Here’s a cute online game that points to the empty sloganeering of corporate PR folk.

Might be a fun activity for some business English students. You could put them in groups and have each group discuss/decide on an answer, then compare/explain answers, then check actual answers. Then have them make on for their company or for their department or position. For fun they could do a ambiguous “sloganeering” style (like the examples) then maybe a direct and clear explanation.

You could contextualize it as a writing task to practice the “clear” and “concise” goals of biz writing/email writing.

Sadly, I got 7 of 8 correct.

Nice series in the New York Times Magazine yesterday on different perspectives on teaching today.  There’s a nicely-detailed article on a multi-cultural negotiations workshop, and another on lectures on YouTube.

There’s also an interesting William Safire article on changing trends of slang expressions on campus.  Evidently “hot” isn’t hot anymore, and “fierce” is.

Fast-changing slang usage made me wonder…do corpus researchers limit date ranges when doing statistical modeling of lexical frequency?  I ask because I’m (very) peripherally involved with a project re-purposing a “corpus-informed” coursebook for online delivery. The corpus influence on the coursebook series is actually very well done and useful, but I wondered about a section titled “Posting to a website”…do 22-year-olds post to a “website” (more importantly, do they say they do)? Or do they post to a MySpace “page”, or a “forum” or “thread”, or their Facebook “page”, or their “blog”?

I wonder about the relative frequency of these collocations, and how this frequency changes over time, and how the the corpora analyses are time-bound to follow fast-changing language about uses of technology and slang.

This morning’s blogroll had a lot of good stuff, but Will Richardson was the highlight for me.

Will’s frustrated with our profession. In addition to voicing the need for teachers to catch up with the rest of the world, he points out two issues that are obsessions with me: authenticity and teachers as learners.

On authentic learning:

That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences.

…”real work for real purposes and real audiences”   …hallelujah.

On teachers as learners:

For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

This is why we designed the English360 platform with a single interface (or view): students and teachers all see the same thing. We want to keep everyone on the same page, so we only have one page. Teachers have needs assessments as well and, like students, the teachers’ needs assessment sits front and center on their dashboard. The point is: we are all learners.

Regarding Richardson’s point about authenticity: with e360 we’re working hard to connect the students’ learning with actual, real life language performance. Since our students are adults learning English for professional and career purposes, these “performance events” are usually the normal on-the-job use of English: conference calls, training courses, negotiations etc. Nothing new here really.

But if we also have a strong commitment to “teachers as learners”, in a flattened (or at least dynamic) hierarchy, then what would our teachers’ “performance events” be?

It seems pretty clear that for a teacher, performances happens in the classroom, and that, for a teacher, a performance event is a class.  And for a community of teachers working on the e360 platform, collaborative, peer-based learning using performance events (classes) as input…what does this mean?

It means collaborative action research. So one way of looking at the e360 platform is as an action research community.

This is the logical overlap of Richardson’s emphasis on authenticity and teachers as learners.

There are many definitions including the O’Reilly one, and much debate on whether the phrase “web 2.0″ actually has meaning, or is nothing but useless hype.

But here’s the best definition I’ve seen in a while, from the brilliant Jessica Hagy:

The Ford Motor Company provided language instruction to immigrant workers 90+ years ago. A major  objective was worker safety at the factory…the same goal of a project I did for an energy company several years ago.  Evidently the teachers used a direct method similar to Berlitz.

From the .ppt A Brief History of EFL Instruction on the CAELA resource page (4th bullet down).

Hat tip to Larry Ferlazzo.

The New Yorker magazine is in the news this week because of its controversial cover.

But, there are two resources inside that are extremely interesting for language teachers.

The first is an article on the linguistic professor Dan Everett and his work with the Amazonian tribe the Paraha. Their language has a zen-like focus on the present, and…get this…no recursion. Since Chomskians hold that recursion is the essence of humans’ unique cognitive/linguistic capabilities, Everett’s claim is, as Stephen Pinker terms it, ““a bomb thrown into the party.” Fascinating article.

Second is a video of a presentation by Malcolm Gladwell that discusses teacher credentials and how they have zero correlation to teacher quality. It’s about 15 minutes and much of it involves discussion of US sports, but it’s all very much to the point and highly recommended.

Here’s a fascinating post about Chris Anderson’s much-discussed “End of Theory” article for Wired, with some interesting examples for the translation industry.

I just discovered Kevin Kelly’s site, and his Technium blog, which is actually a book in progress (perfect example of transparency and the web).

Kelly’s posts are like Paul Graham’s - every one a gem.

[Edit 6/30: an interesting rebuttal to Kelly’s post here.)

Joe McVeigh’s Intro to TESOL course put together a great slang dictionary last month. Slang is a bit like IT vocab - some of it gets obsolete quickly - so this is a nice example of what’s current in US universities. It also has audio examples. Follow the links off the post.

And in case you haven’t checked out Joe’s site, there are some great resources there - he’s the real deal - including some nice needs assessment stuff.

Fascinating article in the Telegraph about the work at Elizabeth Spelke’s “baby brain” research lab at Harvard, where they study infant cognition and learning:

More fascinating still is that Spelke’s lab has revealed a deep-seated prejudice, present in infants, that trumps racial bias: language. Dr Katherine Kinzler, though based in Harvard, spends much time running parallel studies in France. ‘Five-month-old babies will look longer at somebody who spoke to them in their language. Older infants want to accept a toy from someone who has spoken their language,’ Dr Kinzler says.

‘They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’

These findings make perfect sense according to two California-based pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. In the Stone Age, race was next to useless as an identifier, because most people would never have travelled far enough to see anyone of a different skin colour. Accent, vocabulary and dialect would have helped distinguish friendly tribes from foes. Tooby and Cosmides concluded that humans are born with a predisposition to divide the world along ethnic lines traced out by language and accent, more than racial lines.

Via Kottke.

Actually a transcript of a speech by Clay Shirky, this might be useful input for some students. The concept of cognitive surplus is fascinating. In this excerpt an interviewer was asking Shirky about Wikipedia and how users actually write the articles themselves:

I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I also highly recommend Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody.