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Making coursebooks more relevant
April 7th, 2009
by Cleve Miller
Very useful post (as always) from Karenne Sylvester over at Kalinago English.
Already told my wife this is what I want for Christmas
April 6th, 2009
by Cleve
Simultaneously the coolest yet most horrifying thing I’ve seen lately.
Interview with Martin Dougiamas, creator of Moodle
April 5th, 2009
by Cleve
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).
Sunday reading
March 29th, 2009
by Cleve
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.
The future of materials development
March 23rd, 2009
by Cleve
Very interesting thread on the IATEFL Cardiff Online materials development forum about the future of coursebooks - I couldn’t help but dive in of course. A lot of valid complaints about watered-down generic content from traditional publishers who are “dragging themselves kicking and screaming into the 1990’s” as Gavin put it, perfectly. But recognition that coursebooks can add value with cohesive organized syllabi and that they give learners a sense of order and clear aims, and that teacher-generated content can be uneven and unorganized.
I think one way to look at the situation is to use what can be called a “content continuum” with publishers on one side and teachers on the other, that shows the strengths and weaknesses of both. Here’s the idea:
You can see how the strengths and weaknesses offset. Publishers are relatively slow and expensive whereas teachers are fast and cheap. Publishers need to create generic, controversy-free content fit for a wide audience, whereas teachers can fit content to the exact needs of each learner or class.
I think we need to look at this, not as publishers or teachers, but as a continuum that we can move along in either direction as the students and learning environment demands. You can already see this happening in other publishing areas. Encyclopedia Britannica (far left of continuum) announced it would be opening up to accept content from users, albeit slowly and carefully. Thus it moves a bit to the right on the contiuum. Wikipedia (far right of continuum) announced it would be providing a bit more editorial oversight to quell the most egregious tom-foolery on the site. Thus it moves a bit to the left.
So in this transition period I think we’ll see more of this. And in ELT we’re just getting started on tools* to develop the user-generated side of the continuum. It’ll be fascinating to see how the space develops. But what is certain is that the old relationship between publishers and teachers will be turned upside down, as bottom-up materials development replaces top-down coursebooks. Smart publishers** will seek a partnership relationship with users; publishers who don’t will dwindle in relevance.
And what’s the whole point? In today’s world things move too fast for traditional publishing planning. Using a coursebook first published 5 years ago limits relevance to the learner in a way that wasn’t true last generation. But more importantly, new digital approaches to materials development that move smoothly along the content continuum, adopting and adapting the best of both extremes, promise to deliver the radical personalization that will give learning back to the learner.
* watch this space
** also, watch this space
Are coursebooks still relevant?
March 22nd, 2009
by Cleve
Via Howard Vickers off a tweet, a great article by Jane Petring.
Prensky: digital natives to digital wisdom
March 22nd, 2009
by Cleve
Just came across this so I’m late in the game, but in case anyone else missed it, Prensky’s new article is required reading (you may need to register, and it’s worth it). He’s believes his renown “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” distinction is a product of this transition period and will shortly become less useful.
He argues that we are all basically to some degree “digitally enhanced” and that this is a good thing. By extending our minds into the machine world we’re building, our actual thinking improves:
[Digital enhancement] includes—and here is the important part—cognition. Digital tools already extend and enhance our cognitive capabilities in a number of ways. Digital technology enhances memory, for example, via data input/output tools and electronic storage. Digital data-gathering and decision-making tools enhance judgment by allowing us to gather more data than we could on our own, helping us perform more complex analyses than we could unaided, and increasing our power to ask “what if?” and pursue all the implications of that question. Digital cognitive enhancement, provided by laptop computers, online databases, three-dimensional virtual simulations, online collaboration tools, PDAs, and a range of other, context-specific tools, is a reality in every profession, even in nontechnical fields such as law and the humanities.
But what’s interesting is that he believes it will enhance our individual and collective wisdom as well:
Digital wisdom is a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities. Because of technology, wisdom seekers in the future will benefit from unprecedented, instant access to ongoing worldwide discussions, all of recorded history, everything ever written, massive libraries of case studies and collected data, and highly realistic simulated experiences equivalent to years or even centuries of actual experience. How and how much they make use of these resources, how they filter through them to find what they need, and how technology aids them will certainly play an important role in determining the wisdom of their decisions and judgments. Technology alone will not replace intuition, good judgment, problem-solving abilities, and a clear moral compass. But in an unimaginably complex future, the digitally unenhanced person, however wise, will not be able to access the tools of wisdom that will be available to even the least wise digitally enhanced human.
Anyone interested in further reading on this theme could check out singularity theory and Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando.
I known this all sounds like the Matrix, but what can you do? It is what it is.
Hello again
March 21st, 2009
by Cleve
Goodness me: five months since my last post. Lots has happened with the English360 project. I’ll be updating everyone soon.
I’ve also made my first tweet in 2 years…so, relatively speaking, I’m lavishing attention on the blog. I may try the Twitter 140-character limit for blog posts ands see if that makes it easier. Whoops, I’ve gone over already.
Are you fluent in “corporate-speak”
September 24th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
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.
The “mysteries of teaching in all its variety”, and corpora questions
September 22nd, 2008
by Cleve Miller
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.