Yesterday Erin and I presented several Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it…) resources. One of of my favorite sites, VoiceThread, is great for simple narrated photo stories. If you’re creative, you can create games with the drawing feature (Where’s Waldo, What am I, Picture Guess - you get the idea.) But it’s [...]
Good morning LLU readers!
This weekend Felix and I are in Sherman, TX, attending a NITLE event at Austin College called ‘Technology and the Language House Curriculum’. We gave 4 hours worth of tag-team technology sessions yesterday; today I’m [mostly] off the hook but Felix has two technology sessions yet to give. Hooray for Felix! [...]
With thanks to Jeff Samuels for sending me this gem. I am thinking we should have every first year language class do one of these as part of a final. Hmmmm… I wonder what the “One-Semester-of-Chinese” Chinese Love Song would sound like…. any suggestions?
Here’s the Topic: Languages Across the Curriculum: Examining case studies from different schools while trying to figure out how it could work in your own school. Turn to your partner and discuss. You have five minutes. You may begin.
The recent MLA recommendations outline the importance of teaching language and [...]
(thanks to Jennifer Lawson for the image)
(goodness me, two posts in one night?…is it a full moon?)
Okay, I will be frank. The configuration of this site is bugging me. We have some great stuff in here but, much like my harddrive (Erin: no comment) you can’t find stuff. Or there is stuff [...]
The semester is off and running. We must be at the three week mark because I actually got to sit down and work on something for 4 hours and had only 2 interruptions. During the first 2 weeks of class, no one sat down. See Lab Director run! See the Educational [...]
Me lo ha enviado una colega, y creo que tiene un gran sentido común; como dice el juez "hemos perdido el norte" y un buen resumen "estamos implicados todos"
http://mediateca.educa.madrid.org/reproducir.php?id_video=mianzc4s1quh4cv3
http://mediateca.educa.madrid.org/reproducir.php?id_video=mianzc4s1quh4cv3
From Woodsy’s photo gallery
This post is part of "The First ELL, ESL & EFL Carnival"
It is frequently said that the Web is full of teaching and learning resources.
What kind of language teaching resources can we find on the Web?
What do we mean by "web teaching resource"?
Teaching resources in general are a source of aid or support that may be drawn upon when needed to enhance the quality of teaching and therefore facilitate learning. They may be physical (board, book, poster, video projector, chart, ...) or conceptual and methodological. When we refer to web teaching resources we are talking about the different kinds of materials and tools that we can find on the WWW, with the same purpose of improving the quality and efficiency of learning in activities which make use of those resources.
Therefore, a first distinction can be made between materials, which provide contents, and tools, which let us process those contents, create our own materials or interact and collaborate with other people in learning environments. The type of web resources to be used will depend on the kind of activity to be developed.
As we know, when we search for contents in the Net, not only can we find text documents, also images, videos, audio files, presentations, conceptual maps or documents with a diverse kind of interactivity and graphic or multimedia combinations. Whatever their form of presentation, in my view, there are three general types of web materials for educative use:
Therefore, a first distinction can be made between materials, which provide contents, and tools, which let us process those contents, create our own materials or interact and collaborate with other people in learning environments. The type of web resources to be used will depend on the kind of activity to be developed.
As we know, when we search for contents in the Net, not only can we find text documents, also images, videos, audio files, presentations, conceptual maps or documents with a diverse kind of interactivity and graphic or multimedia combinations. Whatever their form of presentation, in my view, there are three general types of web materials for educative use:
- Teaching materials. They are usually created with a curricular didactic aim and may include different kinds of documents and activities: practice exercises (grammar, vocabulary, skills), tutorials, simulations, games, etc.
- Authentic materials. Their communicative or social function is authentic; they haven't been modified or adapted for teaching purposes. They can be used as a resource in discovery based learning activities and web tasks for language learning.
- Reference materials. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, concordancers online.
Web tools used as a teaching and learning resource can be classified according to its function:
- Navigation
- Search
- Office online tools
- Social Bookmarking
- Content syndication
- Communication
- Content and learning management systems
- Social networking
- Multimedia edition
- Didactic materials authoring
This could be an initial sketch to be completed and developed. Internet as a language learning resource is not only an immense network of contents with multimedia facilities, but also a communication technology that promotes interaction with other people and the media, providing the conditions for a more socio-constructive, cooperative and student-centered kind of learning, which takes into account the learner needs and fosters her or his autonomy.
Back Channel
The back end of the conversation is the beginning of the conversation.
Twitter so far has been the best ally to conferences, unconferences and the tearing down of walls. It has brought more interconnectedness than we had probably imagined possible the day we wrote our first blog posts.
The edublogosphere is becoming more open to different circles of contacts and except for one or two star edubloggers, they all -including this star- tend to open up to hear from a wider circle of 'friends'.
Distributed Conferences
We seem to be experimenting with being closely linked to an ever-growing and far-reaching circle of contacts. We all want to create experiences as synchronous or near synchronous as possible. We are far from the days when blogging was writing the quiet, lonely reflection and then press publish to reach others. Now the reverse is happening, valuable ideas arise when like-minded people strike up conversations which will, in turn, prokove thoughts that will be perpetuated in blogs or wikis. A kind of everlasting conference springing from a muted chat conversation at the back of the room.
Back channelling (chatcasts)
As the Twitter tool has limits for this new need, so Skype chatting came into the picture and the Chatcasts were born.
What have we learnt from the experience?
A few good things:
-There is a unique added value to the just-in-time, in-the-moment connectedness. We need more of that.
-In spite of the speedy style of a chat with 40 or more participants, it is an opportunity to share deep reflections for those who have been reading each other for a long time.
-Chatcasts, just like face-to-face conferences, are also a chance to make new connections with like-minded people, who could perhaps have met anyway -at a much slower pace- in a blog comment thread.
Perhaps not an experience to suit all learning styles, but meaningful conversation can spring from people looking over the shoulders of attendees. Streaming and archiving the chat can be as valuable as the presentation podcast itself.
The back channel comes to the fore
People will simply not stay silent at the back. They want to take over the conference and connect to have instant feedback from their wider network. When you need to reach 30 people, Skypecast is not enough... We need to simplify issues of how to:
-access (direct access vs finding the Skype user name who captains the chat)
-archive (a unique URL you can quote and link to)
-search
-share
So? What is next?
Twitter is also the starting point for on-the-fly ideas which may turn into something big...
Chris Craft writes,
Edublogosphere.com, a future centralized back channel?
My thoughts.
It is the word centralized that makes me wonder. I agree we need another venue for informal back channelling. But not a mere alternative to Twitter. I think we have to review our chatcasting experiences and try to push them to the next level.
What were the drawbacks of chatcasts?
Perhaps the number of steps and formal organisation required to make it a success:
-Someone must captain the chat. This person will be somewhat overworked.
-There is a limit to the number of people you can join in the conference mode.
-You need to have the Skype contact name; get it on time.
-A privacy issue. It is necessary for the captain to add new contacts to his Skype, which he may or may not be interested in keeping afterwords.
-How do you get to know if the next conference you cannot attend will have a back channel option of some sessions? The first announcement of a chat could come from anyone in the Twittersphere attending an event somewhere in the world. Unless it is your own presentation and you announce it in your blog ahead of time, it takes good luck to come across a tweet with an invite.
All in all a fairly formal process to get to backchannelling. I think that part of the success of these online meetings is that the enthusiasm you experience resembles a face-to-face encounter at the coffee break in a conference. Lively and mostly informal.
What do we need for future synchronous conversations?
Announcing an event
About creating a site which can be the 'centralized' place to announce events... I believe a calendar in EdubloggerWorld is a far better option. It is open to groups in other languages and we can probably profit from interchange with an 'interpreter' and captain making the back channel of a conference in another country. Backchannel could be a way to go beyond barriers of place, time and language.
Making anyone, anytime a chat Captain
But the marvel of it all -so far- is how simple it is for anyone, to put people in conference mode. It only takes a Skype account, plus Twitter. Choose a tag and you continue conversing in blogs; paste the script to a wiki and let readers (even those who missed the sync chat) start forum threads. So flexible and distributed. You do not even need a conference as a starting point. The need to chat could start with any collaborative task.
More than a need to centralize it, there is a need to make it as open as possible. That is what http://worldbridges.net./ achieves.
We also need to make it transparent. Something that tells you who is there with you, as a meebo chat or a Google doc that tells you who is editing.
Facilitating Openness
-No passwords. No sharing personal IDs unless you want to.
-Ease to integrate to other online 'events' -not just conferences- e.g. provide the archivable chat that a google docs does not yet have.
How will this communication need translate into a form and content?
That is, it would be great to separate form and content. Tool and venue. I think we need a place on the one hand and a tool on the other. That's why the word centralized leaves a bug buzzing in my head. The tool could be the centralized aspect; but conversations are, by nature, distributed.
After all, isn't the whole idea of back channelling a conference a way of shifting the conversation focus to the attendees and their blogs instead of the speaker at the conference centre?
Related Reading
Previous ELT Notes post on Chatcast
Chatcasting: A Summary. By David Jakes, August 26, 2007.
A chatcast I took part in... This is a chatcast example archived in a wiki.
Learning the Guitar at the ACSD14 Global Learners. By Darren Kuropatwa
Some reflections on that experience by the chatcast 'Captain'.
Chatcasting from a Management Perspective. By Terry Freedman, August 15, 2007.
Follow-up on this in my del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/chatcast
Image Attribution
Jakes Rolling out the Chatcast by Shareski
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/858483919/
BLC07_1 by torres21
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torres21/864182814/
The back end of the conversation is the beginning of the conversation.
Twitter so far has been the best ally to conferences, unconferences and the tearing down of walls. It has brought more interconnectedness than we had probably imagined possible the day we wrote our first blog posts.
The edublogosphere is becoming more open to different circles of contacts and except for one or two star edubloggers, they all -including this star- tend to open up to hear from a wider circle of 'friends'.
Distributed Conferences
We seem to be experimenting with being closely linked to an ever-growing and far-reaching circle of contacts. We all want to create experiences as synchronous or near synchronous as possible. We are far from the days when blogging was writing the quiet, lonely reflection and then press publish to reach others. Now the reverse is happening, valuable ideas arise when like-minded people strike up conversations which will, in turn, prokove thoughts that will be perpetuated in blogs or wikis. A kind of everlasting conference springing from a muted chat conversation at the back of the room.
Back channelling (chatcasts)
As the Twitter tool has limits for this new need, so Skype chatting came into the picture and the Chatcasts were born.
What have we learnt from the experience?
A few good things:
-There is a unique added value to the just-in-time, in-the-moment connectedness. We need more of that.
-In spite of the speedy style of a chat with 40 or more participants, it is an opportunity to share deep reflections for those who have been reading each other for a long time.
-Chatcasts, just like face-to-face conferences, are also a chance to make new connections with like-minded people, who could perhaps have met anyway -at a much slower pace- in a blog comment thread.
Perhaps not an experience to suit all learning styles, but meaningful conversation can spring from people looking over the shoulders of attendees. Streaming and archiving the chat can be as valuable as the presentation podcast itself.
The back channel comes to the fore
People will simply not stay silent at the back. They want to take over the conference and connect to have instant feedback from their wider network. When you need to reach 30 people, Skypecast is not enough... We need to simplify issues of how to:
-access (direct access vs finding the Skype user name who captains the chat)
-archive (a unique URL you can quote and link to)
-search
-share
So? What is next?
Twitter is also the starting point for on-the-fly ideas which may turn into something big...
Chris Craft writes,
Edublogosphere.com, a future centralized back channel?
My thoughts.
It is the word centralized that makes me wonder. I agree we need another venue for informal back channelling. But not a mere alternative to Twitter. I think we have to review our chatcasting experiences and try to push them to the next level.
What were the drawbacks of chatcasts?
Perhaps the number of steps and formal organisation required to make it a success:
-Someone must captain the chat. This person will be somewhat overworked.
-There is a limit to the number of people you can join in the conference mode.
-You need to have the Skype contact name; get it on time.
-A privacy issue. It is necessary for the captain to add new contacts to his Skype, which he may or may not be interested in keeping afterwords.
-How do you get to know if the next conference you cannot attend will have a back channel option of some sessions? The first announcement of a chat could come from anyone in the Twittersphere attending an event somewhere in the world. Unless it is your own presentation and you announce it in your blog ahead of time, it takes good luck to come across a tweet with an invite.
All in all a fairly formal process to get to backchannelling. I think that part of the success of these online meetings is that the enthusiasm you experience resembles a face-to-face encounter at the coffee break in a conference. Lively and mostly informal.
What do we need for future synchronous conversations?
Announcing an event
About creating a site which can be the 'centralized' place to announce events... I believe a calendar in EdubloggerWorld is a far better option. It is open to groups in other languages and we can probably profit from interchange with an 'interpreter' and captain making the back channel of a conference in another country. Backchannel could be a way to go beyond barriers of place, time and language.
Making anyone, anytime a chat Captain
But the marvel of it all -so far- is how simple it is for anyone, to put people in conference mode. It only takes a Skype account, plus Twitter. Choose a tag and you continue conversing in blogs; paste the script to a wiki and let readers (even those who missed the sync chat) start forum threads. So flexible and distributed. You do not even need a conference as a starting point. The need to chat could start with any collaborative task.
More than a need to centralize it, there is a need to make it as open as possible. That is what http://worldbridges.net./ achieves.
We also need to make it transparent. Something that tells you who is there with you, as a meebo chat or a Google doc that tells you who is editing.
Facilitating Openness
-No passwords. No sharing personal IDs unless you want to.
-Ease to integrate to other online 'events' -not just conferences- e.g. provide the archivable chat that a google docs does not yet have.
How will this communication need translate into a form and content?
That is, it would be great to separate form and content. Tool and venue. I think we need a place on the one hand and a tool on the other. That's why the word centralized leaves a bug buzzing in my head. The tool could be the centralized aspect; but conversations are, by nature, distributed.
After all, isn't the whole idea of back channelling a conference a way of shifting the conversation focus to the attendees and their blogs instead of the speaker at the conference centre?
Related Reading
Previous ELT Notes post on Chatcast
Chatcasting: A Summary. By David Jakes, August 26, 2007.
A chatcast I took part in... This is a chatcast example archived in a wiki.
Learning the Guitar at the ACSD14 Global Learners. By Darren Kuropatwa
Some reflections on that experience by the chatcast 'Captain'.
Chatcasting from a Management Perspective. By Terry Freedman, August 15, 2007.
Follow-up on this in my del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/chatcast
Image Attribution
Jakes Rolling out the Chatcast by Shareski
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/858483919/
BLC07_1 by torres21
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torres21/864182814/
Seems the NYTimes has figured it out…. as a TimesSelect customer I was able to search for old articles etc. …but for price… Now…everyone can search to their heart’s content and do so for free.
From the NYT:
Why the change?
Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more [...]
photo credit
Ahoy, me hearties … if you’re tired of swabbin’ the deck and would prefer not t’be walkin’ the plank, there’s lots of ways to parrrrrrrticipate in today’s festivities:
The Official Talk Like a Pirate Day website
Another TLAPD blog
The Wikipedia entry
A Pirate’s Day gathering on Second Life (Aazy’s Place)
Sing along to the theme from Disney World [...]
I just got back from the EUROCALL 2007 conference at the University of Coleraine, Northern Ireland – followed by a one-week holiday touring the North-West of Ireland. It was one of the best EUROCALL conferences I have attended since EUROCALL first became an official professional association in 1993. This year’s conference included a more elaborate online Virtual Strand than last year’s conference in Granada, Spain. As well as the conference blog and the Blobber text chat facility, this year’s Virtual Strand included the Yaplet text chat facility, live online presentations in text chat, and podcasts in which conference participants expressed their impressions of presentations that they attended. The plenary keynotes and panel discussion were streamed and are also archived. An asynchronous discussion list has also been set up. All the details are here:
http://vsportal2007.googlepages.com/
The blog, to which you will find a link at the above URL, will remain active for some time.
It is often said that if you return from a conference with three new important impressions or ideas then the conference has been a success. These are mine:
1. Bernd Rüschoff, talking about wikis in his plenary presentation on Web 2.0, pointed out that an analysis of the answers given by the audience in the German TV version of “Who wants to be a millionaire” were predominantly right. He reflected that the criticism levelled at wikis such as Wikipedia may be unjustified, as collective knowledge is increasingly proving to be reliable.
2. The video that Gràinne Conole showed in her plenary presentation of the student living in a high-tech house and using a variety of digital devices as part of her everyday life left a lasting impression on me. Teachers need to be aware that the new generation of students feel completely at ease with new technologies.
3. Uschi Felix – who declared her intention to retire from academic life this year – warned us that students will not be impressed if they are confronted with “boring old technology” at school or university. On the other hand, they often react negatively to teachers who think they are being trendy by using Facebook and other social network sites that are popular with young people. Students often perceive such sites as “their” property, which they want to keep for themselves.
All in all, this was a great conference. All the sessions that I attended were good. The weather was kind to us, we observed a perfect sunset from the venue of the Gala Dinner, were entertained by the Altnaveigh House Band, the best Irish/Scottish band (with a fabulous dancer) that I have ever heard, and we danced ourselves to exhaustion at the Céilí, to the accompaniment of the highly-accomplished traditional music band, Craobh Rua (Red Branch).
Just a reminder that the main EUROCALL website, which contains information about previous and forthcoming conferences, can be found at:
http://www.eurocall-languages.org/
http://vsportal2007.googlepages.com/
The blog, to which you will find a link at the above URL, will remain active for some time.
It is often said that if you return from a conference with three new important impressions or ideas then the conference has been a success. These are mine:
1. Bernd Rüschoff, talking about wikis in his plenary presentation on Web 2.0, pointed out that an analysis of the answers given by the audience in the German TV version of “Who wants to be a millionaire” were predominantly right. He reflected that the criticism levelled at wikis such as Wikipedia may be unjustified, as collective knowledge is increasingly proving to be reliable.
2. The video that Gràinne Conole showed in her plenary presentation of the student living in a high-tech house and using a variety of digital devices as part of her everyday life left a lasting impression on me. Teachers need to be aware that the new generation of students feel completely at ease with new technologies.
3. Uschi Felix – who declared her intention to retire from academic life this year – warned us that students will not be impressed if they are confronted with “boring old technology” at school or university. On the other hand, they often react negatively to teachers who think they are being trendy by using Facebook and other social network sites that are popular with young people. Students often perceive such sites as “their” property, which they want to keep for themselves.
All in all, this was a great conference. All the sessions that I attended were good. The weather was kind to us, we observed a perfect sunset from the venue of the Gala Dinner, were entertained by the Altnaveigh House Band, the best Irish/Scottish band (with a fabulous dancer) that I have ever heard, and we danced ourselves to exhaustion at the Céilí, to the accompaniment of the highly-accomplished traditional music band, Craobh Rua (Red Branch).
Just a reminder that the main EUROCALL website, which contains information about previous and forthcoming conferences, can be found at:
http://www.eurocall-languages.org/
I think; therefore I blog:
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies
I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:
The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.
The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.
So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.
I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.
In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.
I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.
In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.
First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens
In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).
I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.
I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.
Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:
Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.
Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!
pp107tesol
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies
I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:
- A static Web 1.o page at http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2007.htm
- A Moodle page at http://www.opensource.idv.tw/moodle/course/view.php?id=23. A big problem with the Moodle this time around is that due to an incompatibility between the most recent versions of Moodle and the SQL dbase running on the server that's graciously hosting us in Taiwan, backup no longer works here, so I'm hesitant to put much effort here until this is resolved.
- Something new, and interesting, a PageFlakes portal at: http://www.pageflakes.com/vancestevens/13498617 . I find I like working with PageFlakes. It has an easy and intuitive interface - you simply select widgets and embed them in your page. One of these works on RSS feeds, so you can display recent content on your PageFlakes portal of whatever sites you want to follow.
The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.
The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.
So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.
I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.
In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.
I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.
In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.
First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens
In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).
I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.
I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.
Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:
- We can look for postings tagged pp107tesol at Technorati, by searching on http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/pp107tesol. There are ways we might need to fine tune here, and we will explore such considerations as we proceed with this course.
- We can aggregate each other's postings by subscribing to each other's blogs in a newsreader or aggregator. Last year we used Bloglines. I think that this year I will use Google Reader just to explore its capabilities. I am becoming enamored with the whole range of Google services, and I like the way that Google Reader fits in as an additional tool accessible through one login for Gmail, Blogger etc.)
- We can comment on each other's postings and see to what degree this kind of conversation can supplant or augment our other threaded discussions.
- We can tag each other's postings in http://del.icio.us and explore together how social bookmarking works. It is interesting for example to tag your own URLs and see who else has read and tagged them as well, and what other tags they are using.
Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.
Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!
pp107tesol
While Gimpshop has been growing on me as of late, rumors of Photoshop Express still have me excited. No official announcement has been made, and we don’t have many details. Early screenshots reveal a GUI that looks as intuitive as iPhoto, but a bit more useful:
(photo credit)
It seems geared towards the low-to-intermediate user, which is [...]
Volvemos al aula, Uf!! cuesta un poco ¿no?.
En mi caso, después de casi tres años fuera de la secundaria trabajando con proyectos de elearning a nivel de universidad me reincorporo al aula con bastantes ganas. Se me ha ocurrido empezar con esta canción que está sonando bastante.
Podéis ver los ejercicios que he preparado en esta página.
Ánimo a todos, y ya sabéis aquí estamos para apoyarnos unos a otros "under each other's umbrella"
En mi caso, después de casi tres años fuera de la secundaria trabajando con proyectos de elearning a nivel de universidad me reincorporo al aula con bastantes ganas. Se me ha ocurrido empezar con esta canción que está sonando bastante.
Podéis ver los ejercicios que he preparado en esta página.
Ánimo a todos, y ya sabéis aquí estamos para apoyarnos unos a otros "under each other's umbrella"
Blogging for students, a year on
A year ago I presented my my first blog for students, The FCE Blog, at Teacher's Day in front of 50 of my co-workers at the BAC, the theatre of the language school I work at.
A translation of this presentation into Spanish was published in an interview at Educ.ar, the Argentine Ministry of Education blog, which opened the door for me to meet the Spanish speaking edubloggosphere. A most rewarding learning experience. It was viewed over 2,500 times at Slideshare and favourited by 20. For all of you wondering whatever I said there, here is the English version of the interview.
I must say I love my first blog. I have used its name/logo as my avatar. Sometimes -not too often- I miss the days when I had no idea there was a network of edubloggers around. I made me focus more on my ideas. Definitely what I produced before September 2006 was purely original content. Somehow ignorance helped me to write unhindered from thoughts such as, hasn't anyone done this before? Shouldn't I build upon what others are doing? Once you are connected, I believe you assume the responsibility of not reinventing the wheel. I did check there was no like of it around the web. There was not.
Some achievements
In April 2007, the blog got a mention as an example of the ELT Tutor blog in the book How to Teach English with Technology published by Longman. The students' reaction to this was 'We are making history'. I think the blog showed there are simply no more walls in our classroom.
Personally, I am so glad Stephen Downes has included The FCE Blog in his Edu-RSS feed list of edubloggers.
More Questions
All in all, a successful presentation. As I have been asked to present again, I am reviewing it. Some core ideas I still find relevant; but others have changed under the light of the knowledge gained in the last six months.
I do not have answers yet. I get stuck and need help. I am posting the questions and hope you make me think. (Contributions will be properly acknowledged and linktributed in a future post).
Can we still use the concept of "digital natives versus digital immigrants" to explain the divide between teachers and students?
Students use msn, fotologs (highly popular in Argentina) and text incessantly. When I speak of blogs, wikis, del.icio.us or Flickr, I am speaking a new language to them. I am not trying to integrate the same technology they master to my lessons. I am introducing new tools which are far more social than a private mail, chat or text message. Learning and sharing with the whole world has, so far, been pretty innovative to them. They do not adopt blogs and wikis at the touch of a button. You can expect a series of adoption resistance moves before the whole class gets engaged.
How can student blogs be best moderated?
Reading class blogs, mostly ELT, it is hard to find lots of blogs flooded with student comments. Moderation and word verification seem to be rather off-putting. Moderation in itself is a top-down activity, which somehow makes the course blog a teacher-centred place in the end.
In order to engage students in writing their reflections, is it better to blog in class or at home? Do students reflect more in blog posts of their own or in comments?
This question is connected to the idea of assigning posts or comments as homework. When I think about my own learning as a blogger, I can connect anywhere, but I still find my home the best place for writing reflections. I can come up with an idea for a class anywhere; however, I would not have developed a whole blogging project on a school computer. Now that digital literacy is not so time consuming, I find it a lot easier to make myself home in a public computer.
Not that these are the only questions in my mind now. But let's say it is enough for one post.
Related links
Presentation handout (in Spanish).
A year ago I presented my my first blog for students, The FCE Blog, at Teacher's Day in front of 50 of my co-workers at the BAC, the theatre of the language school I work at.
A translation of this presentation into Spanish was published in an interview at Educ.ar, the Argentine Ministry of Education blog, which opened the door for me to meet the Spanish speaking edubloggosphere. A most rewarding learning experience. It was viewed over 2,500 times at Slideshare and favourited by 20. For all of you wondering whatever I said there, here is the English version of the interview.
I must say I love my first blog. I have used its name/logo as my avatar. Sometimes -not too often- I miss the days when I had no idea there was a network of edubloggers around. I made me focus more on my ideas. Definitely what I produced before September 2006 was purely original content. Somehow ignorance helped me to write unhindered from thoughts such as, hasn't anyone done this before? Shouldn't I build upon what others are doing? Once you are connected, I believe you assume the responsibility of not reinventing the wheel. I did check there was no like of it around the web. There was not.
Some achievements
In April 2007, the blog got a mention as an example of the ELT Tutor blog in the book How to Teach English with Technology published by Longman. The students' reaction to this was 'We are making history'. I think the blog showed there are simply no more walls in our classroom.
Personally, I am so glad Stephen Downes has included The FCE Blog in his Edu-RSS feed list of edubloggers.
More Questions
All in all, a successful presentation. As I have been asked to present again, I am reviewing it. Some core ideas I still find relevant; but others have changed under the light of the knowledge gained in the last six months.
I do not have answers yet. I get stuck and need help. I am posting the questions and hope you make me think. (Contributions will be properly acknowledged and linktributed in a future post).
Can we still use the concept of "digital natives versus digital immigrants" to explain the divide between teachers and students?
Students use msn, fotologs (highly popular in Argentina) and text incessantly. When I speak of blogs, wikis, del.icio.us or Flickr, I am speaking a new language to them. I am not trying to integrate the same technology they master to my lessons. I am introducing new tools which are far more social than a private mail, chat or text message. Learning and sharing with the whole world has, so far, been pretty innovative to them. They do not adopt blogs and wikis at the touch of a button. You can expect a series of adoption resistance moves before the whole class gets engaged.
How can student blogs be best moderated?
Reading class blogs, mostly ELT, it is hard to find lots of blogs flooded with student comments. Moderation and word verification seem to be rather off-putting. Moderation in itself is a top-down activity, which somehow makes the course blog a teacher-centred place in the end.
In order to engage students in writing their reflections, is it better to blog in class or at home? Do students reflect more in blog posts of their own or in comments?
This question is connected to the idea of assigning posts or comments as homework. When I think about my own learning as a blogger, I can connect anywhere, but I still find my home the best place for writing reflections. I can come up with an idea for a class anywhere; however, I would not have developed a whole blogging project on a school computer. Now that digital literacy is not so time consuming, I find it a lot easier to make myself home in a public computer.
Not that these are the only questions in my mind now. But let's say it is enough for one post.
Related links
Presentation handout (in Spanish).
In Japan, 30% of those surveyed by Goo Research’s online monitor group would like to. Or at least that's what was said in April this year (I've only just seen this now) - I wonder, if you asked the same people now, would the answer be any different? How many of those people have tried to study English in Second Life? And, Perhaps the answer would have been different if they had used a different verb instead of study - learn or practise, for example.
It's amazing what you find by chance...
I came across the What Japan Thinks survey ("Are you interested in studying English in Second Life?") while trying to find out the source of an extremely annoying error message* that keeps nagging my avatar (see below). Needless to say, I got sidetracked and now find myself blogging about the survey instead of finding the solution to my Second Life problem.
Learning a language in Second Life
This topic was discussed extensively at the 2007 Second Life Languages Seminar, and I recommend anyone interested in the subject to listen to the recordings, which are still available at Edunation (where the seminar was held)
From what I gathered, I think most people agreed the idea of supplementing (i.e. using it for blended learning) is the most probable use of Second Life.
The British Council Second Life project (which I'm involved in), for example, will be using this virtual world as a way of having contact with people the organisation does not normally reach (as well as exisiting customers) , and offering extra resources, events, etc. for learners to supplement face-to-face classes. You can read more about this at my avatar's blog (not much there at the moment, but I'll be posting more frequently from now on).
The Second-Life-only company Languagelab.com , however, will be offering courses there (they are still in beta at the moment) , and they have started offering a variety of 'formal, informal and social' ways of learning English. I had the opportunity to take a tour of the languagelab.com islands this summer and was most impressed with the amount of thought and work that has gone into the company and methodology. They also have some very bright minds working on the project, which should show favourable results.
There are also other people that have been using Second Life for teaching language classes, and have gone through some interesting changes in the way their facilities are being used as a result. The English Village is the one that springs to mind, who have changed the way they conduct classes, from imitating sit-down-real-life classes through holodecks and (the latest I've seen) pirate role-playing games.
One thing is certain - I'm certain that we're going to see and hear a lot more about language learning in Second Life over the next year or so.
* The annoying message is one that informs me "Online Monitor: Time's Up, Baldric Commons - you need a break from the computer..." when I've been in Second Life for over 30 minutes. I can't seem to find what device is causing this message to be displayed - if anyone can help, please let me know and I'll buy you a virtual beer...
It's amazing what you find by chance...
I came across the What Japan Thinks survey ("Are you interested in studying English in Second Life?") while trying to find out the source of an extremely annoying error message* that keeps nagging my avatar (see below). Needless to say, I got sidetracked and now find myself blogging about the survey instead of finding the solution to my Second Life problem.
Learning a language in Second Life
This topic was discussed extensively at the 2007 Second Life Languages Seminar, and I recommend anyone interested in the subject to listen to the recordings, which are still available at Edunation (where the seminar was held)
From what I gathered, I think most people agreed the idea of supplementing (i.e. using it for blended learning) is the most probable use of Second Life.
The British Council Second Life project (which I'm involved in), for example, will be using this virtual world as a way of having contact with people the organisation does not normally reach (as well as exisiting customers) , and offering extra resources, events, etc. for learners to supplement face-to-face classes. You can read more about this at my avatar's blog (not much there at the moment, but I'll be posting more frequently from now on).
The Second-Life-only company Languagelab.com , however, will be offering courses there (they are still in beta at the moment) , and they have started offering a variety of 'formal, informal and social' ways of learning English. I had the opportunity to take a tour of the languagelab.com islands this summer and was most impressed with the amount of thought and work that has gone into the company and methodology. They also have some very bright minds working on the project, which should show favourable results.
There are also other people that have been using Second Life for teaching language classes, and have gone through some interesting changes in the way their facilities are being used as a result. The English Village is the one that springs to mind, who have changed the way they conduct classes, from imitating sit-down-real-life classes through holodecks and (the latest I've seen) pirate role-playing games.
One thing is certain - I'm certain that we're going to see and hear a lot more about language learning in Second Life over the next year or so.
* The annoying message is one that informs me "Online Monitor: Time's Up, Baldric Commons - you need a break from the computer..." when I've been in Second Life for over 30 minutes. I can't seem to find what device is causing this message to be displayed - if anyone can help, please let me know and I'll buy you a virtual beer...
WEBHEADS DISCUSSION TOUR #2
REAL LIFE EUROPEAN CITIES IN SECOND LIFE
As the best part of last week's tour was having a guide speak us through it in Wonderful Denmark, I thought I could attempt to do something similar in..
* Barcelona
* Liverpool
and if anyone comes along who'd like to give a tour of another destination, please let us know. Here are some of the other cities I proposed visiting last week...
* Moscow
* Amsterdam
* Lisbon
* Brussels
* Dublin
FOR DISCUSSION:
REAL LIFE EUROPEAN CITIES IN SECOND LIFE
For anyone out there interested in meeting up in Second Life on Mondays, I thought it would be interesting to continue the tour of Real Cities we started last week.
We only got to visit two, and there are lots more that we can take a look at.As the best part of last week's tour was having a guide speak us through it in Wonderful Denmark, I thought I could attempt to do something similar in..
* Barcelona
* Liverpool
and if anyone comes along who'd like to give a tour of another destination, please let us know. Here are some of the other cities I proposed visiting last week...
* Moscow
* Amsterdam
* Lisbon
* Brussels
* Dublin
FOR DISCUSSION:
Second Life has its fair share of Real Life cities that people have
created. Why build a recreation of a Real Life city in a virtual world
where what you build is confined only by your imagination? Do these
places attract native speakers from these countries and people
interested in learning the language associated with the cities? What
can you learn about culture from visiting these places?
Join us for the discussion tour and find out the answer to these
questions and more.
DATE/TIME : Monday, September 10, 2007 at 20:00:00 UTC time: http://tinyurl.com/39j7n9 =
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=10&year=2007&hour=20&min=0&sec=0&p1=0
MEETING PLACE: Meet at the Webheads hut at Edunation :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Edunation/73/51/22/
CONTACT: IM Baldric Commons for a teleport link if you're late
NOTE: If you activate the Second Life Voice Client before you come, you will get more out of this experience: In Second Life, go to Edit ->Preferences->Voice Chat and click on the box 'Enable Voice Chat' __._,_.___
G’morning folks:
The audio from Language Lab Unleashed, episode #21, is now available for your listening pleasure. We had a great conversation ranging from the roots of language learning anxiety (and how it’s different from other kinds of learning anxiety) to how to overcome it in the classroom. Right-click here to download or use the audio [...]
September 6, 8 p.m. EDT LLU #21: Language Learners and Anxiety:
Elaine Horwitz, University of Texas-Austin, on anxiety and second language learning as well as her recent book “Becoming a Language Teacher:A Practical Guide to Second Language Learning and Teaching” Dr Horwitz’ work was recently highlighted in Inside Higher Ed as well as [...]
ESL-EFL BLOGS. Here you can read what some language teachers from around the world have written in their blogs.
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