Mozuku

When I first came to Japan years ago I was impressed by the widespread use of maps. People drew maps for each other when giving directions, for example, and almost every advertisement seemed to feature a map of some sort. Times have changed, everyone has a cell phone and businesses now all have websites, but the use of maps has not. There still seems to be one on every site these days—only now it is usually an embedded interactive Google map.

Google Maps uses JavaScript and XML, or KML (Keyhole Markup Language), an XML-based language. Using this code, some web tools have appeared that allow users to add additional information onto embedded maps, things like pins for locations, extra information or images, and more. For English learners, these tools can allow them to easily produce and share authentic and meaningful geographical presentations. Instead of just writing about their hometowns, for example, learners can identify interesting and historical places and introduce them on a map. Pictures and links to websites can also be added. Any assignment with a geographical or historical theme can make use of these tools, I think. The final products can be viewed at the tool site or embedded into a blog or CMS. Some sites don’t require registration either.

At Click 2 Map (registration required), you can create a map and add a marker at each desired location. Each marker can contain text, photos, videos or any other HTML content.

Quikmaps (registration not required for some functions) allows you to do much the same but you can also doodle on your map with a marker pen function. I find this allows the maps to look more personalized.

UMapper (registration not required for basic service) has similar functions to the other two sites. You can also create or try taking geographical quizzes for fun.

Many years ago I paid about $20 for a nice little software program called SnagIt by a small company called Techsmith. It did only one thing but it did it very well—it allowed me to take pictures of part or all of my computer screen and save them as files. Over the years, I have used that program countless times, especially when making instruction sheets for my learners. A year and a half ago I got reacquainted with (a now much bigger) Techsmith when I saw another one of their products, Camtasia, being used in a demonstration. Russell Stannard was using Camtasia to capture videos of himself correcting students’ writing on his computer screen that he would then send to the learners. It was a brilliant idea for feedback, but it took time, the file sizes were rather large, and the software was costly.

Recently, there are several screen capture solutions for still images, video, and audio available on the web and this month I’d like to introduce some of them. First is CamStudio (downloading needed). CamStudio allows you to record all screen and audio activity on your computer. You create AVI files which you then convert to SWF (Flash video) files and place them where you want, on your school server, for example. The most obvious use of this is for “How-to” videos for your learners. Instead of the old printed sheets with dark and almost unintelligible images taken from your screen, you create a short video introducing how to do something your learners need to do with the computer. You can have the video of you doing it and you can add an audio explanation too.

Next is Jing, a new addition to the TechSmith family of products. It also needs to be downloaded and does much the same thing as CamStudio, but it saves your video on a remote server (like YouTube) and sends you the link for embedding into your blog or website. This is a very user-friendly tool indeed. Here is a video demonstrating how to use it. The video was made with Jing.

Keeping track of your training videos can be a little difficult if you have them embeded here and there in different blogs and websites. But the web can help with that, too. Veewow is a site that allows you to create playlists for embeddable videos. You can keep all your training videos in one list and other videos you use with groups of learners in other playlists. With some institutions recently blocking YouTube, Veewow can be an accessible alternative.

In an introductory writing course I teach, the textbook asks students to make a scrapbook to introduce themselves. There is even space provided–in the form of topic titles and empty square boxes to write in located in the last few pages of the textbook. There are  interesting and exciting topics such as “My Favorite Holiday” and “What I Do to Stay Healthy” and “My Daily Activities.”  But the best part is the big blank title page, a full-sized blank page with nothing on it but the words, “My Autobiography, by ______________.” Students simply add their names and then apply their creative energy to filling up all that blankness by drawing pictures or pasting in pictures to illustrate their activites, health tips and favorite holidays, etc. The lockstep nature of the whole thing is distasteful. It squelches creativity. And while I do sometimes ask learners to write on some of the topics fixed for them in the autobiography, I have never asked them to do the whole thing the way the writers of the book suggest. I find the whole thing really uninteresting, from any perspective I try on it (with the possible exception of the publisher who is getting paid for mostly blank pages). Instead I get learners to write in their journals and I give them different topics or similar topics with a different focus we all agree are more interesting. But it is still text.

Blogs can be a better alternative, if you intend to make a lot of use of them in a course. But for lower level learners and learners who don’t have the computer literacy, or when we just want to allow for a little more creativity in a face to face classroom-based situation, there is a flexible tool available. It is called Glogster and allows you to make a digtal multimedia “poster.” Like the autobiograhy title page in the writing textbook, it is a single blank page. But unlike that page, it screams out to be filled up with images, video, info or poetry.  As a platform it forces the learners to think about design and content. And the results are engaging. The posters on display at the site are now organized by categories (rather loosely, however), and you can take a look at some of the ways others have expressed themselves: travelogues, interactive calendars, cartoons, movie intros (with the preview, critics’ opinions, etc.). A great resource, no registration and no downloading required.

“Punk’s not dead.” I remember the time well, it was several years after punk either absconded or was hijacked by fashionatics and became an embarrassment trying as much to celebrate the fact that it ever existed as hopelessly deny the fact that it didn’t anymore. You see, punk had come and mostly gone by the time most people became aware of what it meant. The early years of heady rebellion were followed quickly by the revenge of the empire. For that reason–whatever that reason is exactly–I am still a little wary of the label punk being used, even though at the same time I have definite sympathies with the spirit. I am writing this because I have recently heard the name Edupunks a few times and came across a home base of sorts. It’s located here. There are some good videos, thought-provoking stuff you might want to hear. Well worth a coffee break. Is it punk? It certainly smells like some kind of spirit. Hurry and check it out before the label sticks and the whole movement begins to lose relevance; or certainly before someone starts making “Edupunk’s not dead” T-shirts.

Chatroll is a chat-discussion tool that recently opened. Learners can join or start discussions on any topic.

As I mentioned in my last post, increasing the amount of time learners engage in English is essential for success. Of equal, or I should say related importance, is the need to provide activities where learners can participate in communities of use–places where they can construct identities of themselves as English users. Hanna & de Nooy (2003) asked students learning French to participate in online debate forums at the Le Monde newspaper website. Their students met with mixed success. The ones who wrote simplistic messages asking for help learning French were ignored or met with sarcastic comments. Others who tried hard to actively participate and express their ideas, met with better success. The focus for everyone–the native French users in the forum and the learners–had to remain on the content of the discussion. Hanna and de Nooy say “…the critically important message for this study, framed in the vernacular, is that if you want to communicate with real people, you need to self-present as a real person yourself. From an instructional perspective, encouraging (or requiring) students to participate in noneducationally oriented online communities would involve teaching students how to recognize genres, and subsequently, how to engage in discussion that does not ultimately revolve around the self…as the exotic little foreigner/the other” (pg. 73). That means that using the language and participating as an individual is essential to identity formation and language development.

Which brings us to the big problem of where. Forums for language learners are often too simplistic (”Hi, my name is Hanako and I like music. Do you like music?”) or learners may have been forced to participate and are not likely to participate further (”I’m Ali. I lke pretty girl….aaaaammmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!”). Large forums for native speakers (or near-natives) may be out of reach for many or most of our learners, as the Le Monde exercise showed. The answer might be smaller forums on much more specific topics that learners already have expertise in. Lam (2000, 2004) followed the development of a learner who found his voice and his entrance-way into linguistic competence (of a sort, anyway) by participation in blogs related to a Japanese pop singer. On the negative side, the dangers of this type of learning don’t go away so easily. These sites can also just as easily host predators as active learners. Students need a little heads-up training in online community self defense.

A new site and promising site for this kind of participation is Chatroll, where people find chat partners by topic. The name is made from combining chat with blogroll. There are already lots of topics here, but users are free to create their own topics. This latter function is what makes the site really useful, I believe. Learners can more easily get to linguistic competence and an identity as an English user if it develops through their topic identity. But they need to be able to find or create a group that specifically matches that topic. By being part of a group of similarly-interested individuals, the chances of meaningful interaction are greatly increased. The only problem at this point is that there aren’t that many people in the Chatroll system yet. Hopefully that will change. There may be some topics here that instructors are uncomfortable with ( the flirting group comes to mind immediately, and there is probably some more dicey or racy content). I plan to get my students to report on what they do in their blogs so I can monitor as best I can how they participate.

It seems that there are almost too many tools available these days to allow students to interact with course material and with each other. In a Treasure Hunt column many months ago I introduced Splashcast and how it can be used in Moodle to deliver student-produced content into a course. What I did at the time was to record students as they spoke in class in a Speech and Debate class and then feed the recordings into a Moodle page with a Splashcast player. This allowed all students the chance to hear (and compare) the voices of all students from one page. It was fun, it worked well and the interface was easy to use. The downside (or the upside, depending on your point of view I guess) was that the entire exercise had to be controlled by the instructor. It didn’t take all that much time–the students simply took turns doing their short speeches into my laptop along with their turns speaking for different partners in class. But it did provide a few logistical challenges, and if you have more than 10 or 12 students, the exercise will probably be unmanageable to do in class, and that means more scheduling challenges. A better way might be to use VoiceThread. Here, students can post sample speeches, and post comments on any image or media you load onto the page. They have the choice of voice comments or text (for those students who don’t have a microphone) and the interface is very clean and very intuitive. Though the VoiceThread people have created a safe space for K-12 learners and educators, EFL students are left to their own in the regular part of the service. That said, I searched around and didn’t find any content anyone in my classes might need to warned about. I love the way student comments are arranged around the media: this can make the experience more classroom-like (by which I mean familiar, in a good way). Registration needs an e-mail address and a password, as well as a name.

Update: There is a good tutorial available for VoiceThread here. The authors are especially interested in using this tool for digital storytelling.

As I wrote in my posting about the Wireless Ready conference, one of the most depressing aspects about the Web 2.0 movement in language education in Japan is the rather dismal record educators have with getting students to use the tools associated with this movement. Regularly, for learning.

Certainly there’s a passion gap. Teachers are finding themselves suddenly surrounded by students and schools that have tools that allow them to do things that the pedagogy has been pointing to for years. Back in 1996 already, Paul Nation wrote, after a comprehensive literature review, that language learners/facilitators should be doing the following with roughly the following amount of time dedicated to each: meaning-focused input (25%), meaning focused-output (25%), form-focused input (25%), fluency practice (25%). At that time, it was nothing more than a dream that we could get our students doing meaning-focused output in an EFL setting for a quarter of their learning time. And meaning-focused input consisted of classroom language and teacher talk, tapes and videos used in class, and tapes made by teachers for students. But now it is possible to do it, with authentic and meaningful language exposure and use. It’s no wonder that teachers are excited, and then a little frustrated and disappointed when students don’t show the interest they should.

I think, though, that there are many reasons for the lack of student use–some timeless ones like laziness and different priorities–and some others that Activity Theory can help us to put in perspective. In Acting withTechnology, Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) explain how tools are culturally loaded mediators that color the way people act. That sounds intuitive immediately, but when we think on it a little, the implications become more significant. The example the authors give is the ax. Once early humans got the ax, the things around them could be seen in light of how easy or difficult they were to chop up. That is, tools are one of the ways we experience the world and they help to define the norms of our culture. And that really is the key word: culture. We know what an ax is and what it can do, or at least we think we do, and it is our understanding of what it is and how we use it that is a part of the culture of the group we belong to. But even for as simple an instrument as an ax, different people around the world have different notions of what it is and what it does. For example, is it used for recreation or work; is it used by men, or women, or children, or anyone; is it important to learn to use it well, etc.? Now, when we consider our new learning tools, we have to understand that teachers and learners may be firmly lodged in different cultures and every person brings to a course his or her cultural understanding of the tools the instructor wants to use.

The ways the teachers see the tools–their possibilities and applications–are not usually the ways learners normally see them. The teacher will look at an iPod and think it is a wonderful device for delivering listening content and participating in authentic communities of use. The learner will likely see a music player, at least at first.

And like cultures that mix anywhere, there are overlaps and there are gaps and the first step to identifying these is to take some serious steps into the other culture. Nobody learns very much about a culture by visiting a restaurant once, and not many people learn much of a country’s language by making a short vacation there. Willingness to try, willingness to immerse, sustained use (required and supported!), and a good amount of time and reflection bring results. We know this about culture and language; it is true also for tools. So with the use of new tools, or old tools for different uses, it is important to ask ourselves some questions: What is the learner’s culture regarding this tool? Am I asking the learner to do something beyond that? How can I gain the student’s understanding and support (enforce, if necessary) their use of the tool? When we think about the culture of tools, the answers to most of these questions come easily. In light of the lack of administrative support for most of these tools, teachers can start building bridges between courses, so the tools are used in multiple courses with different instructors. That will help to create the immersion needed for success. That’s my plan for the upcoming year, and I’ll let you know how I do. Specifically, I plan to use blogs and several online applications for vocabulary training and writing practice.

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.