Liveblogging from CALICO: Wednesday afternoon workshops

Greetings from humid and overcast San Marcos, Texas, home of Texas State University and host of the 2007 CALICO Symposium: The Many (Inter)Faces of CALL. (Also home of Aquarena Springs and, when I was in graduate school in that university up the road a billion years ago, Aquarena Springs was also the home of Ralph the Diving Pig).

As I write I am in a workshop being conducted by Li Jin and Robert Summers, from the University of South Florida-Tampa entitled “Blogs, Vlogs and Podcasting in the Foreign Language Classroom”

It is a large and very diverse group… people from Arkansas, the DLI in California, Massachusetts, Valencia, Barcelona….

I enjoy hearing about the research that others have found and consulted in order to weave these tools effectively in the Foreign Language curriculum. (And wouldntcha know that one of the first people I saw when I came on campus was one of my heroes, Scott Payne, who has researched extensively how the language created in CMCs-Computer Mediated Conversations- mirrors informal spoken language…)

Here are some of the resources they mentioned as part of their presentation:

The work of Mark Warschauer (Associate Professor, Department of Education, Department of Informatics, University of California-Irvine), in particular his work on how we teach students to use these tools effectively, and how language expresses their identity in new and interesting ways in the information age, as well as how electronic literacy and social inclusion (vs exclusion) can be reinforced using these tools (Check out the link above…he is a prolific researcher and his work is really interesting)

Summers and CookseyCordier, Summers and Cooksey (2006) Who researched about how using these tools have allowed students to create “lexically and syntactically more complex language production” as well as a greater use of discourse strategy.

(Need to get specific works and citations from the presenters)

An interesting quote: “Blogs are a fusion of content and language learning, they offer varieties of FL discourses and a variety of language registers, and provide the users with the ability for self-assessment”

A mention of Tumblelogs… huh. Never heard of those before… but I am intrigued….A term coined by Jason Kottke a quoted here:

A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.

Kudos to Robert Summers who has to be the most patient language tech person EVER… Imagine a room of people playing with Audacity all at once with different levels of expertise as well as varied levels of success… 25 people creating their own blogger accounts and changing their templates 4 gazillion times and then the coup de grâce… the presentation PC crashed mid Windows Movie Maker demo… 🙂 …. and he never lost his cool…

Some mentioned podcasts:
This Week in Tech (TWIT) http://www.twit.tv/TWIT