Mozuku

Here is the interview I did with Vera Menezes, one of the keynote speakers at WorldCALL in Fukuoka this summer. She plans to talk about Chaos theory and CALL, and CALL in Brazil and South America and she gives a little background to those topics in the interview.

One of the keynote speakers at the Wireless Ready conference on March 29 was Russsel Stannard. With a background in EFL and a degree in multimedia, he has done something simple and garnered a lot of attention, including articles in the Guardian and Times as well as invitations to talk at conferences such as Wireless Ready. That simple thing is to adapt screen capture software for the use of providing feedback for students. In his case, he uses Camtesia by TechSmith. What he does is “video” himself correcting a student’s written assignment, recording himself highlighting sections of the text, drawing marks, and making audio comments. He then sends those videos to students in the form of Flash or Windows media files (or others) and students open them up, listen to the corrections and suggestions and then redo their written work and send it back. Technically simple and pedagogically powerful. And the students apparently love it. At his website, you can find out more information, see example videos, and even watch instructional videos that show you how to do it (as well as other things). This is something I am definitely going to try in the new school year (starting tomorrow!!).

Saturday, March 29th I made the trip to Nagoya for the 2nd Wireless Ready conference, brilliantly organized again by Michael Thomas. First, as I mentioned earlier in a post on Second Life and Moodle, the conference had both a live and a Second Life version running simultaneously again this year. Last year all of three people showed up in Second Life, but this year, there were fifty (live in Nagoya there were officially 75 people registered). I think that shows that this technology is advancing nicely.

At least in certain areas. You see, when I spoke to Steve McCarty, the presenter who introduced Second Life at last year’s conference, he said that he wasn’t able to use it with his students because the computers available on campus were not powerful enough. And that, it seems became a dominant undercurrent to this conference on Web 2.0 technologies: they are wonderful, but we’re having trouble getting students to use them. Witness:

Michael Coghlan in his inspiring presentation admitting that his success rate in using these technologies with his (teacher) learners is limited; and commenting how an Australian primary school teacher had his blog project shut down by the school board when (invited) outsiders posted comments on student blogs.

Thomas Robb, Judy Noguchi and Masako Terui reporting on a study where they offered students weekly vocabulary quizzes on Moodle via cell phone or PC. Students loved the idea of e-learning but didn’t really make use of it!

Patrick Foss an Kurtis McDonald reporting on a project they organized to see if students were ready to do international e-mail exchanges: they weren’t.

Again and again, the barriers of technology, the barriers of learning culture, and the seemingly universal lack of administrative support came up and made me think that I was in a building with a bunch of dedicated and well-intentioned educators who were on to something good–really good–but were having real difficulty doing anything about it. It was the same finding I found difficult to admit in my presentation last year at the same conference, where I reported on the lack of student downloads of our class podcasts, and it reminded me of when I was 19 and my friends and I had such a hard time convincing anyone (but particularly girlfriends) of the greatness that was Joy Division and Wire (You can still achieve enlightenment here or here). Anyway, what I am trying to say is that it’s still going to take a lot of work to get students learning better with Web 2.0 tools and activities. There are still administrations to convince, fellow teachers to bring on board, learning styles and learning cultures to change, and examination washback effects to overcome. The future looks bright, but it isn’t here yet.

Here’s the “interview” I did with Dr. Trude Heift. She is a keynote speaker at WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka this summer and is planning to talk about feedback and ICALL. In the interview, she talks a little about feedback in general, feedback in CALL, and ICALL, or parser-based CALL. She recently published a book on the topic of intelligent feedback in CALL. You can find it at Amazon.

Two games to introduce here that are accessible to English learners in Japan. The first is Phantasy Quest. It is simple but engaging with limited vocabulary. You play a shipwrecked sailor trying to find his way around an unfamiliar island with suspicious inhabitants and find the woman who was on the ship with him before the shipwreck. The next is Job Pico, a challenging problem/mystery-solving puzzle in which you try to escape from a room. The situation is that it is a kind of job interview task that you need to perform to show that you have the smarts needed for the job. It’s a nice interface (playable in both Japanese or English for people who might get stuck and want to remove the language barrier for a while). The game has great 3-D walk-through graphics and could be used for some reading practice or, even better, for a type of do and report orally assignment.

Now that I got a new computer, one of the first things I intend to do is explore Second Life. I joined more than a year ago, but my 5-yr-old computer crashes within two or three minutes every single time. This has been frustrating because the possibilities with Second Life just keep getting better. Last year I attended a Wireless Ready conference in Nagoya which featured a Second Life demonstration and a virtual presentation. Those of us in Nagoya watched our beefcake virtual presenter and only three virtual participants jerk about, clap, fly,  and sort of interact in  a somewhat empty world. This year, the Wireless Ready conference will again feature a Second Life virtual conference (SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/52/49/21/) and I am very curious to compare it to last year. I think the changes will be astounding. A recent video on YouTube highlighted the educational possibilities of Second Life very well and showed how rich SL is becoming. One really interesting development mentioned in the video and also on the Language Lab Unleashed blog, is Sloodle, an open-source application that combines Second Life with Moodle. For those of us who are using Moodle for language teaching, this is mouthwatering stuff indeed.

Some of language learning requires rote memorization, and rote memorization can be facilitated by technology, which can help in the organizing and delivery of content. It can also play an important role in feedback. Of course, a learner with flashcards or a classroom activity can often accomplish this as well, but computers can do it all faster and more efficiently. These days, however,  it sometimes seems that it is not fashionable to talk about rote learning in EFL because of the bad name the audio lingual approach still has, and the educational technology field to still pretty busy exploring social technologies and trying to distance itself from the time when CD-ROM-based fashcards and multiple choice questions was what people meant when they talked about using computers for language learning. But while social learning is very important, some rote memorization can go a long way in improving proficiency, especially (but not only) for less-proficient learners. Learning vocabulary requires much more than just memorizing meanings, however. To “know” a word, learners must know the meaning, written form, spoken form, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, associations, and frequency of that word (Schmitt, 2000). Last week, I  found out about 2 recently developed vocabulary learning sites, Learnit Lists and Quizlet. Each site uses a different approach and focuses on different vocabulary.

Learnit Lists focuses on the 1000 most common words and aims to help you learn 10 words daily in your target language by serving you a new list every day. There are 15 language pairs available, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese & Czech (you choose which language you want to go to and which language you want to go from). More languages will be added they say. The lists are simple one-to-one translations of important words and thus are out of context. I also found many errors in the Japanese translations of English words (nouns for verbs, particles as verbs). But even meaning aside, the site cannot help you with the spoken form, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, or associations. It can only give you the written form of high frequency vocabulary words (and no phrases or fixed expressions as far as I can see). Also, there is little learner control of content. Possibly useful for entry level learners, when the developers get the translations cleaned up.

Quizlet attempts to marry the best of rote learning techniques with the power of social networking. It bills itself as the “end of flashcards” and provides a nice system of self training and testing that you plug your own content into. If learners can be educated a little about the nature of vocabulary, they can then use this tool to learn it more efficiently. They can also share lists with others, reducing the time needed to input the vocabulary (which while it will facilitate learning, may cause some learners to avoid using this tool).  Some very common content is already available (important SAT vocab, prefixes and suffixes, for example) and there are groups creating ESL vocabulary with pronunciation and other content as well. The author lists the features as follows: the system keeps track of your progress, facilitates sharing with e-mail notification when others contribute sets to your  lists and allows chat boxes so learners can talk to each other while learning. Also, any language can be input and accent buttons for non-English letters can be used. The learning system is also nicely designed. It  provides pages that allow learners to familiarize themselves with the vocabulary, a call and response learning function and a testing function. Combine this with easy input and editing and sharing and you have a very powerful tool. Highly recommended!

Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.