June 17th, 2009
“…this is it. The big one.”
NYU Professor Clay Shirky (via email from Diane Tucker):
“I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching.’ Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.
Traditional media operates as source of information not as a means of coordination. It can’t do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention.
From Nico Pitney in The Huffington Post.
May 20th, 2009
Collaboration and 360° content creation.
The traditional publisher model of expert authored, professionally edited language teaching course books is often necessary, but seldom sufficient for optimal learning.
Although they are a wonder of high quality teaching content, scope and sequence, and production values, course books have their issues. They may take 3-5 years from conception to classroom, and are usually designed for general appeal to a passive mass audience. They are expensive to produce. Authors are far from the needs of different cultures, different students, and different teachers. Contentious topics are avoided.
Thus, the problem is keeping content relevant, current and personalized. Today, slang, technology, and cultural references evolve more quickly now than before. Content and references have lost validity when they are 5 years old (and often when they are 5 months old). And they may have not been personally relevant to the student anyway, since a “common denominator” approach invariably leaves many students yawning.
So what’s a teacher to do? Well, most teachers have the solution: they supplement the core course book to one degree or another. They supplement with web resources, authentic material, teacher- and school-developed content, content from other course books and resources, and activities and projects that teachers come up with on the fly.
And, critically, they supplement (or, for the Dogme folk, replace) with content brought to the learning process by the students themselves.
If a teacher has the skills, resources, and experience, the result can be an optimal mix of pre-defined language content, and personally, culturally, and professionally relevant and engaging content.
But, it’s not easy. For most teachers, we’re talking analog: photocopiers, tape, manila envelopes and file cabinets. For other teachers it’s a mind-boggling succession of web 2.0 apps, user names, and passwords…each one cool and useful but scattered around in info silos throughout the net. What each approach has in common is a lack of time to implement it.
Today’s digital technologies will soon open up possibilities for meeting these challenges. Group authoring platforms and collaboration tools will allow groups of teachers (and students) to work together, pool their energy, and create materials and lesson plans that in terms of both quantity (definitely) and quality (optimally) were formerly only possible from publishers. Print-on-demand, e-learning, and PDFs provide a delivery mechanism that again was previously only available to large publishers.
Large-scale collaboration will lead to the same result in language learning material that Wikipedia brought to encyclopedias: a dramatically wider range of topics (Wikipedia has 10 times the articles of a traditional encyclopedia). This long tail of content will provide the custom course work that will result in radically personalized learning – we’ll have as many courses as we have students. And as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, it’ll be fast and it’ll be cheap. And most importantly, what it will be is open.
So, the coming collaborative content has many advantages: speed, relevance, flexibility, personalization, the capacity to mix authored, student-generated, authentic and web content into a more rounded approach. Through collaboration, this “360° content creation” adopts and adapts content from a wide range of sources, leading to learner-centered content that transforms passive learners into active, and a mass audience into personalization.
April 22nd, 2009
Excellent perspective on the future of “books”
This made me think about the “Future of Coursebooks” thread on the IATEFL Cardiff forums. Steven Johnson outlines where he sees e-book technology taking us, and how it will change some of our most basic ideas about reading and reading behaviors. I think his analysis shows clearly the limits of the “one content - many media” re-purposing, where an ELT publisher takes print content, or CD-ROM content, and puts it on the web: while it’s often OK, the content wasn’t developed to take advantage of the social and collaborative nature of the web. Thus, opportunity lost; it’s like turning off the picture on the TV and using it as a radio.
Anyway, Johnson outlines where ebook technology will take us. In bullets:
1) Reading will change from solitary to social:
As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
2) Book-length content will become granular:
Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. This fragmentation sounds unnerving — yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition.
3) Google PageRank will fuel sales:
Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.
Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.
Fascinating stuff. The “social” and “granular” themes are what English360 is all about, and I think that this will bring us a step closer to the goal of radically personalized learning learning content.
April 14th, 2009
Community as curriculum: the “rhizomatic model” of learning
“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.”
April 14th, 2009
New blog find
Peter Thwaites in Oman has some interesting conversation happening at his (new?) blog: A Look at Language Teaching.
April 9th, 2009
Capitalism 2.0
Interesting article by Nassim Taleb that would be great input for a class for financial English. And here’s a blog post discussing it.
Hat tip to Andrew. If you go to the Taleb article from his post you won’t need to register at the FT.
April 7th, 2009
Making coursebooks more relevant
Very useful post (as always) from Karenne Sylvester over at Kalinago English.
April 6th, 2009
Already told my wife this is what I want for Christmas
Simultaneously the coolest yet most horrifying thing I’ve seen lately.
April 5th, 2009
Interview with Martin Dougiamas, creator of Moodle
From The Island Weekly, Anne Hodgson’s blog. See her post for a link to the full interview audio.
I always try to explain the difference between Moodle and what we are doing with the open platform English360, but Dougiamos himself outlines it better than I can:
Moodle is really a system of control. The web 2.0 is very much about complete freedom and openness and lack of privacy. And Moodle is obviously oriented to what institutions care about, which is about walls and protected spaces, and this just allows you to bring content from the wider world into these potected spaces and do interesting things with them.”
It’s for people who like islands. It’s for those people who need that. And it’s definitely not the solution for everybody.
Our goal with English360 is to provide web 2.0 learning tools for those who don’t need the islands and don’t need a system of control.
This reminds me that I need to dig up and post on Dougiamas’ “5 laws of VLEs” - which are brilliant (although I’ll propose a 6th Law).
March 29th, 2009
Sunday reading
Best article yet on the financial crisis. The first three paragraphs sum things up nicely.
Mind is not brain. Kinda following a zen “the self is an illusion” direction.