There is a Second Life-like site that I recently came across. It looks more like a wholesome version of the Sims, with buggy or jet ski races, fashion shows, scavenger hunts and other such activities and events. It might be a good alternative to Second Life, especially for younger learners. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like it could work well. Sign up is free for now.
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.
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.
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.
That animated version of myself in the right sidebar was made at Voki. It is really too young for me and makes me look like my cousin Ronnie 25 years ago, but I shouldn’t complain about something this free (you can compare my Voki with me by scrolling down the page to my photograph where my real age is betrayed nicely). Making my Voki involved a quick trip to the website and then a few minutes to select and color and tweek until I felt I got as close to myself as possible. There are limitations on the choices (Wii’s Mii avatar maker gives you a lot more control by comparison), but the ability to put in a background picture should allow users to get satisfactory results if they are trying to make avatar art imitate what they see in the mirror, which is probably not everyone’s intent. The best part is you can make it speak, though mine seems to require way too much time to load my insubstantial message. Voki’s website says, “Create a character, make it talk, take it anywhere.” I think my students will like this a lot. It adds a new layer of personalization to blogs and websites.
I’ve been reading Acting withTechnology (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006), a book about Activity Theory and how it relates (particularly) to interface design. One of the many interesting ideas that come up in the book is the notion of curation. When I first heard it, I thought of curator, as in museum curator, and the idea of what goes on in a museum: identifying, organizing, verifying, and documenting. In Activity Theory, however, the term has a very particular meaning. According to Kaptelinin and Nardi, curation “is a deeply social process through which materials are strategically revealed to others, or hidden from them” (pg 159).
Though the situation the authors talk about is the interaction of research scientists at a company looking to develop drugs by analyzing genes, this got me thinking about language learning. There has been considerable research into the area of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in recent years. Curation seems to me like a goal-driven social form of WTC. Curation seems to focus perhaps too exclusively on the individual’s attempts to achieve objectives in the social situation, assuming that other factors are constant (attitudes to the company, personality, etc.). This cannot be said of students in a class. There are usually too few characteristics that are constant across learners. WTC is probably the better theory for describing the motivations and behaviors of students in a language classroom, but curation gives a nice way of talking about the ongoing process of what learners will share or not in communication with other students (and instructors). Language students have two things affecting their curation: one is the choice of what to share (often culturally determined) and the other is proficiency (what they are able to and not able to communicate).
It’s funny how you can go so long without hearing some things. In my case, one of these things was Activity Theory. For the last few years, I have been reading and hearing things that are related to it without ever hearing the name itself or having the theory spelled out for me. I was familiar, for example with Vygotsky, the mentor of Leontiev (the developer of the theory) and the originator of some of the ideas that are part of Activity Theory. His name and theory of zone of proximal development are often mentioned in TESOL literature, though rarely really focused on. I had read some of Wenger’s work, so often used to justify the Web 2.0 approach to (language) learning and teaching, and I was aware of the burgeoning interest in the social model of language learning. But somehow, I just didn’t hear about Activity Theory, until it was mentioned in a discussion. The name sounded interesting and so I made a quick trip to Wikipedia and found a short but enticing entry. This lead me eventually to a book by Kaptelinin and Nardi called Acting withTechnology which does a really great job of introducing and explaining the theory, including its historical development and recent applications. Though the main focus of the book is on computer interface design, there are sections looking specifically at Activity Theory in education. And the more I read, the more interesting the theory became and the more I began to see it as perhaps a theory that could bring the cognitive model of language learning and the social model of language learning together into a larger, more complete model. Shortly after, I came across a book that looks at Activity Theory in language teaching, called Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development, which I have taken delivery of but not yet read. It has some chapters on Activity Theory in language education.
So what is Activity Theory? It is a theory that aims to understand “…individuals and the social entities they compose in their natural everyday life circumstances through an analysis of the genesis, structure, and processes of their activities” (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006, pg. 31). This is done though an examination of activities, the purposeful interaction of subjects with the world (objects), including the social contexts. Analysis of activities is the only way to understand both the subject and the object, and the changes that occur in both through activities. This sounds a little overly general at first, but as we look at the basic principles of the theory, we begin to see how it starts to make sense and how it gives an interesting perspective on the phenomena we are examining.
I am still trying to get a good grasp of the theory and its application to education but it is starting to make a lot of sense to me and it is definitely calling out the limitations of cognitive approaches to language learning. In interface design, this theory has helped designers notice that there are higher and lower level actions (tasks) and place more attention to offering support for the the higher level ones. Higher level actions are meaningful tasks that do not change regardless of the specific technology or strategy used (for example, submitting a paper). Lower level actions are tasks that usually involve an application’s functionality (for example, attaching a Word document to an e-mail message). Activity Theory seems to be able to provide a context for the bigger picture. This is potentially very appealing, but for the time being it is certainly very interesting.