Category Archives: E-learning

New tech in Australian teacher training

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Final ‘Teaching Teachers for the Future’ Meeting
UTS, Sydney
15-16 March, 2012

The final TTF meeting wrapped up a couple of years of Federally funded work in Australia, involving all 39 universities with pre-service teacher education programmes. Part of the Australian Digital Education Revolution, its main focus was on the teacher training needed to ensure new technologies are effectively embedded in classrooms across the country.

Its 3 main components were:

1) developing graduate standards for new teachers (led by AITSL)
2) creating a base of online resources and learning objects for teachers (led by ESA)
3) conducting research and evaluation, and establishing a national network of ICT expertise

AITSL opened the main part of the proceedings by showing a video created about the national standards, simply entitled The National Professional Standards for Teachers, and giving an overview of their National Professional Standards for Teachers website (Component 1 of TTF). ESA followed up with an account of the professional learning and curriculum resources they have been developing, which will shortly be made available to all teachers (Component 2 of TTF).

The keynote speakers, Punya Mishra and Matt Koehler, delivered a talk called T’PACK’d and Ready to Go! Back in 1999, said Koehler, the dominant view was of new technologies just as tools, which could be taught to teachers in workshops, but this didn’t necessarily mean they had much idea of how to apply the tools in the classroom. Mishra and Koehler worked with Shulman’s 1986 notion that there is a need for both content and pedagogical knowledge and, in 2004, published their initial TPCK model (represented as a triangle) and in 2005 modified it (changing it into the familiar circle format). It came to wider attention in 2006 but the acronym was unpronounceable, so they added the vowel to create TPACK, which was announced in 2007. The current model, drawn from Matt Koehler’s TPACK website, is shown below.

Koehler went on to say that a framework has to be complex enough to capture the perspectives of multiple stakeholders but not so complex that people can’t talk about it. The TPACK framework, however, is not meant to be prescriptive, nor is it meant to be complete (that is, it doesn’t cover everything a teacher needs to know). While it has been referred to in more than 300 scholarly articles, and appears in textbooks, the Australian TTF project is the biggest implementation of it to date.

Mishra pointed out that there is no such thing as an educational technology – most technologies are not in fact designed for education. As users, we are always redesigning technologies. “Only repurposing makes a technology an educational technology.” Repurposing is a creative and innovative act, with the crucial mediating role played by the teacher. These tools can allow us to break out of the box; we need to move from using technology to integrating technology to innovating with technology.

Koehler then returned to stress the importance of more work being done on measuring TPACK. To date, most work in this area has been in maths and science, but the TPACK model is meant to be broader than this.

Mishra rounded off the presentation by speaking of the  importance of (in)Disciplined learning, where we think creatively across disciplines and areas. They have recently published a piece in this area called “7 trans-disciplinary habits of mind (for the 21st century)”, and their work is reflected on a website called deep-play.com. Standard solutions don’t work, he suggested: creativity is the only solution. It is time, he concluded, to explore, create and share. Putting your ideas out there, ideally under a Creative Commons licence, will bring great returns.

Glenn Finger kicked off the first afternoon by reporting on the Research and Evaluation Working Group’s major findings (Component 3 of TTF). There were three main research and evaluation strategies:

  • the TPACK online surveys, which revealed measurable growth over the duration of the project in pre-service teachers’ confidence to use ICTs as teachers, and their confidence to facilitate student use of ICTs
  • the Most Significant Change Methodology, which resulted in 41 stories of implementation being submitted from participating institutions, in turn revealing four categories of engagement with ICTs, namely investigation; application; integration; and extension and leadership
  • facilitation of institution-led research projects and collaborations, with the upcoming Australian Computers in Education Conference, to be held in Perth in 2012, having a dedicated TTF strand
In their keynote on the second day, Punya Mishra and Matt Koehler gathered audience feedback about the future of TTF, covering areas such as scalability, sustainability, project research, developing TPACK, developing leaders, and advocacy. Mishra wrapped up by discussing what 21st century learning looks like, and listed three key ideas derived from their investigation of the literature on this subject:
  • KNOW: foundational knowledge remains important
  • ACT: metaknowledge (problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, etc) is important
  • VALUE: humanistic knowledge (life & job skills, cultural competence, etc) is important

We must avoid technological determinism and see technology as embedded in social relations. Ultimately, Mishra suggested, meaning making is a transactional process – between the innovation and social structures and relationships. We need, therefore, to keep an eye on the bigger picture of technology – and of the TTF project.

Following the final keynote, the Minister for School Education, Peter Garrett, attended a series of short presentations on the accomplishments of the TTF project and responded with some comments of his own on the importance of embedding digital technologies in education.

Digital literacies in KL

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‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ Seminar
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
5 – 8 March, 2012

Following directly on from the ‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ seminar in Bangkok, Gavin Dudeney and I ran a second version of the seminar in KL, Malaysia. We had another great group of participants to work with, and enjoyed learning about the differences present in this new context. But even more striking were the similarities. Like the Thai government, with its plan to roll out tablets to all Grade 1 students in the country this year, the Malaysian government is taking the role of new technologies seriously, continuing to push out its smart schools programme as it works towards its Vision 2020 plan. Once again, teachers’ perspectives were similar: what is needed, we heard again and again, is training not so much in the technology itself, but in the intersection between technology and pedagogy. This theme, it seems, repeats itself from country to country.

Digital literacies in Bangkok

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‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ Seminar
Bangkok, Thailand
27 February – 1 March, 2012

Gavin Dudeney and I have just finished running a 4-day Becoming Digitally Literate seminar in Bangkok, Thailand. It’s been great to work with an enthusiastic group of local language educators from the Ministry of Education, universities and schools. It rapidly became apparent that among progressive teachers in this country there’s a great appetite for learning about web 2.0 and, in particular, how to use it in the classroom. It also became clear, as it always does in different venues, just how important it is to tailor our use of new tools and new pedagogical approaches to the local cultural, institutional and educational context. We’ve left the teachers with lots of new ideas and it’ll be really interesting to watch how they’re implemented over coming years. In turn, we’ve learned a great deal about the Thai context and how to go about implementing the use of new tools and new pedagogies in local classrooms.

New media, new spaces

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1st ICODEL Conference
 Manila, Philippines
23-24 February, 2012

The first International Conference on Open and Distance E-learning (ICODEL), was held at the Century Park Hotel in Manila from 23-24 February 2012, with the pre-conference workshops having taken place on 22 February. It was great to be back in the Philippines only months after the GloCALL Conference was held here in October last year – a sign, it seems, of increased interest in the field of e-learning in this country.

In her opening plenary, entitled The State of the Art in Open and Distance E-learning, Denise Kirkpatrick spoke about the 2012 Horizon Report, mentioning currently influential technologies such as mobile computing, electronic books, and Open Education Resources, and indicating the future potential of augmented reality, game-based learning, learning analytics, and gesture-based computing. Major contemporary challenges, she suggested, include:

  • Digital literacies
  • Metrics of evaluation for new forms of publishing
  • New forms of education and competition (universities’ roles are changing in view of competition from other institutions, and in face of the need to prepare students for lives in an increasingly complex world)
  • Keeping up

Open and Distance Learning, she suggested, must be about:

  • Connectedness
  • Community
  • Communication
  • Collaboration
  • Convenience
  • Connections

Today’s students are mobile and connected socially and technologically.  Social media platforms are becoming an important part of learners’ lives and we need to think about how we can leverage them in the service of education.

Schools and universities, she argued, need to be learner-centric digital environments. There should be a focus on problem-solving and helping students to think creatively.  Collaborative learning is important, involving students in formal learning in teams and projects, informal learning with buddies and mentors, and multiple learning environments. Collaboration is also important for educators, who are increasingly engaging in interdisciplinary and cross faculty learning, and internationally distributed research.

She gave examples of current uses of augmented reality, e-books, virtual worlds like Second Life, and social networking sites like Facebook. There can be a link, she observed, between social networking sites and open educational resources, with the latter becoming much more powerful when we focus on the social interaction around them. It’s important to enhance the power of the social and investigate ways of learning together.

Learning analytics is an area that will grow quickly, she predicted, as a way of increasing the quality of student learning and achievement, thanks to interventions derived from looking at the learning analytics. This will also allow us to personalise learning materials to a greater extent, and help students take control of their learning by allowing them to visualise their own learning.

In short, she suggested, we are in a period of major change and growth in the provision of education.

In his talk, Integrating Media and Information Literacy in Open and Distance E-learning, Jose Algaran described the importance of providing guidelines to students on the use and value of materials in multiple media and on multiple platforms. Media and information literacy competencies are an important indicator of students’ readiness to take courses online, and should also inform instructional design. Given that the media and the internet are the key sources of information in the contemporary world, media and information literacy are absolutely crucial skills and are essential to enabling lifelong learning.

In his talk, An International Survey on Media Use for Learning, Michael Grosch opened with a reminder that books are in fact a form of media. Text, he suggested, will still be the most essential medium for learning in the future, even if it is presented in electronic formats.

He went on to say that learners don’t accept all media equally, and that the media offered by teachers are often rejected by learners. External, self-searched and web 2.0 media are becoming more and more important for learning.

Inspired by the ECAR surveys, he developed his own survey instrument to get an overview of students’ use of 48 different media services (print, online, web 2.0, e-learning). Surveys were conducted at about 15 universities, predominantly in Germany and Thailand. Wikipedia, Google and email, he found, were the three most used media services by students, with some commonly discussed web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and Twitter being ranked relatively low. Teachers, he found, read more books than students, while they use social media on a very low level.

He concluded that students use a broad variety of media for learning, but this is self-controlled, with students making up their own minds about which media to use, rather than doing what teachers tell them to do. Text media, he reiterated, play a key role in the learning environment, with electronic texts set to become very important in the future. Interestingly, his data suggest that the most intense media users may also be the better students.

In his talk, Open-source and Free Software for In-class Online Surveys and Data Analysis, Enrique Frio spoke about the value of conducting surveys online, recommending the use of free software such as Kwiksurveys and PSPP (a free alternative to the proprietary SPSS). This cuts down enormously on many of the manual aspects of survey writing, data collection, and data analysis and display.

The second plenary involved three speakers addressing the topic of Issues, Challenges, Reforms and Solutions in Open and Distance E-learning. The first speaker, Tian Belawati, Rector of Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia, spoke about the role of the Universitas Terbuka (Open University) in bringing opportunities for equal access to higher education to the whole of Indonesia. Its student base shows that it is having success in “reaching the un-reached”. Because of the lack of penetration of the internet in parts of the country, the UT works through 37 regional centres. The UT is currently in the process of developing tablet-based materials, and, given a mobile phone penetration of around 73% in Indonesia, it is exploring the use of mobile phones in education, including the use of personalised SMS messaging.

The second speaker, Grace Javier Alfonso, Chancellor of the University of the Philippines Open University, talked about the different domains of distance learning (where teachers and students are physically separated), open learning (which focuses on access for all), and ODL, or open and distance learning (which fuses both concepts). She indicated that e-learning (teaching with new technologies) shares common ground with ODL, but is not the same, since much ODL delivery worldwide still makes little use of new technologies. ODEL, or open and distance e-learning, fuses all three notions.

ODL has been affected by a number of factors in recent years:

  • Transnational education (possibly leading to a need for international accreditation)
  • Quality assurance (which does not yet exist for ODL in the same way as face-to-face education)
  • Digitization of distance education (which is quite varied across institutions)
  • Changing profile of students (with a greater range of students wanting to update their qualifications)
  • Open Educational Resources (with more and more institutions openly sharing their resources at no cost)

The University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) was established in 1995 as the fifth component institution of the University of the Philippines (UP), with the aim of opening up education to all those who are unable to access it in traditional ways. It is currently exploring ways of integrating ODL with e-learning. Because its inception coincided with the inception of the internet in the Philippines, the UPOU did not invest very much in older ODL infrastructure. The rapid increase in internet usage in the Philippines bodes well for e-learning.

ODEL, she concluded, is a world view and an expression of values.  It is a construction of how DL, OL, and EL are enacted in the context of the ‘Universitas’.  The interweaving of these components can bring about social transformation, but there are some issues here:

  • There is a need for a plurality of ideas, which should come from the developing as well as the developed world.
  • There is a need for academics to disseminate knowledge in multimedia formats to reach audiences more familiar with the grammars of audio-visual language.
  • There is a need to recognise the non-linearity of the medium, with hypermedia allowing for the expansion of the democratic space.
  • There is a need to instil the ‘Universitas’ ethos, which is traditionally propagated in physical spaces, in the electronic environment, and to consider how, for example, social networking services can function as scholarly platforms.
  • There is a need to consider the digital divide to avoid the marginalization of the disadvantaged, perhaps by combining EL with more traditional ODL technologies (like television and radio).

The third speaker, Eing-Ming Wu, President of the Open University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, argued that we are living in the time of the city defining the nation, advancing the state, and enriching the citizens. Lifelong learning, he suggested, enables urban life.  The city should become the most resourceful lifelong learning platform, and public schools (at all levels) should become the most accessible lifelong learning centres. Learning, he suggested, enables a better quality of “living, loving and earning”. Drawing on the EU definition of a learning city, he suggested it should promote “city prosperity”, “society security” and “individual fulfilment”.

The Kaohsiung Open University is the only Taiwanese open university founded by a city. Its key characteristics are that the learning it provides is affordable, accessible, achievable and amplifying. The city, he said, becomes the campus of the university – and the university becomes the city’s universe.

Although I had to leave the conference early to get to the CamTESOL Conference in Cambodia, it was clear from the first day that there are many interesting developments occurring in ODEL, both in the Philippines and the wider region. No doubt there will be many future conferences expanding on the themes broached in the 1st ICODEL Conference in Manila.

New media, new learning

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1st ICODEL Conference
Pre-Conference WorkShop
Manila, Philippines
22 February, 2012

The day before the commencement of the 1st ICODEL Conference in Manila, pre-conference workshops took place. Curtis Bonk opened his workshop, Technology-enhanced Teaching and Learning, with a session entitled The Rise of Shared Online Video, the Fall of Traditional Learning. He argued that video can play a major role in bringing learning alive. He started off by showing videos from the History for Music Lovers Channel, where an American history teacher has remixed popular songs to relate historical events. Some videos can be inspirational. Some can convey a great deal of information quickly and easily – Apple makes major announcements through video. Flipped classrooms, where teachers video-record key material for students to watch outside class, allow in-class time to be devoted to more engaging learning. There are growing banks of Open Educational Resources on the web which teachers can draw on. It’s also becoming common for conferences to be filmed and keynotes to be made available to the world. For a list of useful educational videos, see Curtis Bonk’s Shared Online Video Resources, Portals, and Pedagogical Activities, which includes sites like Academic Earth, Book TV, GETideas.org and Howcast.

Bonk listed key reasons for using video which have emerged from research, including:

  • dual coding theory, i.e., the idea that information learned verbally and visually is more richly stored (Alan Paivio)
  • anchored instruction, macrocontexts (John Bransford)
  • multimedia theory (Richard Mayer)
Some recommended strategies for teachers who want to embed videos in education include:
  • anchoring learning (i.e., finding an anchoring event for the learning)
  • starting online discussions before class
  • initiating a pause-and-reflect process
  • stimulating reflections on key concepts
Students can be asked to:
  • find useful video resources for class
  • edit collections of videos to sift out the most effective examples
  • preview and discuss videos before class
  • create videos to summarise their learning
  • evaluate and update archive videos from past years/cohorts
  • send effective videos to the teacher, with those chosen for class viewing receving bonus points
  • share videos across classes or even institutions
  • find videos that support, or contradict, their side of a debate

Bonk concluded with some key pieces of advice for educators using videos:

  • consider the underpinning learning theory or approach that makes videos more powerful than other media
  • get students to reflect on why or how you are using them
  • the length of video for activities should be short (under 10 mins, but preferably under 4 mins)
  • get students to create videos, not just watch them
  • get students to find some course videos rather than looking for them all yourself
  • watch and approve all videos before selecting them, and test for linkrot
  • have a backup plan if links don’t work or bandwidth is limited
  • have a guide sheet to foster students’ reflections
In  later parts of the workshop, Bonk went on to discuss Adding Jumbo Motivation to Online Courses and Activities with the TEC-VARIETY Model, where the value of online video was again an important theme. The workshop was wrapped up with a brief discussion entitled Blended Learning from A to Z: Myths, Models, and Moments of Magic. All in all, the workshop provided a wealth of ideas on how online video sharing can support contemporary educational approaches.

Thinning the classroom walls

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‘Emergent Technologies in Education’ Seminar
Melbourne, Australia
23-25 November & 8-9 December, 2011

I’ve recently finished running another iteration of the Emergent Technologies in Education course, this time in compressed format for the Library at Victoria University in Melbourne. What really struck me this time is the extent to which social media are increasingly ‘thinning’ the walls of the classroom. One participant revived an old blog as a place to keep a set of hyperlinked, multimedia notes on the seminar; it’s called Librarian’s Web 2.0 Travels. Another created a Libguide called Web 2.0 Examples to showcase some of the technologies covered and to disseminate ideas to other VU educators who were not attending the seminar. Two participants set up brand new blogs – Cameron’s Space and Wiki Thoughts – to give them a space in which to reflect on the lessons they’re learning as they develop their online resources for the final presentations session in February 2012.  And, after most people had signed up to Twitter, we experimented with three live display formats – Monitter (a simple, easy-to-view linear display of the most recent tweets), Wiffiti (a dynamic display which shows the most recent tweets) and Visible Tweets (a dramatic, dynamic display showing a selection of recent tweets, one at a time) – over the last couple of days of the seminar. While the decision wasn’t unanimous, and while most people agreed that context would dictate which service was most appropriate, participants generally preferred the less distracting Monitter. So we used Monitter for backchannel feedback during students’ initial presentations on the last afternoon; you can check out the discussion under the #etvu11 hashtag.

The walls of face-to-face classrooms are getting thinner and thinner, allowing educational conversations to spill into the blogosphere and onto Twitter, encouraging the easy dissemination of ideas, promoting the building of links between course materials and the wider web, and inviting external commentary and feedback. Education is, less than ever, an isolated enterprise, but rather feeds into and is fed into by the world outside the classroom. And that, I think, is a good thing.

Visions of the future

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ICELF11: The International Conference on E-learning Futures
Auckland, New Zealand
30 November – 1 December, 2011

The key themes to emerge from the inaugural International Conference on E-learning Futures at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand, were linked to mobile technologies – particularly smart, context-aware tools – and the associated personalisation of learning.

Trends in Technology & Education

In his opening keynote, Learning generations: Looking forwards, looking back, Steve Wheeler quoted Arthur C. Clarke’s comment that: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. New technologies are appearing everywhere, he observed, but educators don’t know how to use them; we still see them as magic. Technology won’t impress students, he went on to say, but good pedagogy and inspiration will.  Education is so important that if we get it wrong, we leave a very poor legacy for coming generations.  We need to find ways to use technology appropriately to support pedagogy, but there are many vested interests resisting it.

One issue is that: “For the first time we are preparing learners for a future we cannot clearly describe” (David Warlick). Declarative knowledge is becoming less important than procedural knowledge; it’s less about knowing that, than knowing how. New literacies are therefore important; they go much deeper than skills, because they allow real engagement. Connectivism, he suggested, is a useful approach: students need to learn how to connect with others as they build their PLNs.

Wheeler went on to list key characteristics of the future of education as follows:

  • Open: we will have to share more.
  • Social: people are already sharing. (Quadblogging is a good example of the application of this idea in education.)
  • Personal: homogenised learning is no longer effective, as we move out of the industrial age. (A lot of past educational technologies were teacher-centric, but contemporary technologies are more personalised.)
  • Augmented: Augmented reality is becoming more important, enhancing what we see through the naked eye. Context-awareness is key. It’s about “web meets world” (Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle).
  • Non-touch:  gesture-based technologies will become more central.

In his presentation The new new things: Emerging trends in technology and education, Derek Wenmoth outlined key trends towards:

  • mobility/portability
  • miniaturisation
  • convergence of technologies into a single device
  • personalisation
  • openness (the OER University is an example of this)
  • gamification
  • data visualisation
  • contextualisation/location-awareness

These will impact dramatically on our behaviour as information gatherers and learners. We will need to consider how ‘desire pathways’ will take shape, and how we might use services like Yahoo Pipes and ifttt to personalise our information consumption.  Location is now an important characteristic of you as a learner – we see this, for example, with Twitter, iPad apps, or Al Gore’s “Our Choice” app. In the follow-up questions, Wenmoth quoted Neil Postman’s comment: “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.”

In his IBM keynote, Education for a smarter nation: Changing business priorities and trends in education, Dougal Watt discussed five signposts for the future:

  • technology immersion
  • personalised learning paths
  • knowledge skills
  • global integration
  • economic alignment

These trends, he argued, form an educational continuum, or single view of learning, skills development, and workforce training.  This has implications for the traditional boundaries between academic segments, educational providers, and economic development initiatives.

In her keynote, Digital ecosystems: mobile, portable, embedded and conventional devices, Judy Kay outlined emerging technologies with educational applications, including:

  • surface computing: multi-user touch-sensitive tabletops
  • data mining/visualisation: using digital footprints to improve learning through data visualisation, e.g., in an activity radar system which shows at a glance the amount of work done by students on a wiki

This keynote, which rounded off the conference, provided a snapshot of current and future trends in educational technology, leaving delegates a lot to think about.

In her keynote, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme outlined current mobile learning projects at the Open University, UK, before going on to talk about self-directed learning, which she argued is a natural approach to lifelong learning. She reported on the results of survey and interview-based studies which aimed to determine emerging trends in the use of mobile technologies in education, and to find out what learners’ wishes are with respect to mobile learning.

She suggested that the following areas need strengthening, specifically in foreign language curricula:

  • connection with learners by supporting real needs and performance in situ
  • tools and strategies for navigating and exploiting the new (increasingly mobile) ecology of digital learning resources and networks of support
  • personal management of language learning across place and time

Next generation designs, she suggested, should take into account time, place, and activity.  She also noted that language use will change; “Find coffee near me” is a perfectly logical statement to a personal assistant like Apple’s Siri, though we wouldn’t say this to a friend. She concluded that:

  • we need ongoing research with learners, as mobile practices and technologies evolve
  • language curricula will be increasingly intertwined with ways to learn and interact with technology
  • the design of learning activities will need to recognise learners’ emerging patterns and preferences regarding:
    • different types of travel
    • short periods of time
    • individual and social learning
    • ways to combine formal and informal learning

In their talk, Making the ‘case’ for the iPad, James Oldfield and Dawn Duncan described a business programme and a law programme in which students were given iPads. Students used these for a variety of pedagogically traditional activities but also for creative and collaborative web-based activities, including tasks on blogging and wiki platforms. The more creative apps used by students included iMovie, Keynote and Prezi. Collaborative tools included Dropbox, Google Docs, Mindmeister, Posterous, Twitter and WordPress. Further details of this work with iPads can be found at http://ipadnzeducation.wordpress.com/.

Language Teaching & Learning

My own paper, Tailoring language learning to a world of screens, sought to build a bridge between the broader field of educational technology and the more specific field of CALL. It outlined 4 key trends associated with the shift towards a world of screens:

  • multimedia
  • networking
  • mobility
  • customisation

It then went on to examine the implications of each of these trends for language teaching and learning. A more detailed summary and links are available.

In her presentation, A distinctive blend: Seamless integration of e-learning tools with classroom delivery in a blended learning oral skills language course, Katherine Danaher talked about the importance of redesigning a course to incorporate new technologies, rather than pasting new technologies over the top of an existing design. In the redesign process, it’s important to:

  • Know your pedagogy
  • Know your learning outcomes
  • Know your e-learning  tools (amongst other things, declutter your course, and start small but think ahead to avoid getting painted into a corner later)
  • Know the practicalities and pitfalls; issues to consider include:
    • teacher and learner training
    • teacher (and student) workload
    • too much content (it may be better to design only 70% of a course and leave the rest as whitespace, so you can work with what students bring to the course)
    • failure to integrate successfully
    • seduction by the wow factor

It’s valuable to remember that curriculum design is an iterative process; courses don’t have to be fully designed from the start, but will grow and morph over time. To integrate new technologies into a blended course, it’s essential to refer to the online tools regularly in class; to maintain a strong online presence; and to develop scaffolded activities that include both face-to-face and online components.

Danaher finished by quoting Harasim et al (2007): “Online you get to know your students’ minds, not just their faces.”

In her talk, Task implementation in CMC: How does it influence language learning opportunities?, Rebecca Adams focused on the introduction of SCMC (synchronous CMC) into a language course.  Research suggests that synchronous text chat can:

  • encourage meaning negotiation
  • produce a focus on form
  • enhance accuracy
  • foster active learning
  • develop oral communicative competence (which can transfer to face-to-face contexts)

In the project on which she reported, it was found that reducing a task’s cognitive demands on students freed up cognitive space for them to focus more on grammar and form.  More complex tasks resulted in less focus on form. Not only does synchronous chat have language learning benefits, but using it in class helps prepare students for its use in real-world contexts.

So all in all …

Taken as an ensemble, the keynotes and papers at this conference distilled a clear sense of the emerging trends to watch over coming years. While predicting the future is never a safe bet, on current indications it will be all about mobility and personalisation. No doubt the next ICELF conference will give us a chance to see how these trends have progressed …

Changing language, changing learners, changing teachers

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AILA 2011: The 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics
Beijing, China
23-28 August, 2011

One of the major themes running through the 16th AILA Congress was the relationship of new technologies to language teaching.  Over the course of six days, presenters from around the world discussed changing teacher training, changing  teaching, and changing language – especially the growing importance of digital literacies.

Changing teacher training

In their presentation Language teacher education: Developments in distance learning, David Hall and John Knox reported on an investigation into institutional, teacher and student views of LTED (Language Teacher Education by Distance). Those surveyed believed there are numerous advantages of LTED, including:

  • flexibility/accessibility (approx. 70%)
  • situated learning (approx. 23%) (in particular the theory/practice interface when teachers study while working)
  • learner control
  • diversity of the student cohort
  • financial issues for students
  • interaction & mediation of discourse (you can take time to respond, e.g., in asynchronous discussion)
  • learner responsibility
  • employability

In short, the old advantages of LTED remain (such as flexibility and situated learning), but new advantages (such as diversity of the cohort and mediation of discourse) are expanding as technology breaks down barriers of time and space. Hall and Knox argued that both face-to-face and distance learning have particular affordances and advantages that in some ways balance each other out.

In her paper The development of language teachers’ expertise in exploiting the interactive whiteboard towards a socio-cognitive approach to computer-assisted language learning, Euline Cutrim Schmid noted that there is some concern that interactive whiteboards (IWBs) can be used to enhance teachers’ control of the learning environment, thereby promoting more traditional transmission or behaviourist educational approaches.

According to Warschauer (2000: 57), a socio-cognitive approach to electronic language learning activities should:

  • be learner-centred
  • be based on authentic communication
  • make some real difference in the world
  • provide students with an opportunity to explore and express their evolving identity

The question is whether and how teachers can be encouraged to use IWBs to support this kind of approach. Cutrim Schmid presented a case study of a language teacher who moved from a teacher-dominated stage of IWB use where:

  • the teacher focused mainly on form and controlled practice, and overgeneralised the use of the IWB to the whole lesson, doing most activities with a full-class focus (but she felt dissatisfied with students’ level of activity)
  • the teacher delivered authentic multimedia-based input (but she realised that students’ fascination for multimedia materials didn’t necessarily correlate with effective language learning)

to a learner-centred stage where:

  • students had an opportunity for co-construction of knowledge (where the equipment was not the main focus but was used as necessary to support language-based tasks, and where the IWB was used as a platform to show student-produced web 2.0 materials as well as being used by students themselves for presentations)
  • students had an opportunity for self-expression

The teacher developed important CALL competencies as she came to understand the strengths and limitations of the technological options, and to make informed judgements on the suitability of the tool for the task.

Cutrim Schmid concluded that IWBs can present a threat to communicative language teaching, especially as the acquisition of new competencies doesn’t occur automatically.  There is a real need for teacher development in this area, based on a sound theoretical basis and an examination of pedagogical practice.

In a talk entitled Web 2.0 for teaching and learning: Professional development through a community of practice model, Christina Gitsaki reported on a PD programme developed for  English teachers in the UAE to help them integrate web 2.0 into their teaching within a laptop programme.

The results of an initial investigation had shown that teachers reported a high level of confidence with emailing, word processing, accessing a VLE, etc, but made little use of web 2.0 and were in fact concerned about students accessing web 2.0 on their laptops, especially social networking sites. Students reported that the activities they wanted to do with the laptops were very different from what teachers did with them – they wanted to engage in more creative and collaborative activities. In other words, the way teachers were using laptops in the classroom did not reflect students’ online socialising and learning in their own time.

A PD programme, underpinned by a community of practice model, was set up to give teachers greater awareness of web 2.0 and how to use it pedagogically. It was based on the following cycle of learning:

  • Introduction to new idea
  • Reflection & interaction
  • Challenges & negotiation
  • Outcome: Adopt, Adapt, Abandon

Tools covered in Semester 1 included Edmodo, Flickr, Google Docs, Mindmeister, MyPodcast, VoiceThread, Xtranormal and YouTube, and in Semester 2 they included Photopeach, Dipity, OurStory, Prezi, Glogster and Comic Life.

Teachers found the community of practice approach valuable. They learned about web 2.0 tools, tried them out, and collaborated with colleagues on how to use them in the classroom. The more confident teachers actually tried the tools with their students and were able to report to colleagues on their experience.

Changing language teaching

In his talk The impact of digital storytelling with blended learning on language teaching, Hiroyuki Obari argued that digital storytelling can improve student autonomy as well as proficiency in English.  He observed that digital storytelling “merges the traditional art of storytelling with the power of new technologies” and can promote linguistic as well as paralinguistic skills in students. Through digital storytelling, students practise rhetorical skills as well as technological skills, with technology becoming an “imagination amplifier”.  Assessment of students’ English following the introduction of digital storytelling into his classes resulted in improved scores, and most students agreed it was useful in learning EFL.

The symposium Computer-assisted language learning and the learner consisted of a number of papers (by Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana, Bin Zhou, Hiroyuki Obari, and Mirjam Hauck) examining the effects of CALL on student learning. In the presentation The effects of games on interaction and willingness to communicate in a foreign language, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana argued that, given the positive effects of gaming on classroom interaction and language production, we should appropriate gaming software for pedagogical purposes (rather than the other way round). The paper concluded with the following recommendations:

  • Do not let applied linguists mess up game design.
  • Do build on existing non-educational games as ecologies in their own right.
  • Do gather evidence of game language use and attitudes to learning.
  • Do make links between formal and non-formal learning.

In his paper Students’ perspectives of an English-Chinese language exchange programme on a web 2.0 environment, Bin Zou described a web 2.0-based programme for learners of English in China and learners of Chinese in the UK. Wikispaces was the platform chosen for students in these two groups to interact with each other around topics of common interest. The History function of the wiki allowed students to easily identify corrections made to their texts by the native speakers of the target language, though some students preferred to upload Word documents containing the corrections. Overall, wikis were found to be a useful and motivating platform for language education.

In his paper Integration of technology in language teaching, Hiroyuki Obari argued that social learning is the key trend of coming years. Open Educational Resources, he suggested, will be a big part of it. He noted that mobile technologies can be used to support lessons in a number of ways; for example, announcements and information about words and phrases can be sent to language students on mobile devices while they are commuting. Digital storytelling, he suggested, is also a very useful tool which allows students to demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products. Social learning and blended learning, he concluded, can both help students improve English proficiency and IT skills, while fostering autonomous learning.

In her paper Promoting teachers’ and learners’ multiliteracy skills development through cross-institutional exchanges, delivered at a distance by Skype video, Mirjam Hauck reported on two empirical case studies of a task-based telecollaborative learning format.  She argued that it is important for both teachers and learners to develop multimodal communicative competence, as defined by Royce (2002), and showed Elluminate as an example of a multimodal communicative environment. There is an “orchestration of meaning” in multiple modes online. It is important, she suggested, that language teachers design tasks that oblige learners to make use of multiple modalities online.  She quoted Hampel and Hauck (2006) on the need to promote the kinds of literacy required to use new democratic learning spaces to their best effect.

Changing language: New literacies

In introducing the Digital futures symposium, David Barton suggested that literacy studies research is a good lens for looking at language and new technologies. In his own paper, Creating new global identities on the web through participation and deliberate learning, he stressed that literacy studies research sees literacy as a social practice. With the advent of web 2.0, there are new spaces for writing (with writing becoming more and more important), including multilingual writing. There are also new spaces for learning.

His paper focused in particular on the photosharing site Flickr. He suggested that a typical Flickr page involves a number of different writing spaces: textual description, discussion, tags, etc. He reported on a study of Flickr use conducted collaboratively with Carmen Lee. New multilingual encounters occur online – such as when a Chinese person learning English in Hong Kong discusses photography with Spanish speakers elsewhere in the world. Comments may be left on photos in different languages.

He noted that many Flickr users write about learning, even though it’s not predominantly a learning site. He spent some time discussing ‘Project 365’ (in which people take one photo a day for a year), where it is very noticeable that many people refer specifically to learning. These are, he suggested, “deliberate acts of learning”. He listed the following key characteristics of Project 365:

  • it’s social
  • deliberate acts of learning
  • discourse of self-improvement
  • it’s life-changing (people are not just learning about photography but about life; learning, he suggested, should be life-changing)
  • vernacular theories of learning (where people present their own views of how learning takes place)
  • reflexive writing spaces
  • a passion (something, he argued, that is often left out of theories of learning)

My own paper was part of the symposium Enhancing online literacies: Knowledge and skills for language students and teachers in the digital age, organised by Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler from the Open University. As part of this symposium, papers were delivered by myself, Linda Murphy, Aline Germain-Rutherford, Cynthia White, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana, and Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler. Paper summaries, reference lists and links can be found on the E-language Wiki.

In the opening paper, Digital tools and the future of literacy, I argued that our communication landscape has shifted dramatically in a few short years. New web 2.0 and related tools, ranging from blogs, wikis and podcasts to social sharing services, social networking sites and virtual worlds, are having an increasing impact on our everyday lives – and our everyday language and literacy practices. It’s more crucial than ever for language teaching to encompass a wide variety of literacies which go well beyond traditional print literacy.

I focused on four specific digital literacies of particular relevance to language teachers and students: multimodal (multimedia) literacy, information literacy, intercultural literacy, and remix literacy. I showed how language teachers can incorporate elements of each into their everyday classroom activities. I concluded that combining traditional print with multimodal, information, intercultural and remix literacies can make the language classroom much more dynamic – and much more relevant to our students’ future lives and future uses of language.

In her paper Tutor skills and qualities in blended learning: The learner’s view, Linda Murphy argued that the difference between distance learning and regular learning is breaking down, thanks to the arrival of new technologies.  The top-ranking important skills for online language tutors, as viewed by students in a 2011 study conducted at the OU, were:

  • native/near native speaker competence (due in part to a need for cultural input)
  • teaching expertise in supporting grammar and pronunciation development
  • strong emphasis on affective dimension: approachable, enthusiastic, encouraging, fostering group participation with confidence, catering for differing needs and styles
  • well-organised, focused use of contact time
  • competent IT users
  • prompt responses and awareness of support systems

In a previous study conducted in 2008, IT skills had not been listed in the top five most important skills, but by 2011, 20% of respondents mentioned IT skills. The idea of IT also overlaid many of the other tutor skills mentioned in student comments.  She concluded by suggesting that teaching online is not so much about adding to one’s repertoire as transforming one’s practice for the online context.

In her paper Preparing our students for the intercultural reality of today’s online learning spaces, Aline Germain-Rutherford focused on intercultural issues. She opened with a quote from Edgar Morin, who argues against inadequate, compartmentalised learning and in favour of learning “about the world as world” in its contextual, global, multidimensional and complex reality. She referred also to Reeder, Macfayden, Roche & Chase’s (2004) description of culture as ‘negotiated’ rather than ‘given’.

Our job as language teachers, she suggested, is to design learning environments where students can co-create linguistic and cultural content through their collaborative contributions to blogs, wikis and social networking platforms. She recommended Henderson’s (2007) model of E-learning Instructional Design, which is centred on epistemological pluralism and is designed to help raise students’ awareness of cultural diversity as they engage in co-construction of a learning space where multiple cultural contexts are made visible and debatable.

In her paper Online academic literacy within user-generated content communities: Connections and challenges, Cynthia White started with the new literacies position, which sees literacy as a social practice.  There is of course a need to switch practices between different contexts. She referred to Kern (2006), who suggested that the internet has complexified the notion of literacy by introducing multimedia dimensions and altering traditional discourse.

She described a telecollaborative project involving students from Germany and New Zealand, where they interacted online, e.g. collaboratively writing on a wiki, as well as making use of tools like Facebook and YouTube which they themselves introduced.  She explored how students practised language and negotiated meaning in examining the relationship between German and New Zealand/Maori culture.  She finished with a number of questions, including:

  • What are the dimensions of literacy as social practice in web 2.0 telecollaborative projects?
  • What is the intersection between intercultural literacy and online literacy?

In the paper Incorporating computer games into the EFL classroom, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana focused on gaming literacy and asked how, as teachers, we can move from an entertaining to an educational use of games. Key learning principles present in many games include:

  • the active, critical learning principle (gaming environments are about active and critical, not passive, learning)
  • the psychosocial moratorium principle (it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them)
  • the practice principle (learners get lots of practice which is not boring and where they experience ongoing success)

However, language learning through games is not yet well developed. Many online language games do not really exploit the capabilities of the digital medium, but essentially reproduce offline activities.

The paper reported on an experiment conducted in Thailand, where students were able to communicate in English in a copy of a commercial gaming environment. It was found that students had a greater willingness to communicate in online gaming than in the classroom.  It was also found that students produced a greater quantity of language in the gaming environment compared to the face-to-face class.

In the concluding symposium presentation, Transforming teaching: New skills for online language learning spaces, Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler focused on teachers and how they can transform the spaces that exist online into learning spaces. Referring to their previously developed skills pyramid for online language teachers, they pointed out that the two base layers have to be taken for granted nowadays, as teachers can’t operate online without them, but the higher level skills still need to be developed.

Some of the key literacies for students are:

  • Basic literacy
    • technical competence with software
  • Multimodal literacy
    • dealing with constraints and possibilities of the medium
    • having basic IT competence
  • Linguistic and inter-/multicultural literacy
    • facilitating and developing communicative competence
    • online socialisation
  • Remix literacy
    • own style
    • creativity and choice

Online learning spaces allow:

  • blending of environments – beyond time, space, and pace (making learning flexible)
  • individualised learning (making learning relevant)
  • authentic communication (making learning real)
  • collaboration (making learning interactive)
  • online telecollaboration (making learning multi/intercultural)
  • creativity and choice (making learning fun)

Of course, as they stressed, there is still a need for negotiation of a number of aspects of learning spaces.  Future developments, they suggested, should include the development of new pedagogies; online communities of practice; institutional training; and curriculum planning.

Conclusion

Overall, the AILA Conference provided lots of food for thought for anyone working in the overlapping areas of language teaching and new technologies. It will be interesting to see how both teaching and technologies have continued to develop when the 17th AILA Congress takes place in Brisbane in 2014. Watch this space …

New technologies, new literacies

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New Technologies, New Literacies Workshops
Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne & Perth
15, 20, 22 & 24 September, 2010

Melbourne 013BOver the course of 10 days, Gavin Dudeney and I delivered a series of professional development days entitled New Technologies, New Literacies to TESOL teachers at a variety of centres around Australia.  I opened each workshop with a broad, theoretical overview of new literacies, based on my current research on digital literacies.  Gavin followed up with two workshop sessions where, after learning about a range of technological tools, participants had a chance to try them out themselves. Gavin focused in particular on how language teachers can work with images, video, word clouds, websites, podcasts, cartoons, slideshows and blogs.  We concluded each day with a general Q & A session.  Feedback from participants indicates that although there has to date been little PD on offer in this area, there is great interest among language teachers in learning more about how new technologies can support language teaching.  For more information, see the flyer and the composite Google Doc co-created by the presenters and attendees in each session.  We are particularly grateful to English Australia and Pearson for supporting this professional development tour.

Technology in TESOL

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English Australia Conference
Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Centre
Gold Coast, Australia
16 – 18 September, 2010

Gold Coast 8BAmongst a diverse set of themes, the 2010 English Australia Conference included a technology strand with a strong focus on the initial implementation of technology in TESOL contexts and, in particular, how to approach teacher training.

Getting teachers excited about learning technologies was the title of the talk by Clementine Annabell, Neil McRudden and Mark Steinward, who focused on the introduction of IWBs at Embassy CES. Taking a 3-phase approach to teacher training, Embassy CES began with a seed-and-grow phase for those who were really enthusiastic about the use of IWBs. This was followed by a creative eclecticism phase involving the appointment of learning technologies staff, who were given non-teaching hours to champion the use of IWBs and to provide support.  Different needs on different campuses necessitated a range of different strategies.  A strategy used successfully in Melbourne took the form of 10-min sessions in a ‘Coffee Club’, where uses of IWBs were explained.  Participants were rewarded with free coffees and eventually a free USB after attending a set number of sessions.  The third phase was a structured program in the form of a worldwide online course called StudySmart, built in a Moodle VLE, where teachers improved their skills and had to produce lesson materials which could then actually be used in their classrooms.  Creative solutions to typical problems – lack of time and lack of funding – were discussed.

In a presentation which exemplified the possibilities of multimedia delivery, and was entitled A bite of the apple: Real life takes on e-learning, Katrina Hennigan and Lucy Blakemore  outlined key principles for e-learning which emerged from 360 degree interviews: it should be simple, collaborative, seamless, guided, and engaging.  These are the same principles, they argued, that underpin good teaching more generally.  The went on to outline a series of e-learning ‘apps’ (technologies and/or strategies that can be easily used in the classroom) under each of these headings:

> simple:

  • use of iPods
  • use of PowerPoint (e.g., in a Pecha Kucha format, with 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each)

> collaborative:

  • Values Exchange (a web-based tool for students to debate social issues)
  • Skype (text chat, with chat logs being annotated by teachers and emailed to students to improve)

> seamless:

  • using sharing options included with articles, etc, available online
  • use of TED talks to show how class activities have been done or researched in the ‘real’ world

> guided:

  • the importance of narrowing down choices for choices for teachers & students
  • “the best ‘app’ is a person” – teachers want hands-on experience with face-to-face support

> engaging:

In a talk entitled Technology integration in ESL: Teaching and learning, Adrienne Vanthuyne began by focusing on Koehler and Mishra’s TPACK [Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge] model and discussing how it might be applied in the context of training language teachers.  She suggested that we should be aiming for high-level ICT integration (involving instructional activities for higher order thinking among students) rather than low-level ICT integration (involving digitised drill and practice).

She also spoke of five Stages of Technology Integration: Entry (where not many technologies are being used) – Adoption (where new technologies support text-based drill-and-practice instruction) – Adaption (where teachers adapt new technologies to suit students and promote higher order thinking skills) – Appropriation (where there is development of new instructional patterns like team teaching, interdisciplinary projects and individually paced instruction, with teachers becoming facilitators) – Invention (where teachers invent interdisciplinary learning activities that engage students in gathering information, analysing and synthesising it, and ultimately building new knowledge). Teachers find themselves at different positions along this continuum.

It was suggested that for teacher training to be effective in this area, teachers need training that is appropriate for their context as well as a supportive environment including technical support through a community of practice, colleagues who are enthusiastic about technology, and a ‘technology positivist’ environment.

In her talk, Wiki: A support tool to assist and support homestay families, Jennifer Petrie ran through the wiki concept with the help of Lee Lefever’s video Wikis in plain English.   She went on to explain that La Trobe University has developed a wiki (on pbworks) for homestay families, in order to provide more support and easier communication, and create a sense of community.  The homepage contains key contact details, while other pages cover a range of areas such as announcements; information on incoming groups; a recipes page where host families can post recipes they cook for their students; and, most interestingly, a student feedback page where families can see anonymous aggregated feedback from homestay students, annotated with advice from the homestay co-ordinator, and where families can comment and offer advice on the issues raised.  Use of the wiki by host families has increased dramatically over recent months.  Jennifer listed key benefits of the wiki as:

  • Streamlining of processes
  • Efficient use of time and resources
  • A permanent record
  • Transparency
  • Collaboration

Emerging Technologies: Mobile learning was the title of the talk by Larry Anderson from the Australia Network. Indicating that mobile phones, with a worldwide penetration around 45%, have become the number one screen in the world, ahead of computer screens and televisions, he outlined a number of English m-learning projects in different countries.  He noted, for example, that three of the top-selling iPhone apps in South Korea are for  English learning. Mobile phones, he suggested, provide  cheap and easy access to content; publishers are busy producing both free and paid apps; and schools and universities are experimenting with mobile devices inside and outside classrooms.  In short, he argued, mobile phones offer important ways of diversifying educational delivery.  This is an area in which Australian TESOL educators need to engage much more.

In his plenary address, entitled New literacies, teachers and learners, Gavin Dudeney  started with a definition of digital literacy from Wikipedia: “the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers”. One of the limitations of this definition is the use of the word ‘computers’, which doesn’t take into account the recent proliferation of mobile devices.  A second, more recent Wikipedia definition, which puts more accent on the productive aspects of digital literacy, is: “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology […] Digitally literate people can communicate and work more efficiently, especially with those who possess the same knowledge and skills.”  In addition to talking about ESL, Gavin went on, we are now hearing mention of DSL – ‘Digital as a Second Language’.

While there are some generational differences in approaches to technology, they are not as stark or clear as is sometimes imagined.  The OU has recently suggested that instead of talking about digital natives and immigrants, we should talk about digital residents and digital visitors.  The latter set of terms is more flexible that the former.

He went on to list various categories of digital literacies, based on those discussed in my 2009 book From blogs to bombs: The future of digital technologies in education and summarised in a more recent document here.  After a discussion of the digital skills possessed by audience members, Gavin went on to ask the question: ‘Why is [digital literacy] important?’  One reason is that we’re preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, so we need to future-proof education to some extent.  People are changing; technology is changing; there’s a shift towards mobile devices; and students are changing, becoming more digitally literate, and expecting technology use in education.  There is a great missed opportunity in asking students who come into the classroom to switch off the technologies they use in their everyday lives.  This message comes through clearly in the Engage me! video about new technologies by pupils at Robin Hood Primary School, Birmingham.

The real problem may be that teachers are not changing, mainly because they are not receiving training in the pedagogical aspects of teaching with new technologies – and, said Gavin, this is the case in every country he’s worked in over the last 10 years.  This lack of training leads to frustration and fear.  One possibility is to rely on students as a technological resource, which also helps them become invested in the success of the class.  It’s also important to use computers to open up your class to the world and to foster interaction.

The bottom line, he argued, is that the use of technology shouldn’t change our pedagogy; it should enhance current pedagogical practices.

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