Language, Education, Technology

She has a decent level of English (around B2 according to CEFR). The four language skills are more or less equally developed, which in a way is an exception in the Armenian context where kids of this age attending a regular are able to fluently express themselves in speaking.

After I talked to her and her family, we identified the following areas of improvement for her:

• enrich her vocabulary and structures so they represent more authentic English
• improve her reading skills to handle texts that are beyond her listening and speaking skills
• raise her awareness that words in English may be pronounced differently from how they are written, and have her expose to new words by listening to them and not always by reading them

I ran into this video  from TedxVienna and decided to watch it. And I really liked it.

Leyla Haidarian is a media specialist, broadcast and print journalist who has worked for Warner Brother, Tribune Media, the American Radio Network and Diva Magazine. In this talk, she shares her experience from South Africa.

She talks about how competition models that underlie most human endeavor run against human nature. That’s how this talk actually resonated with me in the first place. Her experience in South Africa has transformed her understanding of mass media in this part of the world. Essentially, her main point is that mass media and culture in South Africa tend to be more aligned with collective and unified understanding of community, and that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from this culture.

She also mentions a neat example of ubuntu. I’m familiar first-hand with the operating system Ubuntu developed in South Africa, but I wasn’t aware that it means ”I am what I am because of who we all are”. And this explicitly reflects the open source philosophy of which ubuntu is one great example.

As I was listening to her talk, her language got my attention: “unity in diversity”, “ever-advancing civilization”. Because my religious background is the Baha’i Faith, this language sounded very familiar to me.  After a quick search, I found a few more links about her: her book at amazon.com, news line from Baha’i World news, and her autobiography. She obviously comes from a Baha’i perspective although this day and age many people share this perspective regardless of their origin or religious background.

For the last week or so, I’ve been tinkering with OpenClass, the new LMS (by Pearson and google) announced officially at the Educause conference this October 2011.

Because the school I work for is not using google apps for education suite as an institution, I had to create my own domain name for $10 per year and create my own ”institution” (here is the link to start with). So far, I’ve experienced quite a few limitations apparently due to this non-conventional setup.

This post is actually being written up as I’m attending a webinar right this moment hosted by Chronicle of Higher Education. The archive of this session can be accessed here once you create an account. Here are some highlights:

• Cloud-based
• Easy ways to collaborate with colleagues across schools to co-create course content
• A gateway to cutting edge technological tools (ebooks, Merlot, skype, respondus, and many more), which will be offered commercially if applied
• Free
• Content can be imported from platforms like Moodle, Blackboard, Angel
• Can chat with students/users online
• video collaboration from within OpenClass
• Can easily access students’ activity in OpenClass
• Seamless google apps integration
• Users can change privacy settings any time, e.g. if you want to hide your online presence
• Stream function – similar to a personal blog, you can follow users easily and contribute to/comment on their discussion
• Mobile site – interface to stay connected via a mobile phone
• Content categories: content page, threaded discussion, uploaded content, assessments
• More integration of ebooks coming up this 2012 year
• Collaborations – spaces where groups could work on their projects
• There’s a gradebook
• Interesting example – Signup sheet for a presentation which is a google doc at the instructors gmail account. Ss can sign up for the time and day they want
• Exam/quiz builder: MC, essay, true/false, etc. very user-friendly interface.
• No LIMIT to content you download: video, visuals, audio, etc.

The New York Times has published an interesting article with recent research findings about brain development in babies exposed to more than one language: Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort out Language.

The studies offer more evidence to confirm the benefit of bilingualism for the cognitive development of babies.

Mary Beth Herz shared a short and sweet blog post at Edutopia about do’s and don’t's of integrating technology in schools.

A new website has recently been published with 3.0 teacher resources. Unlike 2.0 resources (e.g., web 2.0, classroom 2.0, etc.), 3.0 implies some screening of user-produced content to come up with something that’s decent quality based on a systematic and rigorous review.

I browsed the website and was pleasantly surprised to find good quality content, easily searchable and well-sorted out.

Definitely worth bookmarking:  http://www.teachersfirst.com

My son’s back in Russia with his mom visiting the family. I figured I had to find a way to engage him in meaningful discussions online to maintain his English. He’s now 5 and needs more fun things to stick around on skype for more than 5-10 minutes. Here’s what has worked so far quite successfully:

• Online multiplayer games: http://worldofcars.go.com. He’s excited about this one so far. “Cars” is his favorite animated movie, and he loves wondering around the Radiator Springs neighborhood. It’s free for basic features and we get to talk a lot over skype while we do different things together. This is totally kid-friendly and safe.
• Casual multiplayer games: http://www.novelgames.com. I like this website. Games are visually appealing (flash-based) and fast to load and play. We’ve tried some games that we’d played before but not on the computer: chess and ship battle. He liked them a lot, but being so young he didn’t like the idea of losing, so I had to give him a break. The website is mostly safe, but sometimes ads with somewhat violent or sexual content show up, which the user than can easily report. Obviously, they are making effort to make it safe for kids.
• Another neat place where we hang out and interact in English is google docs – the Drawing document. We draw objects together and have a lot of fun talking about them in the process.
• He also likes reading a story that he likes as I show the pictures through the camcorder although this is a little challenging for me because I have to point the pages to the in-built camera and twist around it to be able to read at the same time. I might need to find the stories that he likes online so I can share the screen and read without straining my neck.

I just came back from a conference at the Sabanci University, Turkey “Eclipsing Expectations” (a link for their blog and other resources http://www.eclipsingexpectations.com). Great conference in terms of organization and content. But Istanbul was the best highlight!

Thoughts on some of the most insightful sessions I attended:

Professor Patsy Lightbown

Plenary talk by Professor Patsy Lightbown: “Transfer-appropriate processing: How can we ensure that classroom learning is transferable?”

• This was obviously all research-based
• Her quote: “retrieval is facilitated if the context and cognitive processes that were present during learning resemble those that are present during retrieval”, hence, good to replicate real-life circumstances/situations in class.
• Having said that, meaning-focused interaction (typical of real-life circumstances) do NOT always lead to better retrieval…
• …Because focus on meaning takes up a lot of cognitive load from focus on form
• Her research shows that when learners write new words or try to pronounce them well while focusing on meaning, they miss the semantic aspects of the words
• This explains why content-based teaching often doesn’t lead to linguistic accuracy (no room in the brain for that)
• This also explains why recasts (teacher saying that correct word/form when hearing the learner make the error) are often useless. Learners are zeroed in on the meaning and miss the form correction
• Bottom-line: focus on form for new items may need to be dealt with in some isolation from communicative tasks at initial stages

Concurrent session by Okan Bolukbash: “Effectiveness of students’ use of laptops outside of school”

• Sabanci University gives away free laptops to all new students. He wanted to see how they use them outside of school.
• Interview and survey based research (forget to include the sample size but decent enough)
• Some findings:
• A) the most favored advantage of having those laptops is access to the Internet just about any time, any place (including their shuttle buses)
• B) students use them to do homework, check out school website with course assignments, and for entertainment (video, music, games, facebook)
• C) students tended to use their laptops for entertainment a lot and this sounded like a drawback in terms of language learning.
• My take on the last one is: let’s look into what exactly they do for entertainment. My hunch is that most of the games, music, videos are English-medium. Also, would be interesting to see the ratio of English vs. Turkish language interactions in facebook. There may be a lot of meaningful language use going on there that we are not away of.

Concurrent session by Nicky Hockly (Constultants-E): “Teaching the Mobile Generation”

Nicky Hockly, Consultants-E, UK

• perhaps we shouldn’t be concerned with the technical aspects of integrating technologies in class with the mobile generation. Kids will take of it for the teachers
• uses of mobile technologies for outside of class: access course site, sms each other for school or other reasons, language apps (dictionaries, etc), download and listening to/watching podcasts
• uses of mobile technologies in class: making touristic video with photos and soundtrack. Photos, soundtrack, narrative could be done in Movie maker or similar software app.
• Example of an m-learning projects from Clair Chapman (youtube): Clair Chapman M-learning example
• Helpful ideas from Nicky: for starters give students a few podcasts or other similar resources and then ask for feedback. Based on interest gauge your m-learning resources and activities.
• Nicky’s blog: http://www.emoderationskills.com with lots of ideas and resources for m-learning among other things.  I like the following the most: 6 key m-learning resources and m-learning apps.

Concurrent session by Joe Pereira (British Council, Portugal): “Playing and Learning outside the Box”

Joe Pereira, British Council, Portugal

• Main point – students learn a lot of language by engaging in games and other fun activities outside of class
• He has come up with a number of projects that tap into this potential of current digital media:
• Avalon project based on Second Life (a pdf report I dug out online) and here’s a related blog
• Some other projects he mentioned from out there: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Interactive fiction (e.g., Zork – see below)
• A blog he recommended: http://digitalplay.info/blog/
• Joe’s slides for this presentations are available at his website: http://www.theswanstation.com/page2/index.html

Plenary talk by Joe Pereira (British Council, Portugal): “A Narrative at War with a Crossword: An Introduction to Interactive Fiction” (IF)

• Very cool – worth looking into
• Reading fiction (different genres) and interacting with it, hence different outcomes/endings are possible
• What’s needed: a computer, a program that can read IF files (gargoyle for PC and Zoom for Mac), the IF files that can be downloaded from different sites (e.g., http://ifdb.tads.org, http://brasslantern.org/)
• Joe’s slides for this presentation are available at his website: http://www.theswanstation.com/page2/index.html

I’ve been reading a few things about childhood bilingualism, and the last two books I’ve been flipping through are:

• “7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child” by Naomi Steiner, Susan Hayes, and Steven Parker (2008)
• “The Bilingual Edge” by Kendall King and Alison Mackey (2007).

These are both very light reads for caregivers. I like the second one better because it goes into a little more nitty-gritty of language acquisition research through blurbs they call “Spotlight on research”, “Quick tips”, and “Fast facts”. Overall, King and Mackey go into more detail of empirical research in their text too.

Here are some highlights for those who consider raising their children bilingual (some of these conclusions many need to be treated tentatively):

• To get 2-year-olds to speak a second language, they should be exposed to it at least 20% of their waking hours (Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, Oller, 1997)
• reading to little ones sometimes leads to better vocabulary acquisition than playing with them
• use the help of grandparents, playgroups, baby-sitters, and nannies to promote meaningful exposure to second language
• once kids start going to a daycare or school in the majority language, the minority language starts dwindling, hence more effort needed to maintain it
• girls tend to start speaking earlier than boys (e.g., vocabulary use – Daniel Bauer (2002))
• first children tend to start speaking earlier than the following kids apparently because of the poorer kind of exposure they get
• there’s no empirical evidence supporting delay or confusion among bilingual learning kids vs. monolingual kids (e.g., delay – Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, Oller, 1992)
• Research suggests that digital media sources (computer games, movies, talking toys and books, e.g., Baby Einstein Language Nursery Video, Muzzy, BabyFirstTV) aren’t as effective in promoting second/foreign language acquisition compared to human interaction. They could, however, serve as an add-on to human interaction with kids who already have a solid language foundation.

You can post your questions for the upcoming conference call about Open Educational Resources in the Comments below.