Throwing by madpotter1, on Flickr; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’m starting to feel a difference between my new gig in general instructional technology and my previous one in language technology as concerns the position of potential collaborators along the maker–manageraxis. My language lector partners were nearly all, whether by individual inclination or by structural requirement or both, predominantly focused on the making. This is a natural fit for me most of the time. When I finally got into technology professionally, it felt right to have something to point to at the end of the day (or week or half-year) that had my stamp on it.

20F01.01 Western Log Saw by Garrett Wade, on Flickr; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When I dabble in wood butchery (known to more effective practitioners as carpentry or cabinetry), I get the same deep sense of satisfaction. Fortunately, perhaps, my projects so far have been in working with people who are very interested in moving the project forward, in getting things done. (Working with people who are smart and get things done is a thing of beauty and helps me think I’m both of those as well.)
All of this gives me some perspective to understand why in particular the instructional technologists and the language instructors should be friends. (My digital humanities friends very much count here as well, but the title of this particular publication you are reading is Language Lab Unleashed, not Hooray for Digital Humanities.) We make, we use tools, we mod, we adapt, we reconstruct, we mash-up, we build, we get our hands dirty, we cook. We hack.

X11_0056 by neonzu1, on Flickr; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The thing is, and what I’ve been coy about so far in this post, is that Graham’s short essay is not about the educational world, where the paradigm holds from an administrative perspective but breaks apart when you get to the sites of learning and teaching. What are students, what are academics? The traditional aim of education, or at least elite higher education, is allegedly to take people off the continuum by helping them develop into thinkers rather than explicitly makers or managers, but in practice the end is to make students into managers. Here’s a place for a unity among language teachers and instructional technologists: Show and manifest the elegance of craftsmanship, the transcendence of creating, the beauty of developing something too often derided as “just” a skill or stepping-stone.

And just because it’s the weekend, I’ll leave you with a little disco:
Makin It by David Naughton on Grooveshark

If you’re as lazy as I am, you might not go and read the Houston piece, so I’ll make it easy and include her framework questions inline. Since I’m not a classroom teacher, I’m being liberal with my use of the questions.

What reading or assignment was most successful so far this semester? Why?
(What’s the best thing I’ve read recently that ties into my work?)

Not even close. The best thing I’ve read in a long time (and extremely accessible, in a specialist way) is Claire Kramsch’s The Multilingual Subject. So good I’ve put it on my Amazon wish list and will likely buy it for myself if nobody else does. Opened a hundred new doors to possibilities about thinking about language teaching, learning, and acquisition; turned me on to a number of people whose work I now want to research; and gave me hours of reading pleasure to boot. It took me forever to get through because I had to stop so often to ruminate on what Kramsch (or her sources) wrote. Similarly, in scores of places, I got lost noodling through my own language learning experiences that echoed or (rarely) differed from her analyses. Further, as with so much good language learning research, it’s mosty applicable to other disciplines. Good thing, since I’ll be working with those other disciplines in about 72 hours.

Which unit, lecture, or topic did you really enjoy teaching this term? Which one did you least enjoy? How might you use those insights to rearrange or revise the course contents next time?

Looking back over the presentations and teaching sessions I’ve done recently, I think I most enjoyed the short one I did on place-based learning in the spring. As so many things move into the virtual world, I think that there’s a opportunity to create some powerful hybrids of the physical environment and a virtual one. Equally, I think there’s a lot of neglect of language students’ lived environment as a source for language learning rather than a distraction from it.

Following that one pretty closely was one that appealed to my inner structure-freak, a discussion of using WordPress for student writing in which I used a WordPress site (open only to Yale community members, unfortunately) as the presentation visual support. It was a little awkward, being my first time doing it, but I enjoyed the public dogfooding and got a surprising thrill from putting something out there that wasn’t fully realized, seeing as how I got the idea to do the preso that way at 11pm the night before.

What has surprised you the most this term?

The bloom is still on the rose for me, so I am pleasantly surprised quite often. One trend I’ll pick up on that I will likely miss when not working with language instructors is their general willingness to try new things. Even at my institution, where tradition rules the roost, language instructors seem to be feeling increasingly able to experiment with their activities and their own mental models of pedagogy. I had a wonderful discussion with an instructor about turning a theater-based course she teaches into an OER. I’m secretly hopeful that she will want to do it but my soon-to-be-former department won’t be able to support her so that I can convince my new department to take it on. The more I have gotten to know this instructor, the more I am motivated by her interest in augmenting and amplifying her teaching and her students’ learning.

What do you hope your students are taking away from the course this term?
(What do I hope I have helped instructors to understand?)

When I was co-leading a session on working with a new media hosting space inside our LMS, I came up with a phrasing that described how I was hoping the participants would approach the process. I said to them that I hoped they would be persistent and resilient, but not foolishly so. That is, I wanted them to try on their own, fail, and try again, but at some point (and not even a very far point) I wanted them to realize that they had us for support.

What one piece of advice do you want to offer yourself for the next time you teach this course?
(How am I going to take these reflections and apply them in my new situation?)

This is a little difficult to answer, since I don’t know exactly what my personal interactions are going to look like. However, I can speak to how much I want to bring to instructors in other disciplines the need to view all learners as distinct and bringing their own identity struggles and successes to the discipline, whether or not the learner is a major in the discipline. Similarly, I’m working on internalizing an “all roads are good” philosophy when it comes to accommodating and even valorizing those struggles and successes within a discipline. And though I haven’t written elsewhere in this post about it, I was strongly affected by a presentation on heritage language learning by Maria Carrera in which (inter alia) she elucidated the practice of Differentiated Instruction; many disciplines at my institution could benefit from implementing this in a gradual manner and I hope to be able to discuss where steps can be taken to enrich the teaching and learning experiences.

CreativeCommons image by flickr user StreetFly JZ

A bit like Ryan before me, I’m going to be starting a new job soon that takes me out of the intimate daily work of language technology and puts me into the larger pond of academic technology in general. My new group takes a different approach to technology provisioning than my current one, which means I am in media res with a minor shopping adventure for new work devices and accessories. As the devices arrive, I need to spend time learning them in ways general and specific, and in doing so I have experienced uncomfortable feelings of guilt.

Thinking about this, I realized I was participating in the common cultural perception of technology devices as toys. This participation is compounded by my personal frugality (nothing in my home is ever the latest or close to it), my gender and my interest in avoiding being a stereotype (think of the overused phrase of “boys and their toys”), and the time of year (making these feel more like gifts than appropriate equipment).

As I reflected more, it seemed to me that the appropriate reaction to this control (or my perception of it) by a guilt society was to appropriate the term of toys and repurpose it in the context of appropriate learning behaviors. After all, if learning can root deeper when it is fun, then all objects and interactions that are a part of the learning process are toys. (A recent piece I wrote on language play explores the narrower example of language learning and antedates my reclamation of “toys”.) For me, reconceptualizing the learning process itself as (largely) acquiring the knowledge necessary to play appropriately with the toys of the trade and the perception necessary to probe* the fuzzy boundaries of domain-specific play opens up multiple new worlds of exploration and ways for me to teach or help teachers.

* Or, somewhat recursively, “to toy with”.

This past spring, I wrote for another outlet a short piece (that may never see the light of day) after reading and being inspired by Guy Cook’s Language Play, Language Learning. Since then, I’ve only seen more that persuades me of the value of enjoyment in the language classroom and the value of getting students to appreciate the fun of language learning.

Part of what has happened since then has been my child’s impressive acquisition of language and my observations of how he learns it. One of the most interesting aspects is just picking up on what he likes. There are phrases or words (or sounds) that will send him into paroxysms of laughter, and they are ones that he loves to repeat. They don’t always mean something, or don’t always mean something out of their original context, but I love to be reminded of the conventional nature of words. We’re giving him some Italian here and there, with no real effort to teach him to be bilingual, so that probably reinforces for him that the names for things are just sounds that someone attaches to a concept. Why is this thing he eats with both a “spoon” and a “cucchiaino”? Are the utensils he uses called the same thing as the ones that Mama and Daddy use? What about the different kinds that he uses — are then all called the same thing? I have a penchant, acquired from my father, for addressing children in as sophisticated language as I can while not making them lose interest in me, so my child will hear bells and say “chiming the hours”, as if he knows the denotative meaning of those words. By the same token, he knows that the phrase refers to bells, so maybe that’s good enough.

He’s also an incredible mimic. Maybe all children can be, since we start with few limits on our abilities (generally speaking), but you should see the delight when he’s able to repeat nihao (OK, ni3 hao3 / 您好) or annyeong haseyo (안녕하세요) or “Bom dia” to parents at his preschool. The delight is on his part and the parents’ part, as best as I can tell, which brings me to my only real point of this entry, to wit, that language play and playing with language is all well and good, but we who teach languages or support language teaching have to refresh ourselves constantly about the fun of it all. If going into the classroom on any given day is no fun for us, it’s unlikely to be fun for any of the learners. As many of Barbara’s posts say explicitly or implicitly, we’re all in it together, during every interaction. One of the many hard parts is staying refreshed (keeping in mind the sense of “fresh” to describe the first breeze you get when opening a window after inclement weather), keeping a sense of wonder about the whole thing. Seeing my child toddling on feet and words is doing it for me, and that’s enough for now.

(See what you get when I don’t put hours into a short piece? You’ll have to get used to it.)

Nonetheless, my approaches to teaching academic technology to instructors and students are very different. When I led a session on video editing for language instructors, it took me the entire ninety minutes to get through the basic material. Conversely, in this morning’s session for students, I burned through the concepts in less than an hour, and even added a discussion of proper citation as well as a walkthrough of subtitling. Why the discrepancy?

To me, it’s about my audiences’ networks, or at least my impressions of them. What I see and hear of our instructors’ environments suggests that they are rather fragmented. Within any given department, there are some close collegial relationships, but the majority of those who showed up to the video editing session I led last fall were LCTL instructors, often islands within a department or council that is itself an island. Conversely, though, our students are by and large connected all the time. Leaving aside considerations of Sherry Turkle’s concerns, my institution has a resident (and overwhelmingly on-campus at that) student body that’s very conscious of the importance of networking while they can. I mean this in ways both social and cynical, but the upshot is the same. When I teach to instructors, I work on the assumption that they are going to leave my room and sit by themselves to do work. When I teach to students, I work from the presumption that they are going to leave the room and be with groups for most of the rest of the day, whether dyads or larger groups.

Another part of the students’ network is the support provided them on campus. When I run down the support options for students, I can name four to five groups that exist to serve student technology needs, with the understanding that technology and student life is inextricable (hence, perhaps, the wide misperceptions of student technological proficiency). This doesn’t include me and my unit. When I do the same for instructors, I come up with one or two. To boot, support organizations for instructors tend to be compartmentalized into administrative support, employment support, tech support, and pedagogical or professional development support.

Other institutions may be better at supporting instructors wholly than we are. Besides, they’re adults, right? They can manage their needs better than the students, who are only learning to be independent adults? This doesn’t resonate with the conversations I have with our instructors. Something tells me that we need to apply our ideas about how students learn more often to situations outside the classroom, that is to staff and faculty — who are learners themselves in their own domains — as well.

Photo by Lee Rush

[For the first time in quite a while, I'm trying posting without much drafting and redrafting. Such is my guilt at doing so that I'm posting this attempt at expiation.] ]]> http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/04/11/talking-out-of-both-sides-of-my-mouth/feed/ 1 http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/02/01/au-debut/ http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/02/01/au-debut/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:10:24 +0000 triplingual http://languagelabunleashed.org/?p=3084 To start, I’d like to thank Barbara for the invitation to join the Language Lab Unleashed family. The opportunity comes at a particularly good time for me, since I am starting to feel like I’m getting a good hold on my professional direction.

Image from Biblioteca de la Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias del Trabajo Universidad de Sevilla

Until recently, my jobs have all been supporting roles, or at least that’s how I saw them. As a legal assistant, editorial assistant, programmer, database administrator, sysadmin, even as a technical manager, I always worked reactively. We could spin that better and say I was service-oriented, but a spade’s a spade. Since being moved to my current position as an academic technologist, I’ve been part of conversations nominally about others but that collectively lifted the scales from my eyes about a career in language education.

The primary notable group of these conversations are the ones we have in planning meetings at my center about language instructors. As part of our programming, we try to provide opportunities for their professional development and to make them aware of other opportunities. Very cleverly, I noticed that these conversations applied to my career as well, only there was no group at a table anywhere thinking of ways to help me.

The second notable group of these conversations were during the IALLT 2010 Summer Leadership Meeting. In a very contemporary form of participation, I was able to watch and listen on UStream while putting in my options via UStream chat. Interestingly enough, my realization above was narrated there in other forms by several people in multiple settings. Here, though, I heard the additional resonance that language instructors themselves at other institutions lacked professional development support.

CreativeCommons image from Flickr user hbp_pix

As a way forward, I’ll be identifying open-minded language instructors for tactical collaboration, somewhat as discussed recently by Mark Sample. I’m happy to have some fruit borne of this plan already, a presentation proposal collaboration in progress with an instructor. (Turns out this instructor welcomed my overtures, having hesitated to suggest the same.) More importantly, the proposal is based on our work introducing blogging into her language’s curriculum on a trial basis, that is, on a project of multiple benefits to the instructor, to me, to the students, to my center.