TESOL Blogs from across the net

In his post Dogme and Identity, Luke Meddings, one of the writers of the co-authored Delta Development Blog, points to the present excess of standardized course materials, content and technology we are exposed to in ELT. The 2007 article The Autumn of the Multitaskers in the Atlantic, while not specifically dealing with English teaching, also illustrates well the cognitive overload and haste we have to deal with presently and warns us against their dumbing down effects.

In both situations there is little room for slow conversations and the emergent language which arises from the learners’ own interests and shapes their evolving identity in the foreign language.

At Dekita, we have brought up the need for peer-centered learning and questioned the forced standardized content from the strict curriculum and the cookie-cutter model of the standard pre-packaged coursebook topics.

How can we guide our students to acquire what they need so they can express their thoughts, share them with others, and negotiate meaning in self-directed ways? How do we move from dependence towards greater independence and inter-dependence? How do we adopt a more process-oriented approach and interact in a more open and decentralized fashion which allows for self-directed participation, informal communication, inter-cultural and inter-linguistic development?

Is it possible to make time within your class to slow the pace and allow for different meaningful processing experiences, during which understanding and language are negotiated and appropriated individually or are our courses becoming devoid of meaning and as as queer as a clockwork orange?

During the 2005 WiAOC conference, we introduced, explained the P2P concept and showed why / how it could be incorporated in language learning. We also set up the Dekita Exchange project for learners, which unfortunately came to a halt earlier this year for lack of interest and participation.

Today, I have just come across a series of other P2P presentations and initiatives. During the E-merge Conference in July 2008, Robin Good and Michael Bauwens discuss P2P Models in Education, demonstrate that P2P is far more than technology and file sharing and describe the collaborative social arrangements which are necessary for large scale voluntary projects such as writing and editing Wikipedia articles.

The P2P Virtual University is about to be launched in February 2009. Similarly to the EVO sessions, the P2PU courses will run for 6 weeks and be open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. Learning, however, will take place in small groups of 8-14 students and will require the payment of a small sign-up fee and an application as a way to ‘assure’ learner commitment and motivation.

As Alastair Creelman states in his post

The whole concept relies on committed tutors who use P2PU to enhance their academic reputation and the opportunity to work in communities they would not otherwise have access to. The role of the “sense makers” is more to provide academic depth to the courses and to liaise with the tutors. Whether these people will get some kind of financial reward for their contribution in the future depends on the success of the project.

While George Siemens questions the notion of “sense makers” (no one makes sense for us) and centralization, the Chronicle of Higher Education points to some of the obstacles to such project.

Although the initiative signals yet another movement towards openness, de-institutionalization and personalization, like Siemens, I still see it as linear, top-down and very teacher-centred. The content and design are laid down beforehand and precede the learner instead of respecting truly self-determined learning and reflection.

I wonder whether I will see the day when learners themselves discuss and write down their own curricula on a wiki according to their passion and needs, and then, interact in diverse communities to seek out experience, discuss and collaborate with feedback from tutors, experts and peers in order to make sense and achieve their goals. Their certificate, whether accredited by an institution or not, would then be their personal learning process and trajectory documented through their interactions and artifacts on the Web/f2f.

Have you ever seen 10,000 students learning English from one teacher – all at the same time? Have you ever met a detective whose mission impossible is to arrest bad grammar? Or encountered a 74 year-old retiree who thinks nothing of ambushing foreigners on the streets just so he can practice his English? Or heard a Chinese policeman speak English in a New York Bronx accent?

Mad About English, a film by Singaporean filmmaker Lian Pek, humorously documents China ‘s passionate love affair with the English language and their obsessive quest to learn it (some through very unorthodox methods).

This TechCrunch article shows another opportunity to_grow_ your_ career by pointing to a very grammatically (and politically) incorrect website, EngrishFunny, to which users send in photos of poorly translated or odd variations of written English in products, signs or instructions.

Deivis Pothin, a student of linguistics in London, shares his impressions and worries about the underlying message.

Hot off the press, Bill Fitzgerald’s (FunnyMonkey) Drupal in Education and e-Learning, a book designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. Bill explains in this podcast interview with Jeff Robbins (Lullabot) how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions.

Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim are using it with Youth Voices, a meeting place where students and their teachers share, distribute, and work in a variety of creative endeavors, from blogging to video production and discussions of video to digital photography. They were interested in embedding and sharing video on the the site so they put Bill in contact with the Voice Thread team. The result of this collaboration was an extension that can already be downloaded and will likely be bundled with the Embedded Media Field module.

At Dekita, we worked on Drupal from scratch as from August 2007 and prepared it to host the Social Media in ELT EVO 2008 collaborative session that ran from January 14th to February 24th, 2008. In spite of the team being a bit put off by the “hysterically hierarchical” wiki structure, thanks to our ghost in the machine’s help, design and expertise, we managed to navigate forward and experiment with the various basic modules offered.

Differently from Moodle, an LMS platform which tends to replicate the school classroom control mode with its hierarchical, calendar/teacher driven course management, Drupal allows for both teacher-directed and student-directed learning.

Drupal Ed (and other experiments like, for instance, the Social Media Classroom) may provide a compromise or a transition phase towards change between the traditional LMS systematization of education, with its requirements for structure, control, accountability and manageability and the PLE’s informal, individual and peer network agency model.

SUGGESTAN
1. geo. A little country where everyone is suggesting something.

From the same developer of Rare Words, Suggestan is another application which taps into crowdsourcing and a bit of semantics.

According to the author, it is “define a thing” project, where you can find or share knowledge about the subjects/hobbies/professions/ideas that you know in form of suggestive questions. It will also try to define some relations between these words, ideas and places.

You may consult a list of suggested random topics on the main page or create your own in the sidebar on the right by starting your sentence using “If you …”. eg. (if you) are dating online . The bold part is all you need to type to start a new topic. The second step is to click on the link created and add suggestions according to the prompts given.

Watching the World Cup recently has prompted me to ask: Why do the announcers refer to teams as if they are plural? For instance, “England are on the attack.” I think it should be “England is on the attack,” as we are referring to the English team which is a single unit and therefore singular?

Americans typically make fun of Canadians, claiming that “out and about” is pronounced as “oot and aboot” (personally I can’t hear it). So if that is the case, what do Americans hear when Canadians actually say “oot and aboot”? What does Canadian “boot” sound like to an American?

In English, there are comparisons and superlatives for some colours. Take for example: black, blacker, blackest; blue, bluer, bluest.

How about other colours like silver and gold/golden?

I think when used as an adverb or adjective, the word should be really, as in “She is really happy.” Real is equivalent to true, or genuine, or actual whereas really is equivalent to the word very.

Is it correct to use real as an adverb or adjective in this way?

I was talking with someone via Facebook. I thought she was wrong, and she wrote back to me: “No, Donna, it is you who are wrong”. Had she left out the word “who” then I believe “are” would be correct, but since she included the word “who” then it changes to singular “you” which would require the word “is”. I believe it shoud read “No, Donna, it is you who is wrong”. Please help me on this grammatical issue.