this passive absorption of knowledge no more educationally creative than copying out of a textbook."

Source: http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2276562

The message is: Don't rely just on the presentation. Presenting new vocab or points of grammar with PowerPoint does not guarantee that they will be retained by your students. They need to practise using the new vocab and grammar.

Reactions?

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) appear to be springing up like mushrooms in schools in the UK. Some schools have had them installed in every classroom and one headteacher has been heard to say that he expects his teaching staff to keep them switched on all the time and use them in every lesson.

We mention interactive whiteboards in the following locations at the ICT4LT site:

• Section 7 of Module 1.3, Using text tools in the Modern Foreign Languages classroom
• Section 4 of Module 1.4, Introduction to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

But how effective are interactive whiteboards? This BBC website article (30 January 2007) entitled "Doubts over hi-tech white boards" raises several important issues.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6309691.stm
It states, for example, that IWBs "fail to boost pupil achievement", that they can "slow the pace of whole-class learning", and that they can lead to "relatively mundane activities being over-valued".

OK, just what we thought - memories of the language lab being hailed as the panacea back in the 1960s and then failing miserably to deliver what it promised. Of course, we now know in retrospect that the 1960s technology was not at fault. It was the failure to train teachers how to use the technology effectively, combined with a singular lack of imagination.

My perception of IWBs is that they can be highly effective in the hands of a skilled practitioner - just as the language lab was (and still is) - but most teachers simply use IWBs for presentations that would work just as well on a humble OHP. Who was it who said that an IWB is "just an OHP on steroids"?

Since the advent of interactive whiteboards we've moved away from the more traditional use of the computer as a learning tool in a computer lab, where it offers many more one-to-one practice opportunities – and which many teachers believe are more effective: v. the case studies in Module 3.1 at the ICT4LT website:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-1.htm

In the above module Helen Myers (The Ashcombe School) writes:
Whiteboards: We prefer to spend the money on increasing the pupil-computer ratio - which makes the technology more genuinely interactive for pupils – rather than on facilities for whole-class/teacher interaction.

In the same module Richard Hamilton (Cox Green School) claims a 15% rise in A*–C GCSE results over a period of three years as a result of his pupils doing regular computer lab work in foreign languages.

In the EUROCALL 2006 wiki a question was raised about the main benefits of podcasting, which attracted a few interesting comments, both positive and negative:
http://eurocall2006.wikispaces.com/message/view/panel+discussion/58780

We mention podcasting in the following section of the ICT4LT website:
Section 3.5.2 of Module 2.3, Exploiting World Wide Web resources online and offline
There is also an entry in the ICT4LT Glossary:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_glossary.htm

My personal view about podcasting in the context of language learning and teaching is broadly in line with the view expressed by one of the contributors to the above wiki, namely that it’s a very efficient way of making digital sound recordings and distributing them to learners and teachers, but that we also need to take another look at audio learning.

As I pointed out in the above wiki, in the end a podcast is just a recording. It's the delivery medium that makes it different. Recordings live or die according to (1) the quality of their content, (2) what you do with them.

Simply making podcasts available to language students is not effective per se. Thinking back to my days as a language centre director, we had a similar experience when satellite TV first became available. "Wow! What a great resource!" we thought. But students, left to their own devices, did not get a lot out of watching TV. So we introduced generic worksheets into the satellite TV viewing room. We had one for recordings of news broadcasts. It was just one sheet of A4, which the students filled in and handed in to language centre staff. On the sheet were a few simple tasks, such as:

• Write down the headlines of the main news items that you viewed in the broadcast.
• Write down 10 new words or phrases that you learned. (Students usually borrowed a dictionary from the language centre at the same time as they borrowed the video recording, so they could look up new words and phrases.)
• Write down a summary of the news item that interested you most and why.

The worksheets were not marked by language teaching staff. They were mainly intended to be a means of focusing students’ attention, but teaching staff would pick completed worksheets at random and offer feedback to students. This resulted in a marked improvement in the way students used satellite TV recordings. Perhaps we need something similar to enable students to get the most out of the increasing number of podcasts that are available on the Web.

Reactions?

We mention Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in the following locations at the ICT4LT site:

• Module 1.4: Introduction to CALL (Section 7: Distance learning)
• Module 1.5: Introduction to the Internet (Section 8: Distance learning and the Web: VLEs, MLEs etc)
• Module 2.3: Exploiting WWW resources online and offline (Section 3.1: Web-based CALL)

There are also several relevant entries in the ICT4LT Glossary. Start with VLE:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_glossary.htm

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) were hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread when they first appeared, but now they appear to be falling out of favour with many educational institutions - for various reasons: costs, lack of flexibility and problems handling audio and video.

Personally, I don't like VLEs. So far they appear to have resulted mainly in the development of rather boring materials and masses of multiple-choice exercises. I miss the interaction, the humour and the unpredictability of pre-Web, pre-VLE software, e.g. simulations such as A la rencontre de Philippe:
http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/Philippe.html
We mention other simulations in Module 2.2, Introduction to multimedia CALL, at the ICT4LT site.

You can achieve much more with a tailor-made website, which is less expensive than most people imagine, but unfortunately the "one size fits all" mentality pervades among educational administrators, which is what attracts them to VLEs. And, of course, there are many things which (so far) can only be done efficiently and effectively offline, i.e. via a local server, CD-ROM or DVD, e.g. listen / record / playback (virtual language lab) activities.

Moodle, however, is one VLE that is finding favour with the language teaching community, especially in Japan. EUROCALL conferences have attracted Moodle presenters, and there was a Moodle workshop at a recent EUROCALL conference. The main pluspoint of Moodle is that it is open source and can be downloaded free of charge:
http://moodle.org/
The Moodle for Language Teaching forum is a useful source of information about Moodle:
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

At last year's EUROCALL conference in Granada (which I unfortunately couldn't attend due to illness) one of the keynote speakers, Diana Laurillard, mentioned a VLE called LAMs. This VLE is also mentioned in several places at the BECTA website. Search the BECTA site for LAMS:
http://www.becta.org.uk/
There's a link to a streamed video of Diana Laurillard's keynote via the EUROCALL 2006 blog:
http://eurocall2006blog.blogspot.com

Reactions?

I am sitting in my office on a Thursday evening, having just finished a screening of Palomas de papel (1983) from Peru with my students.

I am a total wimp when it comes to violence, especially violence that involves children, so this was a tough one. It is a movie that refers to the struggle in the Peruvian countryside when Sendero Luminoso was at its peak, and how tiny villages and innocent campesinos tried to survive during this violent, brutal struggle.

I did not give my students any context other than it was about Peru, Sendero and the campesinos. I did not warn them (or myself) about the fact that this would touch upon kidnapping (”disappearing”) and brain washing young, innocent children…ripping them from their homes in order to properly indoctrinate them to the philosophies of Presidente Gonzalo, the violence with which the guerrilleros make their point known… It was not that I wanted them to be shocked or hurt by the film, rather, I was hoping that they, just like the Juan the protagonist, would also feel the confusion, the rage, the hurt, the violence and the injustice along with this young child whose world is completely shattered all because of this abstract “lucha” that was being waged all around him… something that only seemed to make sense to little Juan when one of the comandantes said that if you follow the path of Presidente Gonzalo, all of the cookies will be free.

Tough stuff to digest. One of my students was in tears at the end of the movie. They looked at me as if I was there to make sense of it all. Violence and war and wrongful imprisonment –don’t– make sense… and I was as much at a loss for words as they were. All I wanted to do was go home and hug my kids.

So before I left work I emailed them a link to Wikipedia (yes, gasp! Wikipedia) and the entry there on Sendero Luminoso. And I encouraged them to consider that as a starting point, but what was more important was that they write and begin the conversation (or at the very least some visceral reactions!) in El blog central…gently reminding them that there is no queen ant in this colony…and the course and the blog was their colony to create.

So as I am sitting here blogging this, I am also listening to a very happy ending for this evening. One of my students is talking on Skype with the family with whom she lived in El Salvador. The connection is clear (thank you Cal, thank you Barron), the conversation sounds lively, and she is here well past 11 p.m. happily chattering away…in Spanish.

Connections and interconnections: the student shares with me that a member of her Salvadoran family has been offered a full scholarship for university study by the FMLN, with the condition that it is in Cuba and that he engage in political activities upon his return to Salvador. Interesting choice, it seems because this person does not consider himself a political person, but the scholarship is indeed attractive.

Choices, politics, liberation, freedom… from a variety of vantage points and pshaw! not written in any text or even a formal part of our syllabus…

To all of you who think all learning has to happen ONLY in the classroom to be valid and effective, I offer you these two moments from my evening: watching movies that make you think and question and hurt and cry along with your students, and then overhearing a conversation that makes the world seem very very small, and yet strangely interconnected…one Skype call at a time.

I will let you know what tomorrow’s class brings…

Welcome to the ICT for Language Teachers blog. This blog was started on 22 February 2007 to encourage feedback from visitors to the ICT4LT website at http://www.ict4lt.org

If you haven't already visited the site, please do so.

Discussion topics and comments on any of the ICT4LT website modules are welcomed, as well as any other aspect of ICT in language teaching and learning.

My Corpus wiki is ripe. It took me about a month to think over what this wiki will be about. Now it is ready to launch. Lessons begin next March. I believe I have produced an overall site design that includes key sections for the learning purpose, the users/readers involved, and sufficient room for change as we all learn with this wiki.

I think it will be a good idea to blog about this. Probably many of us teachers face the same steps and it can be revealing to read about the process. Not just see results and wonder how they made it.

Blogs and Wikis
There we find the first difference: Blogs are good platforms to record processes and stages. In wikis it is the last version that counts. Of course teachers will agree that the best section in a wiki is the Discussion where you can learn how a community interacted to get those results. But in a blog every step of the way, every journal entry is a final version on its own right.

My First Draft
The good think about having finished the first draft is that my mind is free to approach the next step. The how to wiki. This is where networking and connecting (probably in that order) will be crucial to make this experiment a successful project.

My Knowledge Base
I am familiar with blogging but this is my first wiki. Blogging has helped me build an information and people network I now resort to. All information is managed by tags in my del.icio.us account. My del.icio.us network is full of teachers and edubloggers far more experimented than I am. I have contacted by blog and mail people who are teachers of English at the same stage of development of their wikis.


The Shift from Teaching to Learning
Listening to Will Richardson answering questions after his presentation at the Connectivism conference, you notice in his tone of voice that he is not worried at all about having the answers. The point is not to know all the answers but to know how to get the answers. He says he has built a network where he will be able to ask and learn whenever he needs.

A New Frame of Mind
This is the question. Can we teach as we learn? Haven’t all of us sometimes come to the conclusion that all of the knowledge acquired (should I say studied?) at university only clicked in our heads when we started teaching?

Not all of us can feel comfortable learning as we go along. I cannot see a good reason why we all should, either. In the implementation of innovations, we are all to have different roles and positions towards them.

Should every teacher have a blog or a wiki for her class? To me this sounds as if we all had to consider becoming reporters in a newspaper because it is vital to stay informed. I need literacy to read and process the information. I do not need to learn how to design blogs or wiki projects. I need to know that when I am faced with a wiki or blog I can decide to take part in it or not. I need collaboration literacy. That is all.

If we can make our colleagues aware, that’s a promising start. I would not expect much more. Most blogs online today are not blogging at all and several wikis are a one man show. Even people with high internet skills very often miss the point.

The Innovator in Context: Wikis in Education
When we deal with disruptive technologies there will be different actors involved within and outside the school. Some questions:
-Can they all have a say in this?
-How?
-When will we listen?
-At what stage of the project shall we incorporate these voices?

Our decision making process has to evolve as much as our newly acquired web literacy. If we are pioneers in our school context or early adopters -to use Carl Rogers terminology- we will have to embrace the distributed nature of the internet and design ways in which decisions can be "distributed" as well. The school, the students, their parents will have a say about what we do online.

This learning process for the innovator in context does not sound as thrilling as learning how to use wikis, podcasts and blogs. It would be wonderful if they spoke the language we speak now. But this is what there is. Whether we like it or not.


Follow-up/resources links
(I’ll be using the umbrella tag ‘wiki’)
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/wiki

Something really interesting happened during a lesson last week. I played a cassette to a student to test his understanding of spoken English. On the cassette, a lady said, "I won't be back until eight O'clock". I stopped the cassette, and asked the student what she said. Quite confidently, he replied, "she said she will return home at eight O'clock."

He had by and large understood the message. But he couldn't recall the words used. This is because an expression like "I won't be back until eight" doesn't figure in his active vocabulary, and can't be translated literally into French. He nevertheless got the gist.

This shows the gap between what we understand and what we are able to produce. I don't know how teachers could accelerate the process of transforming passive understanding into active usage. After all, that should be our job. It seems to me that massive exposure to language along with lots of practice is the only solution, but someone studying two hours a week with little time for homework is surely not going to make rapid progress.

On Sunday 18th February at 23.30 GMT, there'll be the first synchronous discussion of a new group on 'Languages and Culture in Second Life'.



It's open to anyone who is interested in this subject. Here are the details if you wish to take part:



* Please join the newly formed 'Language and Culture Exchange' group in Second Life



"This group was established to promote language and culture exchange
through the creation of a dynamic language and culture lesson database
and a coordinated learning and exchange program in Second Life. "



* Event to be held at 15.30 SL Time : http://timeanddate.com/s/atb (23.30 GMT)



* Join the Skypecast here:http://tinyurl.com/2rn7gt
Please IM me (Skype ID: eflbridges) if there are any problems joining the Skypecast



* If you'd just like to listen live, you can tune into the stream at Worldbridges
(http://www.worldbridges.com - Sandbox B)



* The discussion will be recorded and made available as a podcast so we'll have a record of what was discussed.



* We'll also be at iMagiLEARNING island in Second Life:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/imagiLEARNING/42/190/21/



Hope to see some of you there!

This post is dedicated to Blogging for Begginners

Today I went into the B4B PBWiki to get to know the tasks for week five and ... lo and behold! My FCE Blog has been mentioned on a list of blogs of the week. This means lots of colleagues around the word will be asked to have a look at it as part of their online training.

First things first. I’m honoured.

Second, this poses a little issue on me. I confess I do not think blog surfing or commenting should be homework at all. At least not my blog project as I conceived it. So I hope no one feels too obliged to pay me a visit (or read this wordy post!).

Let’s stop rambling about and get down to the topic in question.

Widgets

As B4B blog is discussing widgets this week, I though it would be interesting to post a little something about my use of widgets and why I try to stay away from them these days.

In my FCE Blog sidebar you can find several widgets. I have displayed them in a particular order. Why? Well, not only because design is very revealing about the blogger's purposes and relationship to the reader, but also because this order answers my own needs when I browse blogs. They need not constitute a pedagogical purpose per se.

I think there are several ways of looking at this issue of widget choice for your blog:

• the widgets we like

• the widgets our students like the most

• who benefits more from a widget? The teacher-blogger, the audience, the community or our students?

Clarification of terms

A widget is a bit of html code that you add to your template and may or may not have animation (java).

A teacher-blogger is an education professional who may be blogging for countless different reasons. Sometimes they do so for their students.

By audience I mean anyone stumbling upon your blog. Need not be the original intended audience of the blog.

The community is that portion of your audience that finds your blog interesting and most definitely bookmarks it or comes back at some point. (Hopefully!)

Your students are the ones that can and should make a difference. In class and in the comments section. If you are writing for your students, but most comments or widgets are addressed to colleagues or family and friends something is wrong.

There. Much clearer now, I guess.

Now a few things about the widgets in my blog.

To begin with there are technical considerations. The more widgets you add, the slower the page will load. Not every browser will support them. Your blog will not be perfectly seen everywhere when there are many widgets. These are accessibility issues; therefore, top issues. After all, we all love how the web has made the unthinkable 15 years ago so accessible today.

Frappr

So what I do is to use some widgets in blog posts –particularly those that take some seconds to load. An interesting example is the Frappr map of fcebloggers.

I just use a badge on the sidebar and a link to a post to explain how I intend it to be a Guest Map. A curious stat about it: Most people who added themselves to the map have never left a comment. This is interesting because the map creates a sense of belonging, of community building. It opens the door to participate for those who do not feel they have something special to say. And many of them are teachers! No further comments.

Oh stats... I just love stats!

Then there are stats. Everywhere. Stats speak to the audience, community and students in different ways. The first time viewer might reflect on how far this blog has been viewed or how many times. I guess they may decide to come back based on this. Call it going-with-the-flock principle.

To my own students, visual stats have been quite a revelation. They were faced with the fact that the world is watching. This was in my class - I believe- a double edged-sword. Some people who saw the blog being born felt it was just a thing between us. Our blog, period. It gradually dawned on them that the things we write there should make sense to other cultures as well. Otherwise, why not create a private Yahoo group or intranet or moodle? But to blog is meant to network with the world.

Chat

The shoutbox, which is not a sync chat but a simple short message board, is something completely inspired by students. There are terms of use for it.

This is something that everybody uses, students, audience, community. It is a leveller. At first site it is hard to tell who writes there: Is it one of my students, a teacher or an FCE student in Argelia like Mustafa (who writes the sweetest letters calling me "my dear teacher")? The shoutbox is the point where people express more emotionally and fast. A comment requires some thinking that bars people with little time.

Note: I do not recommend the widget provider I am using at the moment. For several reasons. Mainly not having RSS to be notified of new messages. You cannot check your blog every single day and it gets easily spammed.

Community of teachers

There are two widgets that have to do mainly with the community of teachers and educators.

My del.icio.us network

Del.icio.us -unlike Blinklist and other social bookmarkers- is the closest thing to a blog. They are kindred. Creating a network allows you to access instantly to what the people in the network have saved. You can connect and even meet people by del.icio.us. (If you understand Spanish, here is a Spanish edublogger who tells the story of how we met in his blog!)

My del.icio.us network is full of edubloggers and EFL teachers. All those links would be of little use to students, but it is certainly good to show ourselves as learners in front of them, and to let them see how we choose and tag information.

Cocomment is a blog comment/posts tracker and aggregator. It is useful to bring to the fore some comment in a previous post in your blog. I also use it to bring to the FCE Blog the conversations I am having on other blogs – in different languages- about blogging, wikis and education. Another way to expose my learning paths to students.

Conclusions

My use of widgets is not exactly didactic. It is all about informing, integrating and showing the audience what this blog deals with. Or what this blog might soon be dealing with because I am conversing about it on other blogs. Above all widgets should help your blog become a meaningful node in an ever growing network.

At the beginning of the post I said that I am staying away from them these days. The point is that when we just discover one of these widgets we want to use them instantly. Our own learning need makes us practise on our student’s blogs and adding widgets for the sake of practice is creating a noise in communication with students, audience and community.

Widgets are meant to be simple. Learn about them, know what there is available and trust yourself that you will manage to install them pretty fast when you or the purpose of your blog post needs them.

The first teachers who saw my blog, teachers who had never seen a blog before, told me things like: “I’m impressed at your cyber-skills”. No further comments made about the purpose or the ideas reflected on my blog. If teachers or students get paralysed and notice you instead of your blog, or they imagine that you have to know all that to have a blog, then we have definitely missed the point.

Sadly, don’t you think?

Follow-up link on my del.icio.us for this subject

http://del.icio.us/fceblog/widgets

Related ELT Notes posts:

A Blog Genesis (how The FCE Blog was born)

Blogging for Teachers

Quería comentar algunos pequeños cambios en mi web, en primer lugar he hecho actividades para la canción "lucky" que está tan de moda en las discos.



También revisé el taller de creación de actividades online .
Por último he publicado y enlazado muchas actividades resultado de los últimos talleres, merece la pena echar un vistazo, mis compañeros han hecho cosas estupendas. Estoy también actualizando los links de podcasts y algún nuevo link en este apartado.
Espero que os sea útil,

One more year I'm taking part in the online workshop series "Becoming a Webhead 2007", my presentation will take place online on 15 February. It will be about "creating online quizzes", and for that purpose I have revised and updated the workshop on this page. There were quite a few changes on the sites and links I include. Like Discovery channel that does not offer the possibility of creating a custom classroom any more.

But the news here is that you can listen and see other presentations by great experts on the field at this link. If you are interested in using technology in the language classroom this is a wonderful opportunity to learn a few things.

Information about the whole event can be found on this site

The computer-culture in the UAE, where I teach Arab-national first- and second-year college students, tends to be high relative to other countries in the region. Still, with developments in the field racing ahead in the year 2007, teachers as well as students are challenged to keep up with concepts driving the emerging literacies. There is an opportunity in the courses I teach now to revise the literacy aspects of our curriculum to help learners understand some of the ramifications of evolving uses of the latest technologies.

Basic premises

In the materials I'm involved with, the focus is to raise learner awareness of changes to the social structure of software. I don’t intend to call it exactly that at this introductory level, but perhaps a good starting point, one directed at a wider sophisticated audience, is Time's declaration of YOU as its person of the year.

In recognizing all of us as people of the year, Time has acknowledged that there has been a dramatic shift in alignment of control over the power structures traditionally used to convey and arbitrate media. One aspect of this shift is that software (and publishing and other social orders impacted by that software) have moved from the enterprise model into a more user-centric one where normal people and smaller, even individual, entities and groupings have increasing power over software and the Internet, and over content provided in both domains. This shift has important ramifications for the way people can now work both individually and collaboratively with software running either on their PC's and/or over the Internet.

ENTERPRISE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

I look at software as falling into these main categories:<?xml:namespace prefix = o /><?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />, Open Source, Web 2.0

software can be characterised by companies like Microsoft, which create software for sale and profit and guard its code, revealing only what is necessary to allow others to design products that will work with it, in such a way that the company retains control over the process and retains its dominance over aspiring competitors. One result, apart from satisfaction of the shareholders in the company, is software that sometimes gets 'published' without adequate testing, so that users are vulnerable, and the company, as in the case of Microsoft, is constantly having to supply patches, since the real testing of the software occurs only after it has been purchased and shipped.

Many software developers have responded with their support of an alternative Open Source model of software development. In contrast to the enterprise model, the software is developed by interested parties seeking not profit, but mainly to enhance their standing within a community of developers by being associated with the creation of the best possible software for a given task. The code is not guarded at all. It's made publically available in the hope that others in the community will create improvements to it. The result is generally software that gets thoroughly tested during the development process, so there are rarely unanticipated surprises for end-users (and if there are, the community learns about it quickly and moves together to correct the problem). Open source software is not created for profit, but business models are emerging whereby money can be made developing refinements and specific implementations of open source resources for companies whose profits rely on using that software effectively.

Open source software is by definition freely downloadable, but where it has to be set up on a server, this might be inconvenient for some users. Again the community has tended to share resources, so that server-based services are sometimes made available to all users. The concept has broadened into what has come to be known as Web 2.0, or the read-write Web. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to characterize the 20th century as the read-only century and the present one as the read-write century. Lessig's point is that whereas the enterprise model dominated media distribution until only recently, we are rapidly entering an era where this is no longer the case. It is important that this development be better understood by its beneficiaries (all of us) as the impacts are far-reaching in the way we organize ourselves productively through our understanding of what it means to be 'literate'.

I don't intend to include all that follows in the course, but as background and illustration of how these models apply in the real world, we can draw from the following cases:

Thomas Freedman in his influential book The World is Flat discusses how IBM gave up developing its own enterprise rival to Apache server and instead contributed its best engineers to the Apache community in order to be able to resume a business model on which the deliverables would be enhancements to the Apache kernel. That’s just one example of the power of community to produce a superior product (for free) compared to a commercial, patented, closed-source one.

Another good example is characterized in the Blackboard vs. Moodle approaches to development of learning management systems (background information regarding this controversy abounds on the Internet; here is a link to a Feb 2007 article in the well-respected T.H.E. Journal).

My own perception is that Blackboard is becoming regarded in the Open Source community as an old-school Goliath who’s made waves and rocked boats by taking out patents on certain aspects of LMS’s that other developers consider open source and unpatentable. On the day its patents were granted Blackboard brought suit against one of its competitors, Desire to Learn, for royalties owed under the new patents. This has sent shivers down the rest of the open source CMS community in case Blackboard were to use its fait accompli at the patent office to go after users of Moodle and others, including end users, for not paying royalties to the patent holder. But now we see this being reversed one slingshot at a time. Blackboard is seen to be undermining its own potential customer base at the cost of its reputation in the educational community, and more recently there are moves afoot to have the patent decisions reversed.

While this is going on, Sakai, another white horse open source project, is reaching fruition. If you agree that Moodle, arguably the strongest open source rival to Blackboard to date, scales well to enterprise settings despite its lesser polish, then seemingly the only real argument for paying licensing fees to Blackboard is that it might be worth the costs (to some customers) for an LMS solution that appears more crisply enterprise in a Web browser. apparently looks the part, slick and groomed for enterprise, yet has been developed for free distribution as an open source project by educational entities each taking responsibility for developing different parts of it. It seems that this could be a rather large nail destined for the coffin of closed-source enterprise ventures.

I find this of great interest in my own work context, but I see these two examples appearing, if at all, as text boxes in the materials I envisage , whose purpose would be to make the point that open source is on its way to significantly augmenting if not replacing the enterprise model of software development.

So to continue with a course outline, I am thinking ...

1. Enterprise and Open Source software
2. An overview of Web 2.0 tools
3. Social Networking
4. Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management

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Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:

MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/

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AN OVERVIEW OF WEB 2.0 TOOLS

There are many hooks for a wider understanding and use of Web 2.0 tools in modern curriculum settings. Collaborative Google spreadsheets might be used in portfolio/project work for example. I’m not sure if you can format in Google docs to the extent you can in MS Word, but the potential is certainly worth exploring.

The two most salient Web 2.0 tools with application for our students are blogs and their close cousins podcasts and wikis, though there are many more -- online collaborative calendars, for example. I hope to list a few more here eventually; meanwhile:

• Many listings of Web 2.0 tools are linked from my Moodle course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments (guest access welcome).
• A well illustrated example of how the younger generation sees these tools as being used in various modalities ranging from social collaboration to enterprise project management can be found here: http://www.wsjb.com/RPC/V1/Home.html
• I have just come across a good listing of "Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies" at this wiki: http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Aggregation

The concept with greatest implication for collaborative and project work in education (and beyond, in the real world of collaboration and project management in the workplace) is that blogs and wikis can be aggregated.

I have an explanation of how this is accomplished at http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm. This document explains how blogs for a class can be aggregated via an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) in such a way that they can be efficiently read/followed by the teacher and others in the class, or by manager and co-workers in an enterprise project venture.

Tags

Blogs can be tagged, and tags also can be aggregated. One device for doing that is http://del.icio.us/ . Jon Pederson has developed a good explanation of how del.icio.us can be used to good effect by educators: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

The concepts of tagging and aggregation lie at the heart of social networking. For example, my son posts family photos at his Facebook acct and tags the ones of me DAD. I then get an email that tagged photos are available. I get the URLs of only my photos but the whole albums are available as long as the owner has indicated that s/he trusts me with them. I don’t think we need to introduce our students to Facebook here in the Middle East, but participation in social networking sites like Facebook illustrate how the concepts work in a social context.

Podcasting

Podcasting is one highly productive example of how these concepts can be focused on two important literacy goals:

1. achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
2. and staying abreast through lifelong learning.

In order to access podcasts, one needs to have a working knowledge of using an aggregator such as iTunes or Juice (a level of knowledge akin to knowing how to drive as opposed to knowing how to build or repair a car).

The working knowledge needed is two-fold:

1. ability to subscribe to podcasts
2. and to occasionally refresh subscriptions.

Internet search skills are needed to locate desired podcasts in the first place, and some multimedia and file management skills will help in downloading, storing, retrieving, and playing the files retrieved. A computer is all that is essentially needed for this, though most people like to transfer their files to an mp3 player and listen to them while away from their computer.

Although the only skill levels needed harvest podcasts are at the level of those needed while driving, higher education is pursued in order to achieve greater understanding, in the case of driving, of the mechanics and physical forces involved in converting energy to produce the torque to propel the car, etc. Similary, among the goals of a computer literacy course should be some understanding how RSS and aggregation works, and in theory how one can create one's own blogs and podcasts, and disseminate these to a wider audience through social networking skills.

Again, I have a Web document covering aspects of these issues: http://www.vancestevens.com/casting.htm

Conclusion

is the ‘beyond’ application of these principles. But I think that blogs and wikis could be very well worked into current curriculum in student collaborative projects and in all aspects involving reporting findings from Internet search. These techniques and concepts could become built into those modules, and enable the class to pull together while learning about team techniques based in social networking concepts.

In not only social and enterprise but also in educational project/class management contexts, I think that these concepts are important because they show the way teams are learning to work together using the latest shareable Web-based technologies once they have achieved the requisite level of computer literacy.

De Szendeffy (2005: chapter 3) suggests the following 10 tips or guidelines for implementing CALL activities:

1. Focus on activities, not software titles.

2. Wade in slowly.

3. Teach.
Lab class should provide human instruction time and contact with each student.

4. Appreciate the richness of the computing environment.

5. Prepare and be patient.

6. Don’t let technology drive your class.

7. Invest time in training and orientation.

8. Pace activities.

9. Be a resource guide.

10. Orchestrate communicative activities.