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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heads up to our friends and readers who have volunteered to try out our new needs analysis module:

1) thank you all for your interest and enthusiasm, and…
2) it’s not working yet.

I’m getting some flack from our developers for overenthusiastically announcing too early. We’re still in the middle of the internal test phase, which is hair-raising, because it really doesn’t work very well yet, and when you actually use (semi-) working software, you look back at design decisions and wonder “what was I thinking?”.

But I’ve been told by more experienced folks that this is normal, and in a week or so we’ll be ready to let friends and family in. So, thanks for your patience and I’ll be sending out user names the week after next.

As I mentioned before the workshop and presentations on corpora were the highlight of the EuroCALL 2005 conference for me. Other than a few sessions using a concordancer, I went into the corpora activities as a beginner, and, thanks to some great teachers, I came away with a fascination for the potential that corpora and data-driven learning have for fostering learner autonomy and improving materials design. Over the next few months I’ll be testing some ideas to see how they work for our learners.

Corpora: the short and sweet explanation (for beginners like me)
Basically to make a corpus you collect a number of real, authentic texts (written or spoken) that are representative of a language as a whole, or of a specific genre of that language (say, business email). A smaller, specialized corpus might have 1,000,000 words (equivalent to about ten 300-page books) and the BNC corpus has over 100,000,000 words (depending on your purpose, smaller corpora can be fine). By aggregating many, many examples of real language (from newspapers, novels, magazines, interviews, debates, talk shows, gossip, small talk, email, etc. et. al.) you have a nice sample of what really happens when people use the language everyday.

Then, you label each word according to the part of speech it represents (called POS tagging). This process can be automated with software.

Now you can use other software to do all sorts of cool statistical stuff, such as analyzing the most significant words in Business English, and concordancing. Here’s part of a KWIC (key words in context) concordance I made with the phrase “moving on” using the web-based concordancer created by Mark Davies that uses the BNC. I limited the register to “spoken” to try and extract “moving on” used as a discourse marker showing a transition to a new topic (typical BE target language). Each line is a separate “hit” from a different text:

we ought to be thinking about er Yeah. er moving on. Do you think that is about right?
say, an hour and three quarters. Erm moving on a l a little bit, what was your
in the surrounding streets. Mhm. Moving on, erm in te you know obviously you must
That’s how they were dealt with. Erm moving on a bit now, er er I mean,
crimes to prostitution? Well I think you’re moving on now to a sphere where perhaps
does that. That’s right. Er anyway moving on, just a couple more things were on this
when they empty it now? Yeah. Yes Moving on from the, the dredger back to when you
shift again. Pump that one in and kept moving on. Mm. They got the roof secure,
four one is the number to call. Erm moving on and talking about the subject of the
anyway, I’d like to consult you about moving on and getting in the next four motions
sensible way forward. Moving on, another suggestion is that we should ballot our

One implication for teachers: teaching authentic language
So you can see with this abbreviated example that, with the register limitations I used, “moving on” is used quite frequently in authentic speech to signal a change of topic. This isn’t surprising…most BE texts teach this phrase. But, let’s look at some of the other phrases that BE texts teach as discourse markers used to change a topic, and note down the frequency that each is used within the BNC spoken sub-corpus. (Example phrases from a popular BE coursebook on presentation skills from a major publisher, released in 1995.)

“That brings me to…” or “That brings us to…”
Total examples: 7
Used as discourse marker: 7

“Now we come to…”
Total examples: 7
Used as discourse marker: 6

“Let’s go on to…”
Total examples: 2
Used as discourse marker: 2

“…move on to…”
Total examples: 2
Used as discourse marker: 0

“Moving on…”
Total examples: 59
Used as discourse marker: 38

So if we are teaching BE learners how to produce (or understand) a transition in a presentation, which one of these phrases would be more useful? That the answer to this question is now obvious points to the promise of corpora and data-driven learning, and how it can impact materials design. (Disclaimer: corpus analysis can be tricky, and I’m far from being qualified to do it. So this little example above may be riddled with mistakes and the conclusion therefore wrong. My first question would be the appropriateness of the BNC corpus for identifying authentic business language…it might be interesting to use a more genre-specific corpus like Mike Nelson’s. Any readers who can point out other problems get a post of their own.)

Just got back to the office today after some post-conference travel. Overall, the conference was an outstanding experience for me, both for the content of the projects presented, as well as the people I met. The format for this conference was basically six rooms with 6 different 25-minute presentations running simultaneously; as an attendee, you chose from this “menu” which of the 6 presentations was most interesting for you, attended, then switched to your next selected presentation, etc. We had two full days and one half day, for a total of about 150 presentations, of which you could attend 25. This format had advantages (a wide selection of interesting topics) and drawbacks (with only 25 minutes, it was difficult for many speakers to communicate their topic effectively - more on this later).

Over the next few days I’ll post on some conference highlights - here’s what’s coming:

+ Using corpora (resources) and concordancing for language learning and teaching. I attended an excellent full-day pre-conference workshop on this topic, led by Ylva Berglund and Sabine Braun, and was also able to attend some very interesting presentations on using corpora during the conference, including one by Ide O’Sullivan of CALS at the University of Limerick.

+ Using an “integrated language learning environment” that connects classroom-based learning with e-learning. One of the lead designers Piet Desmet presented this software platform. It’s great…and the closest thing I’ve seen to what we’re building here at English360.

+ Joan-Tomas Pujola of the University of Barcelona presented some excellent ideas on CALL application features that support learner autonomy.

+ Nurturing autonomy through tandem learning. This was an interesting case study presented by Katia Carraro from the RZB Language Resource Center (link in German) at Vienna University.

+ An analysis of conversational negotiation strategies in oral communication in an immersive virtual environment. This is some very cool research by Therese Örnberg from Umeå University, Sweden. (Therese has also blogged on her experience at the conference.)

I’m in Warsaw this week visiting family, and will be in Cracow next week for the EuroCALL 2005 conference. I hope to blog a bit during the conference.

Anyone else attending? Drop me a comment.

Food for thought: Computers Learn a New Language

This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, scoring well in standard language proficiency tests, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics.

More here.