TESOL Blogs from across the net

I still do not speak Russian with anyone and have no real desire to do so. I guess I would summarize my philosophy as follows; until I can read and listen to a novel, news programs and recorded conversations in Russian and enjoy doing so, I have no desire to speak with anyone. I might be extreme but I feel there is so much I can do on my own to improve in the language, I am not sure that stumbling around in a conversation at this stage in my learning would really help me. I think the same is true for English learning.

During the 2005 WiAOC conference, we introduced, explained the P2P concept and showed why / how it could be incorporated in language learning. We also set up the Dekita Exchange project for learners, which unfortunately came to a halt earlier this year for lack of interest and participation.

Today, I have just come across a series of other P2P presentations and initiatives. During the E-merge Conference in July 2008, Robin Good and Michael Bauwens discuss P2P Models in Education, demonstrate that P2P is far more than technology and file sharing and describe the collaborative social arrangements which are necessary for large scale voluntary projects such as writing and editing Wikipedia articles.

The P2P Virtual University is about to be launched in February 2009. Similarly to the EVO sessions, the P2PU courses will run for 6 weeks and be open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. Learning, however, will take place in small groups of 8-14 students and will require the payment of a small sign-up fee and an application as a way to ‘assure’ learner commitment and motivation.

As Alastair Creelman states in his post

The whole concept relies on committed tutors who use P2PU to enhance their academic reputation and the opportunity to work in communities they would not otherwise have access to. The role of the “sense makers” is more to provide academic depth to the courses and to liaise with the tutors. Whether these people will get some kind of financial reward for their contribution in the future depends on the success of the project.

While George Siemens questions the notion of “sense makers” (no one makes sense for us) and centralization, the Chronicle of Higher Education points to some of the obstacles to such project.

Although the initiative signals yet another movement towards openness, de-institutionalization and personalization, like Siemens, I still see it as linear, top-down and very teacher-centred. The content and design are laid down beforehand and precede the learner instead of respecting truly self-determined learning and reflection.

I wonder whether I will see the day when learners themselves discuss and write down their own curricula on a wiki according to their passion and needs, and then, interact in diverse communities to seek out experience, discuss and collaborate with feedback from tutors, experts and peers in order to make sense and achieve their goals. Their certificate, whether accredited by an institution or not, would then be their personal learning process and trajectory documented through their interactions and artifacts on the Web/f2f.

In his post Dogme and Identity, Luke Meddings, one of the writers of the co-authored Delta Development Blog, points to the present excess of standardized course materials, content and technology we are exposed to in ELT. The 2007 article The Autumn of the Multitaskers in the Atlantic, while not specifically dealing with English teaching, also illustrates well the cognitive overload and haste we have to deal with presently and warns us against their dumbing down effects.

In both situations there is little room for slow conversations and the emergent language which arises from the learners’ own interests and shapes their evolving identity in the foreign language.

At Dekita, we have brought up the need for peer-centered learning and questioned the forced standardized content from the strict curriculum and the cookie-cutter model of the standard pre-packaged coursebook topics.

How can we guide our students to acquire what they need so they can express their thoughts, share them with others, and negotiate meaning in self-directed ways? How do we move from dependence towards greater independence and inter-dependence? How do we adopt a more process-oriented approach and interact in a more open and decentralized fashion which allows for self-directed participation, informal communication, inter-cultural and inter-linguistic development?

Is it possible to make time within your class to slow the pace and allow for different meaningful processing experiences, during which understanding and language are negotiated and appropriated individually or are our courses becoming devoid of meaning and as as queer as a clockwork orange?

Hot off the press, Bill Fitzgerald’s (FunnyMonkey) Drupal in Education and e-Learning, a book designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. Bill explains in this podcast interview with Jeff Robbins (Lullabot) how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are using it with Youth Voices, a meeting place where students and their teachers share, distribute, and work in a variety of creative endeavors, from blogging to video production and discussions of video to digital photography. They were interested in embedding and sharing video on the the site so they put Bill in contact with the Voice Thread team. The result of this collaboration was an extension that can already be downloaded and will likely be bundled with the Embedded Media Field module.

At Dekita, we worked on Drupal from scratch as from August 2007 and prepared it to host the Social Media in ELT EVO 2008 collaborative session that ran from January 14th to February 24th, 2008. In spite of the team being a bit put off by the “hysterically hierarchical” wiki structure, thanks to our ghost in the machine’s help, design and expertise, we managed to navigate forward and experiment with the various basic modules offered.

Differently from Moodle, an LMS platform which tends to replicate the school classroom control mode with its hierarchical, calendar/teacher driven course management, Drupal allows for both teacher-directed and student-directed learning.

Drupal Ed (and other experiments like, for instance, the Social Media Classroom) may provide a compromise or a transition phase towards change between the traditional LMS systematization of education, with its requirements for structure, control, accountability and manageability and the PLE’s informal, individual and peer network agency model.

This is a translated near copy of a post I made in Portuguese for the OER community in Brazil. I transferred it here as I feel it illustrates well a process that can be used not only in ELT but also by teachers and learners of any foreign language. It is an example of a participatory language activity within a community of practice, which uses authentic material from the open web, and creates an artifact that brings value to the community at large instead of only producing a response to pre-packaged published material produced for the classroom alone.

I have incorporated this example, together with Juliano Spyer’s Adote um Parágrafo project, to the presentation I will be giving at the Global Education Conference next Wednesday, November 17th at 21 GMT together with Laura Franklin and Moustapha Diack on the Merlot OER world-languages and accessibility matters in OER design and deployment.

Open Access 101 is a video made by Karen Rustad from the Right to Research NGO. The author explains how the academic publishing industry works and comments on how the high cost for the end users involved causes knowledge to be bottled up in closed silos, only accessible to those who can afford it. The alternative is Open Access, which allows unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly journals.

The video is in English so this hinders the understanding for people who do not master the language. Therefore, I decided to translate it to facilitate access. The Creative Commons License BY/NC/SA, adopted by the video creator, tells me I can use her work, distribute it, remix it as long as I credit her, do not use if for commercial purposes and share the result of this remix by using the same license.

A good way to do it was to beta test Universal Subtitles, a Participatory Culture Foundation project : “It is a collaborative toolset and community for volunteers and organizations around the world to make almost any video accessible for the deaf and to translate videos for all of us”.

Universal Subtitles, however, accepts (for the time being) only some sites online like YouTube and blip.tv and the FLV and ogg formats.As the original film is on Vimeo and I had downloaded it in mp4, I had to convert it to ogg. I did not have on my computer what I needed to convert it…grrr

Fortunately, at that exact moment I saw (through the Gmail chat) Ewout Ter Haar, one of the founders of Stoa and an active member of the OER community. I sent him an SOS. After a brief exchange, Ewout graciously helped me convert the mp4 , allowing me to have an ogg version to subtitle. This is how communities of practice work. Thank you, Ewout and here is the result. I first subtitled it in its original language, English and then translated it into Portuguese.

This open resource can now be shared and modified by the community as Universal Subtitles allows other users to participate and improve on what has been done. You will see that Open Access 101 was already translated into Dutch and if you look at the recorded subtitling history (like in Wikipedia), another user rectified and made my own translation better.

SUGGESTAN
1. geo. A little country where everyone is suggesting something.

From the same developer of Rare Words, Suggestan is another application which taps into crowdsourcing and a bit of semantics.

According to the author, it is “define a thing” project, where you can find or share knowledge about the subjects/hobbies/professions/ideas that you know in form of suggestive questions. It will also try to define some relations between these words, ideas and places.

You may consult a list of suggested random topics on the main page or create your own in the sidebar on the right by starting your sentence using “If you …”. eg. (if you) are dating online . The bold part is all you need to type to start a new topic. The second step is to click on the link created and add suggestions according to the prompts given.