Who’s in control?

As I sat in on a webinar last week that was discussing literacy and numeracy in the context of e-learning and that connected a number of tertiary institutions in NZ with the guest speaker in London Harvey Mellar (using Elluminate), I mused about the issue of control.

If learning is all about engagement ie. how engaged you are might determine how much you learn, then surely engagement is related to the degree of control that you have. Control in relation to e-learning might be about the learning itself (Do I want to be here?), content (Is this relevant to me?) or the tools (How transparent is the technology?)

Issues for the teacher in relation to the above three might include

• How much do we take into account student motivation, outside lives in relation to learning? Is this our responsibility or can we just ignore it and get on with the classroom business? How holistic am I in the way I address my class?
• How much control do we want to give to students in terms of content? eg. Does it matter what they listen to in English? Can we trust them to find listenings that are the right level for them (i+1)? But isn’t this better than me identifying a single listening for the class that might be i + or - x for each individual?
• How do we measure gain vs load? How do we balance the time taken for students to get to grips with a new application and to feel ‘in control’ (eg. Voicethread which is quite a simple application) and the value that they get out of using it in terms of their language learning? Of course, there is a hidden digital gain, in that what they learn with this application could contribute to their digital literacy in general. So the load vs gain equilibrium is going to be different for each student. Maybe as teacher I need to maximise the ways in which we use a single application. 

Rather than hearing a listening text in class where the teacher controls the player, e-learning allows the student to control the buttons and listen to whatever, whenever and as often as she wants.  Informal student feedback says that they love control in terms of listening, so they can listen over and over. How can I set up tasks that are appropriate where I don’t have control of the number of listenings? And how can I respond to their frsutration when they still ‘don’t get it’ after multiple listenings - when I don’t know the text because they’ve chosen it themselves? 

The value of e-learning lies in the interactivity that can occur through the medium.  Fine with good software where feedback is valuable. But preparing materials with good feedback can be challenging. How much help to offer? How to allow students to control the amount of feedback they want?

All the above is really just me thinking through some of the issues in relation to my teaching and observation of oral skills over the year. Helping students make sense of what they hear - I’ve always thought that listening is the least concrete skill to teach…

teacher talk

Nothing like having to give a presentation for making you knuckle down and actually think. In preparing for what I intend to deliver at CLESOL on Web 2.0, the first part (talking about Web 2.0 and what it is) is easy - in fact, the hard part is keeping it reduced to a reasonable and understandable level.

But I put a sting (for me) in the abstract -  ’I will briefly query whether language teachers are indeed stuck with a ‘digital immigrant’ identity?’ So now I have to try and figure that out - would be grateful for any helpful suggestions. Do you feel you have an ‘accent’? Does it matter?

The value of verbs

Just reading van Lier’s 2007 article on Action-based teaching, autonomy and identity. He mentions two writers who have coined new verbs-:

grammaring - Larsen-Freeman 2003 and

languaging - Swain 2005 as an alternative to the noun ‘output’.

Obviously our skills are verbs too - reading, writing, speaking, listening. Do we start to talk about

CALLing as well?

Blog growing

Help! I managed to be almost entirely absent from the last week of the EVO session on Social Media. Apologies to all of you for my lack of online presence (multitude of reasons - chiefly related to beginning of semester and actually having to teach!) And a special thanks to the facilitators of the course, Barbara, Patricia, Illya, Jennifer, Nancy and Rudolph - your input and effort was much appreciated.

 Over last week I did read some of what was being written and checked my bloglines and came across Konrad’s post on growing blogs which inspired me - both in thinking about my own blogs and also in terms of what I do with students. The metaphor of growth in terms of learning has always sat well with me, and blogging, as Konrad so rightly says, is about the process of engagement. The act of writing has some mysterious affinity with growing. Possibly something to do with photosynthesis  and osmosis which were always very mysterious in my high school biology experience : )

Of course, it turns out that this semester I am NOT teaching writing (which has always been my blogging with students context) and have instead a focus on oral skills - speaking and listening. So am looking forward to use Voicethread and hopefully Chinswing too with my students. And am doing a big push for their listening to pdocasts, which is all new for them. If anyone can suggest a quick and easy recording tool for messages that I can put in the sidebar of a blog, it would be great to play with as well.

Anyway, thank you all for your input over the last couple of months and for encouraging/engaging with me, which has indeed supported my own growth.

Twittering of sparrows

When we were little, my mother taught us to play mahjong - probably a very inauthentic Chinese version - I don’t know where she learnt to play! But I loved between games when we ‘twittered the sparrows’ - shuffling the tiles together to make a clicking noise. 

The what is twitter guide? assures me that when you first join twitter you may feel lonely! I love the irony of that. Social networks have the potential to show you just how isolated you are. To what extent do young people really meet other new people, and what kind of depth is there in their new contacts? I like the fact that flickr recognises that I have contacts as distinct from friends or family. 

Anyway, back to feeling isolated. When I join up with Twitter I get stuck on the page (happened in hi5 the other day too when my ex-students invited me to join) where I’m asked for other people’s email addresses (none of the people whose addresses I might know actually use twitter!) and my Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail email addresses - none of which I currently possess! 

There are any number of suggestions as to how to use Twitter here. Maybe if I used my phone to send… - but I’m still unsure to what end. Anyway, I am now an official twitterer, but a lonely one…

Reflections week 3

This week I played around with flickr and with delicious (plus podcasting and Voice Thread over the last few weeks) so even though I haven’t been particularly visible online to everyone, I have been working on social media.

Musings…  I feel much more comfortable with flickr than I did before. Enjoying creative commons and made a lovely poster of Doors of Auckland into a blog posting. Of course, our teaching year hasn’t officially started yet, so it will be a while before I get comments. It would be great to use flickr with my students, probably 75% of whom would cope happily with registering etc. I think I have to decide how many applications I’m going to ask them to sign up for and what are the most useful ones.

I’ve been playing with VoiceThread to use too, and wondering whether this might be better, and also whether you can sign up to VoiceThread if you are NOT K-12 or an educator, as something I read suggested. I’ve tried an intro at Jan 08.

delicious - now I’m starting to feel quite comfy with this, although I have only uploaded a minimal no of the sites saved under favourites. I can see the value for me, but need to work on the value for my students. If I found it confusing to start with, it might be a high learning curve for half my students - and to what end? I can see that in the future it may well be something that we do automatically.

Success - have thoroughly enjoyed listening/discovering podcasts for myself, and plan to make a whole pile for and with my students this year. So watch the souNZ English space! I feel excited about all this - has only taken two years for it to kick in from back in EVO 06! But also it’s about having the opportunity to use social media with my students in relation to curriculum requirements etc.

Glearning

Just coined a new word. It was actually a typo as I was writing up stuff for my PhD - I meant to say that this list was my gleanings from the literature, but spelt it glearnings. And isn’t that a nice way to talk about what you have gleaned (collected as info, first pickings - not what is left over!) but have also learnt (absorbed, internalised)  along the way. So - glearning it is! Happy glearnings to you all as we keep gleaning and learning : )

Experimenting with Flickr

flax against skyOriginally uploaded by khaines.

I’m just playing round with what I can do in Flickr. I’d forgotten you can blog straight from Flickr. This is one of the photos I took for a similar exercise for last year’s EVO session. I wanted to update my profile and so went looking for a photo. First I uploaded a pic of myself, but then realised (when browsing) that few people use a photo of themselves. So flicked through (or was that flickred through) and chose this one to be my icon buddy. An interesting term - icon buddy.

I tried several different shots - beach, mountain, flower - before deciding on this particular photo. I like the colour and the flax flowers are very kiwi. Recently in an arty sort of shop, I noticed that someone had collected a whole lot of these stems and stuck them in a vase and was hanging items for sale off them. I would never have dreamt of doing that - but it looked very effective.

I am still intrigued by how people represent themselves through images online. My kids mocked the first photos that I uploaded of myself to MySpace for this purpose as being incredibly formal and old fashioned. In the end I got them to take heaps of photos and then choose the shot they thought was appropriate! NB. I CANNOT STAND the photos taken on your own digital camera where your grinning face is distorted because it is too close!!

podcasting finally

Well, more getting round to actually listening to podcasts the way they should be ie out there on the run.

Finally got together in one place at one time   -   a) the mp3 player b) batteries for it        c) iTunes d) the initiative to actually do something about it and e) my 14 year old patiently sitting next to me to encourage (NB. He doesn’t listen to podcasts himself but has a much more exploratory reaction to problems than I do!) So am now furiously browsing podcast lists and downloading all sorts of things, with the expectation that I will be getting my students to do this themselves in a couple of weeks. Is there a way of searching (eg on podcast alley) for podcasts that are recent? A lot of the links I followed the podcasts had evidently dried up several years earlier.

Am open to suggestions re good podcasts. To date I am convinced by podesl.com for my students.

And for me? I quite liked the BBC Front Row highlights and am trying out The Word Nerd. I guess that you need to listen quite a while before knowing whether this one does it for you. Do others have podcasts that they listen to on a regular basis? Surely we should be doing it for ourselves before telling our students to?

So now I just need to go out for a walk…

One of my favourite cartoons below… which doesn’t stop me from trying out making podcasts myself!

Week 2 thoughts

What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context? Without a doubt, the major benefit is that social media provide my students with a different voice. I always hark back to the first class with which I used blogs. A lovely Chinese girl, very shy and at intermediate level, told me (in writing in a questionnaire) that her blog ’is the first time I have used English to communicate’. It blew me away then, and still does! So the benefit is the communciation… Constraints? Well, the technologically literate students have a distinct advantage.

Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?  I commented on someone’s blog about the institutional imperative to use our LMS (Blackboard and which no doubt we pay megabucks for) who have just introduced built-in blogs, wikis and podcasts. There are limits to what they can do, but they would provide a safe environment for my students rather than an open one. So I guess the question is who do I want to participate with my learners, and what value do I place on the openness?

You see, this is very much a reflection - and lacks connection !