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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.

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October 20th, 2006

Great resource for BE speaking skills

Via Soulsoup, a super useful (and free) .pdf on “anecdote circles” by the Australian firm Anecdote. I’ve just skimmed it but it looks like a very nice business English resource for speaking skills tasks for groups. I’ll definitely try these protocols out over a couple of classes and see how the techniques can be tweaked for a language learning focus.

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April 28th, 2006

New-ish ESL blog

Just in case you haven’t subscribed yet, Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ is a great addition to any language teacher’s blogroll. What I really like is that he mostly posts lesson plans. If more of us did that it’d help keep the edutech blogosphere’s feet on the ground (and regarding technology intoxication, I’m as much a culprit as anyone). For the life of me I can’t remember who to credit for the original link - maybe EFL Geek.

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September 8th, 2005

Sex and language learning

There! Got your attention didn’t I? That’s because after millions of years of natural selection our brains are hardwired to react immediately to a chance to reproduce and pass on our DNA. Studies show that when thinking about sex our brains explode in a frenzy of neurotransmitters.

What does this have to do with language teaching? The always brilliant Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users explains in this post (her example is teaching IT systems):

So instead of, “… then the enterprise component will stay synchronized with the underlying persistent store…” I might say, “if you don’t do it this way, you could be a victim of the dreaded Lost Update problem and… that means you could lose the entire record of Suzy’s last Victoria’s Secret purchase.” Then I let them make the one final leap to, “the boss screams at me, it shows up on my performance eval, I don’t get that raise, and that means… less sex.” (And yes, there’s a reason I said “Victoria’s Secret” and not “lose the entire record of Bill’s Office Supplies purchase…”. It’s almost biologically impossible to not have at least some tiny chemical reaction to the phrase “Victoria’s Secret” that simply doesn’t happen when you’re talking about pencils and staplers. And remember, it’s that chemical reaction that leads to attention and memory. It’s that chemical reaction that tells the brain that this is important! Pay attention and record!

If we all acknowledge that we need to make our classes relevant and meaningful to adult learners, what better way than by acknowledging something so essentially human? We need some neural re-wiring for second language acquisition, and neural activity can spark that. AJ Hoge’s recent post at Effortless Language Acquisition (again, a must read for language teachers) writes

If “content is king”… if “fascinating topics” are crucial…why are we still reading boring articles in class? I imagine that thought is going through every one of my students’ minds who reads this blog.

I’ve thought about that question alot and I can’t think of a reasonable answer other than, “I was afraid to go all the way with this idea”. But that fear is evaporating and I realize I’ve got to do more than write or yammer about these ideas.

Another problem is that it’s not necessarily easy for me to know what fascinates most Thai University girls aged 18-22 (the bulk of my students). It has taken me some time to figure this out.

My conclusion is that the number one topic of fascination is relationships & dating. Romance, heartbreak, the differences between girls and boys, dating challenges, love, etc. seem to fascinate most of my students. Whenever I ask a class what TV show they’d like to watch in class, “Sex and The City” is always the big vote winner. Romance movies are equally popular.

OK, time to go spice up the content of my “English for Accounting” course.

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July 28th, 2005

Learning design (or “lesson planning”)

What elements should we consider when thinking through an upcoming class? Are we training, or supporting learning? What about metalearning?

All this and more in a great post from Marg O’Connell.

The post isn’t specific to language teaching, but is 100% applicable to our field, and outlines a general context, with the how-to’s for the next installment.

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