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Extremely cool “education board game”
March 3rd, 2008
by Cleve Miller
From the TED blog:
Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform.
They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but “we didn’t know what it would be”. They set up a studio in the conference’s venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen (”OverThere” — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game “of social awareness” collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.
Check out the Kluster site.
Online language learning review
February 18th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Here’s a nice survey post by Curt Bonk of a variety of online language learning solutions out there, with short explanations and reviews. There’s a bit of buzz right now prompted by the NY Times article that came out Sunday (reg required).
BESIG Conference in Berlin
December 6th, 2007
by Cleve Miller
Fortunately I was able to attend the BESIG conference in Berlin in November - there were many very useful workshops and presentations, and it was great to be able to finally meet many of the folks I’m in contact with online.
Probably the most interesting session for me was David Graddol’s plenary talk on the future of business English. He made some intriguing points:
- according to his research, 74% of business conversations take place among non-native speakers
- as a result, there is a growing recognition that “intelligibility” is as important as accuracy
- employers are now less interested in exam scores and more interested in what the employee can do with English
- the number of people learning will English will peak globally at around 2 billion in the year 2010
- after 2010, the number of English learners will start to drop off, because national curriculums are starting English much earlier in primary school, and then moving into content classes (i.e. history class, but the language of instruction is English). Thus learners are reaching an advanced level (say, C1) by the time they enter university.
Much of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Graddol’s latest research, English Next, which was commissioned by the British Council. You can download the .pdf here.
Karen Richardson has a nice write-up of the conference for One Stop English.
I was also a speaker, and gave a presentation on “Web 2.0 as a Business English catalyst”. Lots of excellent questions after the talk. I spent some time pointing out how the new approaches to the web (”web 2.0″) correspond strongly with the principles of social constructivist learning theory, and how this relates to teaching business English. I then gave the audience a sneak peak of the English360 platform and showed how we have pulled those new approaches into a collaborative, web-based teaching tool.
(photo below) Here I was doing a brief overview to be sure everyone in the audience was on the same page regarding “social constructivist” approaches. It was interesting that many in the mostly European audience were unfamiliar with the “sage on stage” vs “guide on side” terms…maybe these terms are more common in the US?
(Photo below) Here I was showing the relationships between different approaches. The inner circle is the more traditional “teacher lecturer” model, which focuses on what happens cognitively in the brain (mostly remember and reproduce). The second, larger circle represents the communicative approach with a social constructivist foundation: the focus moves from the individual to the group, which works together on tasks involving info exchange. A key point is that the second circle doesn’t negate the first, it expands it…people can and do learn through “passively” absorbing a lecture (I also discussed this here, maybe a bit too aggressively!). But, then working with that new knowledge with others, to produce a result, will usually solidify that learning.
But much of this is classroom based. The third circle represents how web 2.0 approaches can pull this classroom-based activity into the real world, which is, after all, the whole point.
You can get the slides here off the BESIG site (I’m J4, way at the bottom, and -warning- it’s a heavy file download.)
Language learning and exercise
February 21st, 2007
by Cleve
Still not quite sure how this works, but it’s intriguing - Connect 18 is a video-based Spanish language learning exercise biking classes (or something like that). Via KnowHR.
World of Warcraft as a language learning tool
February 9th, 2007
by Cleve
Very interesting discussion of using massively multiplayer online games (”MMOs”) for language learning.
We picked World of Warcraft for several reasons. One, because it’s an MMO, it’s immersive and social and it elicits lots of playing time. Two, because it’s WoW, it’s popular and well known, with high production values. Three, because it has a highly customizable interface, and we saw potential for integrating translation and annotation features.
This seems worthy of more investigation because WoW play would be great input and interaction because:
1 - it’s highly interactive with potential for a “total physical response” result…you have to do something with your comprehension that has a real-life result (well, OK, a virtual life result, but you know what I mean!).
2 - the focus would be on message not form
3 - it’s fast-paced enough it might reduce response/interactive delays of an overactive Krashen monitor
4 - it’s fun!
Be sure to check out the presentation video and the thesis.
Richness: F2F vs Online
April 19th, 2006
by Cleve
George Siemens of elearnspace posted on a Kathy Sierra post - I tried to comment but evidently Movable Type was acting up on elearnspace, and I couldn’t submit the comment (tried 4 times!). So here it is, although it won’t make much sense without reading Siemens’ post first.
Love your blog - I’m a devoted reader.And I agree that “each is for the task at hand”, and that F2F and online are hard to compare (in the sense that a screwdriver and a hammer are hard to compare - sorta).
That said, I’m bewildered that you reject F2F as richer - of course it’s richer. Maybe what’s ambiguous is what is meant by “richer” - I believe that Kathy Sierra is referring to research that measures “richness” in “bits” of information an observer receives. The number of bits of information a teacher receives (facial expressions, tone of voice, (especially) body language, group mood, etc) is much, much greater F2F. Of course an automaton teacher won’t pick that stuff up, so they might as well be on skype (or podcasting!), but an engaged teacher is far better able to make that emotional connection F2F, given a reasonable class size.
Everything else being equal, we can teach better with F2F. Of course, nothing is ever equal, and online teaching rocks for a variety of reasons and circumstances, some of which you point out. Yes it’s tough to value one over the other - both have strengths and weaknesses. But it’s undeniable that, for the quality “interactive richness”, F2F wins. And we need to recognize these strengths and weakness accurately so that we can effectively select the right tool for the occasion. Not accepting that F2F is richer is like rejecting the point that “hammers drive nails better than screwdrivers” because they are different tools and that each is for the task at hand.
IMO
Communities 2.0
March 21st, 2006
by Cleve
Nice post by Marco Polo on social software and communities.
In this vein, please read Danah Boyd’s talk at ETech. I found it via Kathy Sierra, who summarized the talk with a single word: astonishing.
Teaching, language, collective intelligence, and del.icio.us
March 3rd, 2006
by Cleve
Via Joshua Porter of Bokardo, here’s a fascinating post by James Corbett (EirePreneur) on social bookmarking and the semantic web. The basic premise is that our social bookmarking behaviour (e.g. on del.icio.us) exibits semantic characteristics that resemble the emergent intelligence in group organisms such as ant colonies. Or something like that. There’s a great line on teaching as well:
Teaching differs from simply broadcasting information in that the teacher must modify their behaviour, at some cost, to assist a naïve observer to learn more quickly…
…where in this case the teacher is an ant. But any help I can get in reminding me not to just broadcast information is help I’ll accept, even if it’s help from an insect. Corbett then carries out an interesting experiment with the grammar of bookmarking and OPML hierarchies, and ties in Steven Pinker via John Udall. Read and enjoy.
Basecamp: now free for educators
November 19th, 2005
by Cleve
Of all the tools we use in the virtual collaboration mentioned last post, Basecamp is the foundation (well, together with Skype). Basecamp is simply brilliant.
Now Basecamp’s free for teachers.
English360 needs document uploading and timetracking, so we need a different version, but the free version is 80% of the goodness for 0% of the cost. Congrats to 37signals.
Learn Chinese through podcasts
November 17th, 2005
by Cleve
I may be late to the game, and everyone’s seen this, but it looks really decent for a content-based language e-learning site. And I love the idea of micro-content (something we’re working with here at English360). The company also has an English learning site but much of it is in Mandarin so I couldn’t glean much info.