e-language

Colloquium: SLanguages
EduNation, Second Life, 23 June 2007

Organised by Gavin Dudeney of the Consultants-E, the First Annual Second Life Language Teaching Colloquium took place on EduNation last Saturday. With a little over 50 registered participants from around the globe, it was a chance for educators to share their experience of teaching in SL – and was, in itself, a great advertisement for the educational potential of virtual worlds.

During his opening speech, Gavin warned of the limitations and dangers of both old functional (teaching) models and new business models applied to language learning in SL. However, there are some interesting developments underway, as this colloquium amply illustrated.

The first presentation of the day was from Paul Preibisch and Kip Boahn (see image above), who described their innovative work on the English Village Project, the largest languages group in SL. The pros and cons of a number of teaching formats were discussed:

• 1:1 (relatively problem-free, allowing teachers to move around with students);
• small group + 1 teacher (where the ideal number may be 2-3 students);
• large group + more than 1 teacher (where matching teaching styles may be an issue);
• team teaching (where students benefit from the experience of different teachers);
• guided self-study (a promising development; Sloodle seems to be moving this way).

Kip concluded with a series of suggestions aimed at the “Aufmotzen” (dolling up) of SL. He suggested that SL shouldn’t be seen as a solution for everything but as part of a suite of tools. Some aspects of SL still require improvement and more interesting in-world tools are needed. Meanwhile, Sloodle may represent a way forward, and many other web 2.0 tools can be integrated into SL. He also stressed that there is a real need for community – that both teachers and students need to bond around the educational process – and that location is key to creating a sense of community.

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Hugh O’Donnell (see image above) then spoke about the Scottish Secondary Sector, stressing that virtual worlds have a great deal to offer in connecting students in remote locations, without necessitating long hours of travel. There are many educational possibilities – from an avatar of Keats posing questions on his own poems to involving living artists who could interact with students – and ideally there would be in-world travel between schools on the teen grid. However, he acknowledged that there are many problems to overcome, not least of all problems of image: it’s necessary to explode the myths of SL (like those of the internet before it) which suggest that it’s just the province of unsalubrious characters …

Nik Peachey, who spoke on Designing a Language Course for SL, began by asking what theory might underpin learning through gaming. His answer was 1960s flow theory, which suggests that certain key elements – such as concentration on clearly articulated goals, availability of feedback, deep but effortless involvement, a loss of self-consciousness and the development of an altered sense of time – can contribute to learning in an optimal way. He referred also to Prensky’s work on digital natives, but argued that the old ways of teaching (notably lectures) had actually never been effective. Now, however, we have the tools to easily change these old modes of education.

Although SL is not a game, he suggested that it can be used like one, with tasks designed with the principles of flow theory in mind. In a partial echo of Preibisch and Boahn’s presentation, he indicated that one of the major reasons for the success of games, and the learning that takes place within them, is the presence of community. It’s important that we design tasks with collaborative principles in mind. A residential distance learning course, where students could “live” and socialise in a communal space outside of class time, might be ideal.

Many standard communicative activities lend themselves to use in language teaching in SL, most notably roleplays since, after all, SL is a roleplay. However, we should beware of imposing too many layers; to have a student playing an avatar playing a character might be too much. Roleplays, Peachey advised, should be more like jazz improvisation than Wagnerian opera, with students allowed a degree of control and flexibility.

Some of the problems he outlined at the conclusion of his talk include:

• presenting language in-world is difficult;
• the teacher’s paralinguistic cues are absent;
• there is a loss of student reaction;
• we are building on quicksand in the sense that the SL environment is constantly changing.

For more information, see the Tips for language learning materials design in Second Life on Nik’s own blog.

By the time these talks were over and the poster session began, to be followed by virtual lunch, it was rather late on the west coast of Australia so I took my leave. However, there’s no doubt that there are plenty of inspiring educational developments in SL being driven by real enthusiasts. It’s a case of watch this space – closely – in the weeks, months and years to come. Indeed, as Gavin mentioned in a summary talk, it’s not unthinkable that the day will arrive when the internet as a whole comes to resemble a virtual world which we navigate with the help of avatars. It’s good to get a sense of just how much educational potential there may be in such a development.

Tag: slanguages2007

Seminar: Engage Me or Enrage Me with Marc Prensky
Perth, 31 May 2007

At this seminar, one of a series of events hosted by the West Australian Dept of Education and Training (with an associated Prensky Perth Wiki where the slides are available), Marc Prensky outlined his vision of the future of education. Drawing on his well-known ideas of digital natives and digital immigrants, he argued that the old paradigm of education, grounded in a late 19th century industrial model, is no longer working. He sees his role as listening to kids, something he says most educators are not doing. But for those who listen, he claims, the message is clear: kids are bored and do not feel sufficiently engaged or respected by their teachers. Educators need to adapt to the new paradigm which, he says, kids have already started on their own; it’s one where they learn by themselves (although with guidance) in an interactive, discussion- and community-based forum. In short, the way we teach needs to change.

Prensky also argues that programming is the key literacy of the 21st century and that kids are teaching themselves this future-oriented skill in their own time, while schools continue to try to orient them towards the past. This means that what we teach needs to change as well.

Technologies can’t just be an add-on, either. If we try to teach old content in the old ways, new technologies will do little to improve the state of education. Rather, a whole paradigm shift is needed. Teachers, he suggests, need to learn to teach with tools that they can’t fully master, and to work with the kids … where the kids look after the technology and the teachers look after evaluation and quality issues. And we should be making more use of the tools kids bring with them, notably mobile phones.

Of course, as Prensky himself noted when he referred to Dewey in response to a question, the notion of interactive education is nothing new. More than this, I’d suggest there is a real danger in the wholesale rejection, real or implied, of everything we’ve done educationally up to this point. I’d fully agree that we need to make use of the new technologies and tools, that we need to exploit the opportunities they present for teaching in more constructivist, interactive ways, and that we need to prepare students for the future – but I’d caution against abandoning some of the successful education practices of the past. After all, education is not only about entertainment, nor about communicating at lightning speed. It is also about taking the time for thoughtful investigation, careful reflection, and slow (re-)construction of knowledge and understanding. Good educators have always instinctively known how to combine interaction and reflection. The technological revolution gives us new tools for education, certainly, and it presents new advantages – but it also presents new problems. We must find ways to take a balanced view which is neither overly celebratory nor overly reactionary.

Nevertheless, Prensky presented a number of very interesting ideas and concepts. His illustrative quotes were particularly informative. Some of the most striking student views included:

• You look at technology as a tool. We look at technology as a foundation – it’s totally integrated into what we do.
• We want community.
• Email is for old people.

Conference: Best Practices in Education
Second Life, 25 May 2007

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“The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed.” This quote from William Gibson was amply illustrated by the first Best Practices in Education Conference to be held in the virtual world Second Life. This international event – presenters and participants were located all around the world – took place on 25 May from 12.00 to 23.00 SLT (Second Life Time), which is equivalent to PDT (Pacific Daylight Time).

There were a number of venues, including the welcome center, the main presentation area (provided by Hyperstring), a second presentation area (Edulsland), a space for vendors and exhibits, and a poster area (Rockcliffe University). The main conference website contains links to the presentation schedule and the conference blog.

I caught parts of Melissa de Zwart’s (SL name – Bramwell Writer) presentation on IP and virtual worlds and Suku Sinnappan’s (SL – Study Writer) presentation entitled Virtual identity and representation. Both were delivered very effectively in live audio, with follow-up questions typed in by audience members. These were followed by the informative Australian Educators’ Panel, in which the panel discussed a variety of issues pertinent to virtual worlds. There seems to be very widespread interest in legal and IP issues, naturally enough given the new terrain that is being broken in virtual worlds – and its uncertain relationship to the legal terrain of the real world.

It was fascinating to be surrounded by a large crowd of delegates whose avatars ranged from those you wouldn’t blink at if you passed them in the street to those at the more striking end of the spectrum, arranged on a continuum from animals to angels. While most delegates sat in the chairs provided during the presentations, there was considerable coming and going – new avatars materialising, others vanishing, still others wandering the rooms – which was entertaining but ultimately also distracting. Clearly, the relationship between RL and SL conference etiquette is also new ground which will need some exploring!

Overall, this conference was a captivating experience. I left with the feeling that those of us lucky enough to attend had been offered a glimpse of Gibson’s unevenly distributed future. See more pix below …

Vendor displays in the Outreach Center

Presentation IP and virtual worlds (de Zwart)

Presentation Virtual identity and representation (Sinnappan)

Symposium: Language, Literacy & Technology
Auckland, New Zealand, 18-19 May 2007

This 2-day CALL symposium, entitled Language, Literacy & Technology, was organised by Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand, and brought together a wide range of language educators currently making use of, or interested in making use of, technology in their teaching. An associated wiki, CALLsympNZ, provided a contact point for an initial exchange of information and views prior to the conference, with more content added in the period since the event itself.

The keynote speakers included:

• Mike Levy, who spoke about the importance of not just seeing the technology wave but perceiving the underlying current. He suggested that, amid all the hype, we should be selective and focused in our choice of technologies, ensuring that they are always aligned with our learning goals.
• Terry Locke, who focused on a now more traditional but very robust technology, the asynchronous discussion board, examining it as a particular kind of rhetorical space which may contain hidden biases in terms of the way students are positioned and limits set on the construction of their online identities. He suggested that asynchronous online discussion may be more favourable to a constructivist approach than face-to-face discussion, but warned of cultural issues in norms of interaction and politeness. He also stressed the need for educators to “redesign in real time” in response to the needs of students.
• Cynthia White, who argued that participating in new online literacy practices means taking on new roles and that students need to learn to negotiate new identities in this context. She suggested that there are more cultural aspects to the social constructivist approach online than we might intially expect.

My own paper was entitled Unmodern or postmodern? The human dynamics of the social web and explored how seemingly “unmodern” ideals and values persist in the postmodern era and are fostered and facilitated by web 2.0 technology. I argued that, as language and literacy educators, we should be exploiting the “unmodern” potential of web 2.0 for forming connections and building communities through language.

Along with Mike Levy, Cynthia White and Giedre Kligyte, I took part in the panel discussion in the final plenary session, where we attempted to draw together the main themes of the conference and then responded to questions from other participants. It seems to me that during the conference two main themes emerged, both of which might best be expressed as questions:

1. Should we be using digital and web-based technologies in language teaching? The answer is a combined yes/no. Numerous presenters indicated that they were working in blended mode, combining the most appropriate of the new technologies with older “analogue” approaches and materials (if I can use that expression). There are certainly times when analogue technologies are just as appropriate, if not more appropriate, than recent innovations. However, that’s not an argument against e-learning, which brings me to the second question; assuming that new technologies are sometimes more effective, then …
2. Which new technologies should we be using in language teaching? Over the two days of the conference, there were papers and workshops touching on technologies ranging from blogs to podcasting, m-learning, and virtual worlds; the conference itself, as mentioned above, had an accompanying wiki. The answer to this second question may again be a combined one, since all these technologies have their advantages for different purposes in different contexts. The key, to echo the point made in Mike’s opening address, is to start with the learning goals and then select the technologies which best align with these.

The fact that these kinds of questions are being raised suggests to me that a stage of maturity is being reached in the field of CALL. There’s no doubt, as was amply demonstrated at the conference, that many of the new technologies can deliver dramatic pedagogical benefits – but we need to constantly ask ourselves whether new technologies are appropriate in a given context and, if so, which ones promise the greatest advantages. E-learning isn’t a replacement for face-to-face learning, but it can certainly complement it – and, in the process, stretch the teaching and learning processes in new directions, bringing new benefits and new challenges.

Tags: e-learning, CALL, web 2.0, language, literacy

Seminar: Nothing New Under the Sun
Perth, Australia, 07 May 2007

I’ve just given a seminar presentation entitled Nothing new under the sun? Eight ‘new’ technologies in the service of ‘old’ ideals as part of UWA Teaching Month. In it, I explored the emergent web 2.0 and its relevance to today’s classrooms, focusing on eight interrelated technologies (the first of which predates web 2.0, though it’s fundamentally aligned with it in spirit):

• VLEs (esp. asynchronous discussion boards)
• blogs
• wikis
• new search facilities (incl. searchrolls & blogsearches)
• folksonomies
• rss
• m-learning
• virtual worlds

It was a fairly practically oriented presentation, covering the ease of setting up each technology as well as its range of educational applications. I suggested that appropriate use of social web technologies can enormously enhance our teaching, allowing us to pursue long-established educational ideals in a way that will appeal to today’s students.

After the presentation, two audience members spoke to me individually. Both were interested in what one called the “dark side” of e-learning, a point I hadn’t addressed in much detail. In fact, I spent much of last year talking about the dark side of e-learning at conferences (Cyprus) or writing about it (Brave New Classrooms), so this year’s presentations represent a switch of emphasis!

These questions raise an interesting point, though: how careful do educators have to be when starting out with this technology in order to avoid potential traps and pitfalls?

It seems to me that the main pitfall is a lack of balance, something I addressed in my seminar from a different angle. After all, as suggested by Stephen Bax in his work on normalisation (see summary by Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou), if we are to use computers appropriately in the classroom or anywhere else, we need to stop fetishising them and seeing them either as magic bullet solutions to all our problems, or alternatively as the cause of all our problems. Rather, we need to see them as tools. Like all tools, they do some things very well, some things reasonably well, and some things poorly or not at all. For me, the greatest danger in employing e-learning tools is to overemploy them: to imagine that we must replace everything we’ve done previously with new, e-learning-centric modes of teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 provides us with a whole suite of tools, different combinations of which will be appropriate in any given context. And there are other contexts where it’s appropriate not to use e-learning tools at all, or to use them in conjunction with more traditional face-to-face methods. The role of educators is to be informed about the possibilities and to make judgement calls, ideally in collaboration with students, to suit each individual situation.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0

Seminar: Challenging How Knowledge is Created with Jimmy Wales
Perth, Australia, 24 April 2007

This day-long seminar organised by education.au gave participants an overview of the current state of evolution of web 2.0 technologies, with the accent, naturally enough, on wikis. The programme consisted of a presentation by and discussion session with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, following which Mark Pesce introduced and facilitated a panel discussion. The day closed with a workshop involving all participants.

Major themes of the day included the fact that peer-produced networks are beginning to create a seismic shift in the nature of knowledge production and access; that authority is becoming increasingly decentralised and distributed; and that this represents a major challenge to the way things have been done until now, not just in education but in all areas of life. But perhaps the most important theme to emerge from all the discussions was that what matters is not so much technological change, but rather cultural change. On the one hand, some cultural change is necessary to allow new technologies like wikis to be fully exploited; on the other, the new structures of knowledge and authority embedded in these technologies will in time create major shifts in culture.

Jimmy (whose presentation is available in chunks here) described in some detail the operation of the non-profit Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia, whose aim is to foster a world of free content (free as in speech, not beer, as Jimmy put it). In that sense, the aim is to give every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikipedia is already seen by 6.19% of internet users every day, way ahead of major news organisations. Other key points made were:

• monocultures are unsafe;
• it is important to have space for people to disagree safely;
• accountability deals with security issues because you can always see who did what;
• Wikipedia should be a starting point for research, not an end point;
• a number of initiatives are now coming together to create “a base layer of raw cultural materials” online;
• we’re seeing the rise of a new “culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather on intellectual exchange”;
• wikis are not so much about the software but the culture of the community/organisation;
• Wikipedia is not so much a technical innovation but a social innovation;
• in Wikipedia, authority comes from respect.

For interest, you might also like to take a look at the video of the Chaser’s War on Everything prank 10 Questions posed to Jimmy in Sydney.

Mark Pesce (whose podcast and slides are available here) argued that the question “What is the truth?” has now become “Who do you trust?”. There is a potentially a clash of cultures between the Wikpedia model and the older encyclopedic model; has the culture of expertise, he asked, been out-evolved by distributed authority? He concluded by predicting a coming war between elites (who’ve traditionally possessed knowledge), special interests (who try to shape knowledge to their own ends), and communities (which are just becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them – and are beginning to use tools like wikis to harness that knowledge).

During the Perth panel discussion (a podcast of which is available), Mal Bryce, of IVEC, suggested that knowledge sharing is the lubricant of the knowledge economy, adding that information which is shared is information which is enhanced. Control freaks, he claimed, have no place in the emerging order. He agreed with comments made earlier in the day to the effect that more than anything else, it’s about changing the culture rather than grabbing the tools.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0, wikis, Wikipedia, distributed knowledge, peer-produced networks, eduausem2007.

Course: ICTs in Teaching & Learning
Hong Kong, 23-28 January 2007

I recently taught a week-long intensive course in Hong Kong, focusing on ICTs in teaching and learning. Hong Kong is obviously one of the world leaders in technology: you just have to look at the lightshow on Victoria Harbour every evening at eight, or take a trip in the underground, or use your Octopus card (or watch) to buy drinks from a vending machine … But having technology is not the same as knowing what to do with it pedagogically. Actually, with the advent of web 2.0 technologies, it’s less and less about the technology and more and more about how to use it. Few of the teachers on the course had used technology beyond net searches and email; only a handful had heard of blogs or wikis. Yet by the end of the course most had begun to create their own technological resources – blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Moodle VLEs, podcasts – and, over the past couple of months, they’ve successfully embedded these in their teaching. There’s a really important message here:

A knowledge of pedagogical principles is more important than a knowledge of technology for teachers who want to make use of web 2.0 in their classes.

Tags: technology, pedagogy, web 2.0

Publication: “Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet”
Peter Lang, New York, January 2007

The publication of Brave New Classrooms by Peter Lang in January 2007 brings to a close a project on which I’ve been working since 2003 along with Joe Lockard of Arizona State University. Together we’ve edited this volume, consisting of 16 papers which critique e-learning from a variety of points of view. Contributors include Darin Barney, Tara Brabazon, Charles Ess, Bettina Fabos, Andrew Feenberg, Robin Goodfellow, Edward Hamilton, Tina Kazan, Mills Kelly, Marj Kibby, Kate Kiefer, Kerri-Lee Krause, Martha McCormick, Mary O’Sullivan, Tom Palaskas, and Robert Samuels. The blurb reads as follows:

The early, halcyon days of e-learning are gone. Many who embraced personal computers and the Internet, and who devoted their work to creating new forms of electronic education, have grown dissatisfied with trends toward commodification and corporatization, a paucity of critical thought, poor quality distance learning, and the growing exploitation of teaching labor. Online learning’s inherent democratic potential seems increasingly a chimera. Brave New Classrooms explores whether and to what extent its original promise can be recovered. It includes sixteen essays from educational practitioners, including some of the best-known theorists of Internet-based education.

We had felt for some time that there was a need for a study of the dark side of e-learning, as it were. The book in no way recommends the abandonment of e-learning, but it does suggest that we need to approach it in a better-informed, more aware and more sober manner. We concluded our introduction by stating:

High-quality public education can be obstructed or advanced by e-learning. [...] it is up to us to engage critically with the technology and work to exploit its most promising potentialities.

As I’ve suggested in other entries on this blog, it’s not so much about the technology itself but about how it is used by people. We need to develop further pedagogical expertise in order to minimise the potential drawbacks of e-learning at the same time as we seek to fully exploit its advantages.

There’s a brief comment on the book on the Law Librarian Blog.

Tags: e-learning, pedagogy

Conference: Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom: A Step Closer to the Future
Nicosia, Cyprus, 26-28 May 2006

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This 3-day event, entitled Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom, was organised by the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG and the University of Cyprus. It was a chance to explore technologies in the language classroom, with particular emphasis on key issues in e-learning and lots of discussion and speculation about its future directions. Naturally, there were numerous talks and workshops which focused on hardware (especially interactive whiteboards) or software (ranging from Hot Potatoes to wikis), but there’s no doubt about the main focus of the conference: the wetware.

This term, according to Wikipedia, is probably derived from Rudy Rucker’s 1988 novel of the same name, and is used to refer to ” the integration of the concepts of the physical construct known as the central nervous system (CNS) and the mental construct known as the human mind. It is a two part abstraction drawn from the computer related idea of hardware or software”. More simply and more generally, we can say that it refers to the human beings who interact with the hardware and the software.

The core theme of the conference, which surfaced and resurfaced repeatedly in different guises and contexts, was that it’s the people who matter. Yes, the hardware and software need to be in place, but what matters is what we do with them – how we use them to construct knowledge, to communicate, to teach and to learn. Crucially, it’s about people working together, meaning teachers with students, but also students with students, and teachers with teachers … as in a conference forum like this one.

I’ve developed my thoughts on this subject more fully in my article “Hard, soft or wet: Directions in e-learning“, published in summer 2006 in the CALL Review. The same issue also contains summaries of the conference by plenary speakers Stephen Bax and Gavin Dudeney.

My own presentation was entitled “E-learning: From hype to hope”; the PowerPoint and handout are available on the conference website. [As of April 2007, this website was in the process of redevelopment, during which period not all documents are available. In the meantime I'm happy to supply copies if you contact me.]

Tags: hardware, software, wetware