Well lookee there.  We have been nominated for the bab.la/ Lexiophiles Language Lovers Top 100 blogs, under the category of Language Learning blogs.

Yes, we have been nominated before, and yes blogs with much greater traffic have made it to the top 100.

But who knows…maybe this will be our year.  Feel free to click on the icon above and cast your vote!

The Class Blogs. Yours for the taking

For the past 5 years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to work  with  creative and talented people who value not only the need to create tools that facilitate learning, but tools that also are open, available for sharing, and heck, are danged good looking too.  And for those of you who have followed LLU and the Teaching Transparently tag/thread here, you will know that creating a class blogging tool has been a work in progress.

Until now.

My colleague Justin ,  a man of many extraordinary talents, is an accomplished musician and photographer and programmer. He has added to that list of talents “WordPress Wrangler” and as such has developed The Class Blogs Plugin.  What is nice about this tool is that it creates a front page “mother” blog as an aggregator of the student generated content (each student has hs or her blog as part of this package as well).  Unlike most blogs that display posts horizontally (the newest one at the top and pushing the older posts down…) this tool takes feeds from the students blogs, and pulls them to the front page such that the most recent post is in the upper left corner of the page…with all of the other posts still being displayed, albeit shifted slightly  to the right and down.    The effect is that of a newspaper, I think.  Also any images posted on the students’ blogs percolate up to the sidebar in the “mother” blog (with links back to the posts).

The tool is free and available for download off of the plugin page on the WordPress.org site.  Please download it, check it out, try it out, and let us know (and others!) what you think.  I would love to collaborate with others using this tool, with the hopes of thinking new and fun ways of using it for learning.

Happy Blogging!

Gelati. Yum.

Last month, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to be able attend the EUROCALL Open Educational Resources SIG Conference hosted by the  Centro Interfacoltà di Linguisitica Teorica ed Applicata (CILTA) at the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy).  The title of the conference was “Learning Through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication.”

The venue was incredible, to be sure.  But what made this conference possibly one of the best meetings I have attended anywhere was the simple fact that the organizers were determined to do something different and to make the meeting more interactive.  Everyone who attended had written a paper and therefore was presenting a paper.  All of the participants’ papers were released to the group  a month before the meeting, with the expectation that we would read them BEFORE we came to the conference,  and certainly before we attended a session.

In the conference program it stated:

Authors will be given 45-minute slots in which two or three related papers will be discussed together. The authors of the papers will be given 5 minutes each to summarise the main issues discussed in their papers (which all the participants should have read beforehand). This will be followed by a 30 minute discussion.  It is hoped that this format will encourage deeper reflection and discussion, and provide authors with valuable feedback on their work.

And guess what?  IT WORKED.  The session moderators kept the presenters (as best they could, because yes some people just can’t limit themselves, oh well) to the 2-4 minute limit for presenting a synopsis of their work.  After about 10 minutes of that, the rest of the session (35 minutes or so) was filled with questions from the audience and conversations in and amongst all  of the people in the room.

Oh and the other thing? This was a NO POWERPOINT conference. So as a presenter, you did not need to fuss about slides and all of that…just summarize your work and be ready to ask and receive questions.  Brilliant!

While it might have been argued that the two keynotes could have been flipped as well, the final closing “plenary roundtable” made up for that.  Using  Today’s Meet , people were put into small groups and asked to post thoughts about ideas, innovations, questions that were  presented during the conference.  It struck me as a GREAT way to pull together the themes and ideas of a meeting using a variety of perspectives.  To see the archive of what we all pulled together about the conference, click here.

So, for all of you out there who think conferences can’t be flipped, I beg to differ. My new colleagues here in Italy have shown us all that it can be done.

Felicitazioni!

Fred Astaire, "Royal Wedding," (1951)

A few weeks back I spent some time catching up on my blog reading, and was happy to see that Alan Levine was writing about the need to flip more than classrooms.   Indeed.  People all around the internet  have been talking for awhile about flipped classrooms and the need to make teaching less teacher-centric and more student/learner-centric.  Educators like Salman Khan of  Khan Academy have been practicing this idea for years.

But as Alan reminds us, one of the major places where flipping needs to happen is professional conferences. He writes:

“the best interactions [at conferences] happen in the breaks and the evening socials, the stuff that is not part of the agenda….” and not at the events where there are “lecterns, screens full o’ powerpoint, partially full of passive [or under caffeinated] participants [who might be]  reading email or facebooking.”

His comments resonated with me as I prepared to do a keynote presentation for SWALLT at ASU.  Maybe resonated isn’t the word.  Maybe the words were “stopped me dead in my tracks and made me rethink the whole idea of doing a keynote.”  Yeah, that would be more like it.

The time was getting short and I knew that  if I were truly going to flip the keynote, I would have to have prepared everything in advance, distributed it to all of the participants, and then hoped they would have read it prior to the event.  Ugh.  And yet, I didn’t want to stand and talk at people for an hour either.

The title of the talk was “language learning in liminal spaces,” that is, the extraordinarily innovative things that language students are doing as part of their learning in our schools, learning that is not as visible  as it could or should be. What would happen if we made that learning more visible to others?  What would happen if we could assess the value of our language programs not by the number of bottoms in seats or majors per department, but by what the students were able to DO with the skills they learned in a language? Would talking about learning outcomes perhaps be more effective than talking about learning outputs?   I knew that within the audience there were extraordinary stories and amazing ideas to share… it seemed ridiculous to have me monopolize time by yabbering when they could be sharing with each other.

Enter the happy medium.  Instead of flipping the keynote, I tilted it. I spoke for 20 minutes, gave the group a series of questions, asked them to work in small groups, and then had them report back at the end.  People shared ideas, commiserated over common woes and concerns, brainstormed.

Here were the questions:

• Think of an example of one successful, innovative learning practice on your campus
• What is its intended learning outcome
• How could you make that practice (and the learning it elicits) more visible on your campus?

Here is an example of at outcome from one group:

If I am asked to do a talk again, I will not be going back to the speaker-centric keynote model.  And I hope in some small way what I did here at ASU can be an example for others.  The talking head needs to be replaced with more interaction, ideas, conversation, and debate.

That’s why we go to conferences, after all…to meet other people, to share and to learn.

via flickr user devoinregress (click for original)

• to gather evidence of my own learning and professional development
• to better market myself the next time I am looking for employment (although to be clear, this is not imminent)
• to have a better understanding of the tools available to individuals looking to build or support ePortfolios
• to gain experience in a skill many higher ed institutions are requiring or encouraging students to practice
• to document the process of building an ePortfolio for my future reference, and that of LLU community members
• to be more engaged in the LLU community

The plan is to finish this project before I go on vacation in a couple of months, so expect to see regular (hopefully weekly) posts from me over the next couple of months. My homework before the next post is to gather content I’ve created — documents, text descriptions, images, videos, links, etc — and to start thinking about ways to organize it. I’ll be looking to y’all to help with inspiration and to keep me honest, so don’t be shy about chiming in with comments, suggestions, criticisms, or questions!

Today’s question for all of you: have you created an ePortfolio for yourself? If so, post a link and contribute your best advice! If not, what’s stopping you?

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!

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