Communities of practice online: Reflection through experience and experiment with the Webheads community of language learners and practitioners
Week 3
February 3 - 9, 2003
Issues Discussed in Week 3
Communities of practice online: Reflection through experience and experiment with the Webheads community of language learners and practitionersWeek 3 February 3 - 9, 2003 Issues Discussed in Week 3
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cmc: computer-mediated-communication - part 1 definition?, bibliography, chat tools, chat for peer tutoring, chat and language learning, getting started in online teaching
Part 2: pros and cons of chat, cultural attitudes towards chat
Part 3: pros and cons of email exchanges, Wimba voice direct
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| 2Feb03 | ||
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Hi all, Sorry if this question is too obvious, But do you know any clear definition for CMC to give to an audience where perhaps there are many of them with almost no knowledge on Internet? Thank you in advance, María
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| 3Feb03 | ||
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Maria, Denise Murray has a great article in the Winter 2000 (I think) issue of TESOL Quarterly in which she defines CMC for a non-tech-y TESOL audience. She also has an article somewhere in Language Learning Technology which is an online journal (www.llt.msu.edu -- if I remember rightly). The fact that she raises a critical voice has nothing at all to do with my admiration of her writing, of course ... Cheers, Nigel
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. . .
This coming week we will be focusing on
the tools that facilitate computer mediated communication. Maria
asked for a clear definition of CMC and I guess I would say, as it applies
to us and to language learning, it's using computers to put people in
remote (from each other) locations in touch for the purpose of
facilitating authentic and purposeful communication. This is in fact
the practice that our community revolves around, and one of our purposes
is to explore various ways that we can effect CMC.
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| 4Feb03 | ||
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Here is my
(presently unannotated) bibliography of research into CMC and SLA: www.geocities.com/nigelcaplan/biblio.htm As you'll see, I have spent rather more time looking up articles than designing the website (I promise I didn't make it in MS Word just to annoy you all!), but the text should be clear. A small number of the articles are available online, but most (ironically) reside in paper-based journals, unless your institution has subscribed to the electronic archives. I should add that this is in no way complete, and does not include many of the Webheads' excellent works (with the exception of Teresa's paper, which is directly relevant). Also, I should say that I am highly critical of almost all the studies (again, with the exception of Teresa's!). Hopefully, I'll get round to editing and posting the lit review which explains why. Anyway, if you're interested, there it is. Cheers, Nigel
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Hi, Nigel: This is going to be very useful, no doubt! And thanks for the great timing! Just the right kind of resource for week 3! :-) Sadly, though, I was not able to get to your website: "Sorry, the page you requested was not found". :-( Can you check and see if anything is wrong with the url, please? I don't think it has to do with any problem at Geocities, because I can access Daf's pages. Let us know, ok? TIA, Teresa
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| 5Feb03 | ||
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Hi Teresa, Try the url with b capitalized: www.geocities.com/nigelcaplan/Biblio.htm I found this out by stripping the url to www.geocities.com/nigelcaplan and navigating from Nigel's home page which then showed up. Cheers, Arnold
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Thank you,
Arnold! I didn't think about that little, big difference! ;-) And thanks, Nigel! Biblios are always very useful and yours is no exception. I will read the papers on the Web a.s.a.p. And thank you for including my chat paper: an honor! Cheers, Teresa
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OK, so the moral
of the story is that file names are case sensitive in geocities. My apologies - I honestly believed that nothing in a URL or email address was ever case sensitive. Thanks to Tere, Aiden and Arnold for sorting it out. As I only read the daily digests, I'm a little behind. Nigel
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Hi,
Jason,
welcome to the friendliest online community of practice ever....;-) !! We are all willing to listen to oldies and newbies and to share, as Tere has said, ideas, queries and experiences that can enrich us all. Referring to our Week 3 discussion topic, which CMC tools have you used with your students? Which of them have you found more useful or successful in helping you achieve your aims? We have experimented with iVisit, Yahoo Messenger, some of us, with Paltalk, and most of us with our homely Tapped In 1 and 2, where we meet every Sunday at noon GMT, or Saturday 4 pm GMT. I've personally added your ID to Yahoo; mine is ritazeinstejer, feel free to add me as well. I'm from Argentina, so my L1 is Spanish.... Look forward to meeting you Rita
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| Thanks for the
warm welcomes! To answer Rita's question, I use Yahoo messenger a lot and also ivisit. With my students we have often gone to Latinchat.com or similar chats so that they can do different types of activities. Sometimes they are more structured than others, and it depends a lot on their capabilities. For lower-level classes, I like to do a scavanger hunt activity in open chats with native speakers. For instance, they make up a list of several characteristics (things that usually come up in chats: national origin, school, job, family, etc.) and then they talk to various people until they have found all of these. They have a lot of fun with that one and usually make some friends with whom they become penpals. I found ivisit because I use macs a lot, but has anyone here used www.ispq.com? It is not freeware but it has a free trial. It has some things that ivisit does not such as quick messaging that includes video and voice. I have used a localizewd version of PalTalk, Brasil's Tivejo.com, to learn a bit of portuguese and I like the audio quality there a lot. Again, thanks to all for the nice replies! Jason
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Hi, Jason! It was a pleasure to contact you and share some English and some Spanish on Yahoo some minutes ago. And thanks for your quick reply and your promise to participate in our group... I like the Scavenger Hunt you have used, and the follow up activity to integrate it to class work. Using the computer as a tool to enhance our f2f classes should be a must in all schools, but we still need to show many teachers how to, interchanging ideas, suggesting procedures and sites and different programs to exploit and adopt. There's so much to choose from! This is, in fact, our purpose this week, focused mainly on those tools which add voice and image to plain text, and which certainly make communication richer, more vivid and humane. Has anybody else used www.ispq.com? Any experiences to share? I also like Paltalk myself for its audio quality, but find iVisit difficult to move around, which would make it difficult to use with students as well. Any other suggestions for their use in the classroom? My best welcome to all contributions, Rita
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Hi
all, I just lost sight of Jason in Yahoo Messenger, after we tried in vain to find each other in iVisit. Instead, Jason, read here and learn why. I hope we can meet soon and continue the good work. As you know, I was asked to update the iVisit software and could not find information about how to reconfigure my connection for iVisit after the reinstallation. As you, Jason is also a Mac user, I was eager to explore iVisit with you , but did not manage to get there this time. Instead I decided to share our little chat with the list as an example on how the instant chat can be used for peer tutoring - Jason needed a hand to find his way to the Photos folder in our yahoo homepage, and I managed to guide him. This is how we often use the chat - as a parallel assistant troubleshooting extra helpdesk area :-) Sus
Read Susanne and Jason's log on chat
and peer tutoring
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| 6Feb03 | ||
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While working on
a paper for Reading Online, I was struck by the similarity of chat to Father Curran's "counseling-learning" method, going back to the 1960s: Curran, C.A. (1960; rpt. 1982). Community language learning. Reprinted in R.W. Blair, (Ed)., Innovative approaches to language teaching. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. To expand on this some, in CLL, a group of people desiring to learn a language come together in a circle. Facilitators surround them and "translate" for group members, finding out what is intended to be said, and whispering the words they need in their ear as the group carries on a conversation. So the audible conversation is in the target language, and it is tape-recorded. After class, the tape is transcribed as a script in the target language that group members then read at the beginning of the next group meeting. The transcript thus becomes a point of departure for new questions, conversations, grammatical explanations, et al. So learning of the language proceeds first of all by the desires of the group members to say things of importance to them, and then by the work of the facilitators to help them express their ideas and understand how that expression works in the target language. According to the research, several languages (up to 6?) have been learned and practiced simultaneously in group sessions, depending on what the group wanted to learn. I participated in a group like this--a dinner party with French, English, and Flemish as the languages which flowed around the table. (Unfortunately, no one made a transcript--the wine was flowing too freely.) Chat seems very similar to me, because it depends on what the chatters select as their topic(s), several threads of conversation go on at the same time, and there is a transcript to refer to later. It happens that WIA is teaching itself about technology in language learning, but chat obviously is also used for language learning itself. Interesting that there is a respectable whole theory of learning to back up chat, eh? --Elizabeth
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. . . weblog from susnyrop's Site (http://www.xanga.com/susnyrop): In the Los Angeles Times weekly UpdaTE newsletter , LATT (cool acronym), I harvested a link to this interesting article about what our bodies tell in the silent mode. Very relevant to understand - also when it comes to the lack of non verbal communication in chat and other online contexts - and how to interpretate our recent and ongoing experiments with cheap webcams and freeware tools like Yahoo messenger and iVisit for our meetings. Body language and job interview (http://www.latimes.com/classified/jobs/la-la_cbtms_20030202-1827329938feb02,0,5656512.story) Sus
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Hello everyone:
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Hi, Scott, . . . You cannot imagine how much I sympathize with you when you wonder, How does a teacher bring about the transformation from f2f > to online teaching? What are some of the obstacles and issues that > have been encountered in the process? What have been the high lights > as well as the "low lights" for you as you've made the move? Living in Argentina, a country where technology is still frowned upon by many educators, I often feel like giving up in my quest for changes. The concept of autonomous learning still being a laborious issue, there are proportionally very few teachers willing to plunge into new approaches entailing new attitudes in their realationship with students, who, in turn, should also be trained to understand the new concept, another strenuous barrier to surmount. What do I do? I try to show something of what can be done, explaining, stressing advantages and benefits, selecting software that might look enticing and at the same time attainable and fruitful, from classical gap-filling, multiple choice activities embedded in Hot Lists and Scavenger Hunts, to more complex tasks aiming at the practice of the five skills --thinking included!, such as Webquests. This does not mean teachers take to the new methodology at once, the process takes time and patience, and effort, as well. I have already upoaded an outline of the agenda I am preparing for this school year to our Yahoo cyberspace so that you --and anybody interested-- have an idea of the scaffolding I follow, maybe it is of some help (feedback is very welcome!!). How do I do this? I prepare Powerpoint presentations, conduct a Computer SIG (Special Interest Group) in my place, and now I will try to deliver a course for teachers...., though not very certain about the response I may have...., as people are also struggling to manage moneywise, another BIG factor which deters many from familiarizing themselves with the machine (the economic situation in this country is a crucial factor at the moment) And this is just the start. From this, to online teaching, I will still need to prepare myself ;-) ....but the present conditions will surely allow me the time to go on striving, to attain more knowledge and experience on a commitment I feel I share now with so many great Webheads pushing each other ahead for a common cause. Welcome again, Scott, to our Webhead World. My best Rita
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| 7Feb03 | ||
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At 04:36 PM
6/02/2003 +0000, Scott wrote: >Hello everyone: ><cut> > >What would be helpful for a newbie like me, if any of the regulars >have the time or inclination, is some sort of "getting started" >testimonial document. I'm sure what I have in mind has already been >done and I've just not looked hard enough on the various webpages that >have been referred to recently. But the sort of questions I have in >mind are: How does a teacher bring about the transformation from f2f >to online teaching? Scott, For what it's with my progression into this field went something like this: 1) first of all I started taking materials from the Net into the classroom 2) next step was to actually take students into a computer room to do web based activities 3) next step was to get students to build webpages with their own images and writing (slow and painstaking but worth it in the end) 4) next, get all your students an email account and hook them up with other students via sites like Dave's ESL Cafe (there are many others these days 6) eventually I started emailing students the day's lesson plan which they would open and do in self-paced mode 7) around this time I started volunteer online teaching with EFI (www.study.com) where Vance and Maggi also taught. Even with the skills I had picked up via integrating the Web into my classroom teaching the true fully online teaching experience was like jumping in the deep end! So I guess the way I got started was spending about a year gradually incorporating the technology into my normal classroom practice. As my skills and confidence grew, so it did with my students and it became more and more satisfying. Wherever I am today is the result of many small steps, and A LOT of assistance from dedicated online colleagues (professional listservs were invaluable) like Vance, Maggi, and other Webheads. I asked hundreds of questions for a couple of years and am eternally grateful for the endless patience of others. I discovered this amazing spirirt of sharing knowledge on the Internet, which is exemplified by this current WIA group. - Michael C.
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Combining 2
threads before going to bed ... . . . I would suggest to Scott and others that this is a "way in" to using technology in the classroom. The first question you need to ask is WHY? If you're only using the computers because they're there (the old "why climb Mt Everest" theory), then you might want to take a step back and think whether you are significantly enhancing your students' language learning. The Gonzalez article shows how you can use a computer-based task in a traditional classroom - but it's time consuming. I have a task I today on a similar (but simpler) line, but I can't lay my hands on the links so I'll have to get back to you. It involves the Guardian from England, VIVA from France and students from China, Turkey and Japan. In Philadelphia. Now that's what the internet is good at - chomping up distance at the click of a mouse. More anon. Nigel
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Dear Webheads: . . . Concerning the topics for this first half of the week, I think that most of us have a pretty good idea of the role that synch and asynch tools can play in language learning. I feel that the major role is making possible authentic practice of the target language whether with native or non-native speakers. Stepping out of the classroom, so to say, and having the world at our fingertips is a major step forward for a language student, or for any student! Whether these tools are a part of the curriculum or just an add-on depends on different factors such as availability of time and equipment, how confident the teacher feels with the tools, etc. I remember I did my first email exchange as an extracurricular activity with 7 students. I needed to start small and if things went well, I would have wings to fly! And I did. As to practical uses, I think that many of the things done with email can be done with chat and maybe with greater motivation and enthusiasm, because they are interacting in real time: one-on-one or group interactions, interviews, surveys, collaborative projects and simulations in which different students assume different roles from real life. During the rest of the week we would like you to share your ideas on: -- how to organize online sessions with students (Daf and Aiden, you could give us great ideas!); -- how newbie students can/should be introduced to these tools; -- pros and cons of using chat, email and any other online tools in language learning. Hope to hear some interesting experiences and advice! Teresa, Sus and Rita
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| 9Feb03 | ||
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Scott wrote: >How does a teacher bring about the transformation from f2f to online >teaching? What are some of the obstacles and issues that have been >encountered in the process? What have been the high lights as well as the >"low lights" for you as you've made the move? Hi all, Others have already posted on this topic raised by Scott. The following may be interesting too. I happened to see this information forwarded in an OU alumni community conference: ***** Please find information about a free course below. For further information contact Shirley Bennett - S.Bennett@hull.ac.uk The Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Hull is running a short course intended for practising teachers and trainers of adults and focussing on "Course Design for eLearning / Online Learning". The course will run in May / June 2003. It will be an online course, accessible over the internet from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day or night and is open to any teachers or trainers with an interest in Course Design and/or eLearning. The course is being run as part of a European Leonardo project (European eTutor) and there will be NO COURSE FEES. For further information contact Shirley Bennett (Course Leader) on s.bennett@hull.ac.uk. Andrew G. Holmes academic co-ordinator lifelong (vocational and work-based) learning, Tel 01482 465429 ***** This free(!) course might be a relevant follow-up on the programme in WIA week 5 (see Dafne's post "reflections"). I am currently involved myself in another similar international online course from the University of London (Institute of Education), acting as the regional tutor for a group of Dutch colleagues. But that one (which is not free) will only be delivered again next January (2004). Arnold P.S. My own experiences, Scott, stretch out over a period of some five to six years and they have involved subtopics of your main question such as online course design, student support, quality assurance, assessment. The approach described by some of the colleagues in their postings seem to favour a carefully and gradually built-up online presence - taking small steps and bringing things online 'organically' as it were. Very sound advice.
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| 9Feb03 | ||
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Arnold, Thank you for your latest feedback on the Course Design for eLearning / Online Learning at the University of Hull and on the Dutch Web site I referred. Fromwhat I gather from your great overview, there weren't many effective 'good practices', hopefully, more in terms of good lessons learned. I agree with your final comment in [] (including your appreciation for their work). After all, much of what goes into teaching is/should be common sense and feeling! Teresa
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| 7Feb03 | ||
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Continued from my
last post ... Here's the computer lab activity I tried yesterday in my intermediate/advanced vocab class: At this web site http://www.onestopenglish.com/news/Magazine/News/news.htm (suggested to me by a Webhead ... Tere, perhaps?) you'll find some recent articles from the Guardian Weekly, the international edition of a British newspaper. The articles are accompanied by worksheets with vocab in context questions and - get this - there are 3 levels for each article (elementary, intermediate, advanced). Having never found that computers actually reduce the amount of paper I use, I printed out the article for the students (mixed ability class, so 2 of them had the intermediate level, 2 had advanced) and had them work through the exercises. Then, I asked them to post their response to the discussion question on Phil Benz's Viva international message board: http://www.ardecol.ac-grenoble.fr/viva/index2.htm You can read their responses in Viva's "Science Lab" (scroll down until you see my prompt called "Boycotts"). Some thoughts about the limitations of chat and CMC in general follow in a separate message. We've had 5 inches of snow overnight and school is closed (yeah!) so I have rather more time than usual ... Cheers, Nigel
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Nigel, It wasn't me who suggested the Web site (credit where it's due!), but I've already bookmarked it! Glad you're sharing with us your most recent computer activities: the first part was done offline (right?) and the second - posting of comment - online. I read them and I especially liked the one on 'food poisoning'. Yes, it is great to have three different levels, isn't it? And it makes so much easier and saves so much precious time when we find these ready-made exercises on topics of interest to our students. I like the Viva home page: maybe a bit too full, but very lively and colorful! Nigel, I agree that computers have not reduced the amount of paperwork (and I've that confirmed somewhere). This year I tried to do all my Computer and Internet Club activities strictly online both to save on paper (tighter budgets at school) and to get the students used to the Net environment a.s.a.p. I had to give up, because most of the times there were connection problems! :-( Keep sharing your ideas, Nigel! Teresa
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Updated on 9Feb03
Created 3Feb2003
Teresa Almeida d'Eça
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Week 3 threads |
