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

What Google Reader told me this morning. Gee, thanks.

It is the last day of the winter break and grades are due tomorrow.  Which means, of course, that I am doing everything BUT posting my grades.  It’s not that I haven’t finished reviewing my students work and their self evaluations…I have, that’s done (and I will be blogging about that soon).  It’s just the finality of it all… and the fact that I don’t know when/if I will be teaching that course again (more on that later).

So, when in doubt…clean.  I decided to try and clean up and maybe even use my Google Reader page.  It had been a while since I last checked in.  Several of my friends’ blogs had changed domain names (whoops).  Bitch PhD (whom I followed) long ago quit her job and went into the Private sector (double whoops).  Yeah, my Google Reader feeds were a mess.  So I tried to clean it up and re subscribe to things.

The problem is that Google Reader’s interface is SO TERRIBLE that once I got things set up (sort of)  I just wanted to lay down and take a nap out of exhaustion.  And not read any of the feeds.  Which, of course, defies the purpose altogether now dunnit?

After chatting/complaining/whining with Ryan (who shares this opinion), I asked him how he got his updates on people’s blogs etc.  Simple: Twitter.  (slap to forehead)  Oh and Reddit (aka “The Front Page of the Internet”). Which I don’t know anything about and now need to learn.  (Poke poke poke to Ryan… hoping for a comment with info on how to use Reddit below).

So back to Twitter I go.  Huzzah.

In the meantime if any of you LLU readers have any language/ language-tech/ tech  related bloggers/twitterers you think are worthy of following please comment below.

Hmmm, now that’s done…off to clean the kitchen, I guess…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neb31/6604485775

It is that wonderful time at the end of the calendar year when businesses and schools are closed and family members are home, together.  Here at our house,  in between the Scrabble  board game smack downs and the Sudoku marathons, interspersed  between the hours of sleeping, cooking and eating, I have been trying to catch up on my twitter feeds and the blogs I follow.

I discovered this gem, made by the CogDog  (Alan Levine).  Being the foreign language nerd that I am, I have no idea how this site escaped my attention until now, but here it is:  “Words with No English Translation”

Jim Groom blogged about the site here and also linked to a ds106 exercise that used the words from “No English Translation” as a create-an-image-that-portrays this word exercise prompt.  I am wondering aloud about the possibility of asking my future students to do something similar with these words, but in a much more low tech fashion.

Maybe they could choose a word and draw it as we did in for exercise last semester  (images here). The prompt was “draw something that happened last week and then give the drawing to your partner and ask him/her to interpret it.”

Or maybe choose a word and build its representation out of Legos® (along the lines of an exercise I had my class do here).

Hmmm.  Time for more pie.

And when/if  you are done with reviewing the non English words, there is always the fun game of asking your students how to explain /find an equivalent in a second language for English words like “awkward”

Happy New Year to all.

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.

#1:  To my colleague Justin, the class blogging tool he has created:

Justin created a class blog package using WordPress and several custom made plug ins in response to my many years of teaching with blogs, and my desire to keep tweeking the tools to best suit the learning outcomes of my class.

Justin explains on the project page for our center:  “Our class blogs package consists of a group of plugins, packaged as an easy-to-use single MU plugin, that provides features that are commonly used by classes, such as word counting, automatic approval of student comments, an auto-updating YouTube class playlist and, most importantly, aggregation of student posts, comments and tags.”

What I really love about it is the newspaper-like feel to the central mother blog, and how all of the participants’ posts show up together on the front page. (Each student has his or her own blog.. but this front page aggregates everything here)  The only  shifting that happens is that the most recent post lands in the upper left hand corner of the front page. The other posts get pushed to the right and down (but they do not disappear).

Also, if you look closely at the “header” for each of the columns you will see some numbers:

The blog counts not only the number of posts that each student has contributed (via his or her own blog) but also the number of comments s/he has made on other people’s blogs within the class. Since blogging is about creating community and sharing, their comments (at least in my class) are as important as their posts.

Also, despite what that Digital Native-Digital Immigrant balderdash you might have been led to believe, the students I teach  don’t take to technology willingly and fearlessly.  So the bloghas a way to allow students to assume another name should they not wish to be known by their own out there in the big ole blogosphere.  Like so:

(look at the number of comments vs the number of posts…whoa)

Okay so the best news evah? You can have the blog package for your very own:  Yep.  Download it and use it…for free.  Click here to find out more.

All I ask is that you acknowledge Justin’s hard work when you use  it (i.e. don’t claim it to be your own)  AND that you tell us how you are using it.  I would love, love,  love  to create a community of teachers and classes (language and otherwise!) that are using this tool so we could share our ideas and our experiences.  Interested? I hope so.

#2: To Todd Bryant  and his amazing tool The Mixxer:

The  Mixxer has, every semester, taken the messiness and the headache out of finding language exchange partners for my students in Spanish, not to mention more than several dozen people willing to drop everything on a Friday morning just to chat with my students in Spanish on Skype.

The community here is wonderful, and Todd does a great job of keeping the site current and free from sketchy folks. He is always willing to help the language teacher create contacts and connections as well as meetups for classes.  The site has a blogging tool as well.  I understand that there will be updates made to the site very soon, so stay tuned.

Bravo to Todd and this site.  The Mixxer has created more friendships between my students and “strangers” than I can count, and provides language learners with a flexible way to keep practicing the languages they are studying even after the semester is over.

#3 To the Cog Dog (Alan Levine) and his site Five Card Flickr

I just love this site.  Five Card Flickr allows the user to create a visual story using random  images that the class can choose  (pics come from individual’s Flickr collections  and have been tagged “5cardflickr”).  The site then allows the user to give the story a title and perhaps some text to go along with it.

CogDog was kind enough to allow my class to have its very own 5 Card Flickr page, so when they tagged their Flickr photos as “Hisp205″ they showed up here.

Don’t despair.  You can use the 5 card Flickr site as is for your class, or you can  access the source code here. Either way, you need to praise Alan to the heavens and be sure to credit him for his amazing work.  If you have a blog, blog about it.  Share the love. woof.

#4 Finally: where would I be without Voicethread. ?

I love this tool.  I love the fact that students can create content together, share ideas, comment on each others comments, draw…all of it.  For my final “exam” this semester, my students are taking screen shots of what they consider to be significant learning moments that happened on their class blogs (be it a post, a comment, whatever) and making a Voicethread narration (in Spanish) of those moments.  (note: using 5 card flickr to help them warm up to this task was awesome).

I also love the fact that my having an educators license for the tool, we easily encourage other faculty to come and use it too.  Thanks to Voicethread, those “make a movie of yourself speaking an email it to me” nightmares are over.  Now it is:  make a Voicethread and share it with others, and then respond to their comments.  Everybody participates, everybody learns.

Have a tool you would like to share? Please add it to our comment stream.

Wishing each of you a restful and rejuvenating end of the year break!

]]> http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/12/14/a-few-shout-outs-and-a-woof/feed/ 2 http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/12/09/tis-the-season/ http://languagelabunleashed.org/2011/12/09/tis-the-season/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:35:52 +0000 triplingual http://languagelabunleashed.org/?p=3564

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”.

http://thisisindexed.com/2011/08/keep-calm-and-carry-on/

We are at the 1/2 way spot in our semester. It’s midterm grading time (here the grades at midterm are pretty simple: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, Really Unsatisfactory and Never Seen This Person).  It is also a perfect time to ask the students to evaluate the teacher and the class.

Bring on the informal evaluation.

Here is how it works: Give the students 15 minutes at the end of class. They can answer some all or none of the questions. It is anonymous. The questions are any variation of the following:

What should START doing in this class?

What should STOP doing in this class?

What should we KEEP doing in this class?

What can the teacher do to help you improve your learning in this class?

What can your classmates do to help you improve your learning in this class?

Collate the answers, review them with the students the VERY NEXT class period. Put them in small groups and ask for comments, suggestions, next steps. And here is the most important thing: if the consensus is that a specific change needs to be made in order to improve the learning experience of many, then make it  happen.   Ahora. Ya.

Often the changes are very simple. For example, the results of my informal evaluation showed that the students liked small group/pair work. One student in the class, however, went a step further and explained in his/her survey that working in groups of three was better than paired work because it was a little less awkward and people could alternate speaking more easily. Done. A few people mentioned that they really liked spending the first 5 minutes of class with people “checking in” and talking about things on campus, events, stuff they did over the weekend, etc. Done.  A few people mentioned they might like to have caffeine.  I brought in a pot of coffee and hot water for the tea drinkers. Done.

The important thing is that if it can happen, you need to try your best to make it happen. Of course you can’t please everyone, nor should you try. But if tweaking things here and there is all that is needed…do it.

You might also be happily surprised by the results. Prior to giving out my survey, I found myself dreading the answers. The energy in the class was low, not many people talked, and I felt as if I was dominating the conversation. I was expecting the worst. Turns out, the consensus was that the teacher was doing fine, but the class needed to step up and take some risks and not be so passive. As one student put it “Speak more! We all will be pushed to get better if everyone has las ganas.”

My point is this: Don’t wait until the end of the term to ask how you could do  things better in the future. Ask NOW. And act on it. And then in a couple of weeks, ask again.

Remember: What we do in the classroom  is about their learning… it is not always about our teaching.  Informal evaluations make it possible for those two things to mutually support each  other  vs being at odds with one another.

Questions? Comments? Let me know.

This sign was on the door to my building the first week of class. I took the picture, I chuckled, and I stayed calm…I just forgot to post it here

More to come.

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.)

What else does it take to be a not-good-but-great educational technologist, from your perspective? Inquiring minds want to know your thoughts …