Blogging

For my last blog, I thought I'd discuss the merits of assigning a blog to language learners. As was demonstrated by my cohorts in their e-portfolio presentation, blog writing provides students with an opportunity to write with a presumed L1 audience in the target language and to focus on accuracy. The medium naturally lends itself to this focus. Yes, it is possible to edit a blog once it has been released into the blogosphere, but it is usually advisable to measure twice and cut once if you want to be taken seriously by your readership. Showing students that they can target a niche audience and be part of a larger culture of writers is a valuable experience. This new medium is of increasing importance to people in general. Many seek news, opinion, and entertainment from blogs and learners should be able to find an area of focus that appeals to them. Being part of a blog roll helps frame the kinds of material a learner may address as well as the ways in which this is done by L1 writers. Instructors may want to work with students in defining topics to cover and helping to steer them to discover the conventions of the medium. Peer and instructor feedback can come in the form of comments.

I can imagine a scenario in which two FL classrooms could perform a language exchange through blogging. It may be helpful to situate the students writing in this kind of exchange and blogging might provide a format that focuses learner efforts. In this case, an instructor could help students set up a closed blog that would allow students to work on fluency rather than accuracy. Having the partnering class post comments to blog posts would create an authentic exchange that could be motivating to students.

Second Life

Second Life appears to have all the fundamentals of communicative learning built into the environment itself. The potential to interact with L1 English speakers provides students with authentic input and real needs to negotiate meaning. The potential for different learning environments is great. The whole place is designed to provide a sort of uber-realia. One can visit replicas of real historical sights and interact with L1 speakers from the target culture in these environments.

Given the potential for independent learning it would seem simple for students to get a little coaching on the interface and be free to explore. This might be the case. I am not sure that this is the way most environments are being used. Do avatars really respond to environments in an authentic way? Could I engage another avatar in a conversation about the color of the leaves on the trees? In a store, how would another player react if I asked how she liked the cut of the dress on the mannequin? I would have to pursue these questions before making any decisions about the real value of the resource. It may be that people are merely interested in socializing in a way that is actually external to the game. Not that that would be a bad thing, but that would be a very specific kind of language use.

Would it be possible to take a class to a soccer stadium, teach them the appropriate vocabulary for communicating during the game, take a tour of the facilities, and then play a game? If so, I can see the potential, but the instructor needs more knowledge of the tool than I can claim at this point. I'm not sure now is the appropriate time to gain that knowledge, but I've had my taste and will probably revisit Second Life in the future.

Telecollaboration - A journal of sorts

MegaMeeting.com seems super full featured, but I'm not going to even bother given the price tag.

So I'm most familiar with the Zoho environment. They make many full featured tools to create and edit things in the cloud. I was excited to check out their meeting function because it looked full featured because you can integrate it with their other products. For a free account you can only have a conference with one other member. The audio support seems great (skype, phone-in, and local Zoho). One problem, I set up a meeting with another email account of mine using two different browsers - had to download an executable file to get it to work. That may not be possible for all users - especially those that are working on lab computers that don't give them administrative privileges. By using the same computer I got a wicked feedback loop, but I'll give this a shot on two computers one day and get back to you. Looks pretty elegant, but who wants to pay for their students to have access? Looks like there is screenshare and a White Board type feature - I would think this would be a good option if you had the cash.

mebeam seems ridiculously easy to set up, but it only worked on Safari on my Mac. It did not work on either Chrome (actually I finally it to work but the pop-up seems buggy) or Firefox. The flash video settings window did not function. It hosed the entire process.

I was able to use my Google Login and set up a meeting page with relative ease. Posted a YouTube video using the embed code inside the chat. I don't really understand how to get the audio up and running. Would have to investigate TokBox to figure it out.

TokBox has a smooth interface. Looks like they charge for a lot of features. The option to use EtherPad for collaborative writing, SlideShare to watch slideshows (PPT), YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa makes it an easy way to respond to media within a conference. Looks like they are removing the EtherPad feature (bummer). Usable interface and appealing media features makes this a viable option.

No luck with confabio.com. Perhaps that ship has sunk.

Palbee.com seems to have a nice interface and White Board feature. The Library List feature looks like it could be used to show media (PPT and JPG). Seems like it is similar to TokBox, but I am still waiting for the automatically generated email to hit my inbox so I can access the thing. The ability to record meetings would be a nice feature to have students self-correct or reflect on production. Perhaps instructors could annotate to bring learners' attention to certain features of the interaction.

I guess of all the meeting clients out there. I would have to recommend TokBox at the moment, but I should give it a shot after they remove EtherPad on tax day and update my review.

e-journaling

In Cohen & Ishihara 2005, e-journaling allowed both learner and researcher to reflect upon strategies and materials in order to fine-tune their practice. E-journaling also provided the researchers with a qualitative information that could be compared to the quantitative information they were collecting to assess in terms of convergent validity. They were able to investigate learner performance around themes identified by examining the e-journals themselves. They used content analysis designed to describe learner attitudes (reception of) the materials. In a classroom situation this would provide instructors with some access to learner affect.

The researchers were able to draw both from explicit statements about the materials as well as make inferences upon the same themes given less direct comments. The kinds of insights into strategic learning and the nature of Japanese pragmatics that one would hope to see in such e-journaling were not as pervasive as one might hope. There were only a few examples provided in the article of students wrote about "misconceptions about language and culture that were eliminated through studying the material" and "insights applied to other speech acts" (Cohen & Ishihara, p. 16).

One way that this kind of e-journaling could be expanded in a Second Language environment would be to ask students to attempt using the skills taught in the classroom or though internet modules in real world situations and writing about their experiences. To encourage attention to particular pragmatic features of the language, students could be asked to record in their e-journals interactions with or between native speakers that include these features. This could be done easily with speech acts. It would allow an environment in which students could raise issues and instructors would be able to identify trends and respond to the class as a whole.

Using speech acts that are appropriate to the target culture often requires that learners work against the instincts and intuitions that they have unconsciously developed in their L1 (or has been drilled into them in childhood). E-journaling provided a way of processing such disjunctions. One participant reflected upon his resistance to “telling a white-lie” presumably because the strategy is more frequently used in Japanese than English (Cohen & Ishihara, p.24).

If one is trying to teach students to be reflective about their own language learning strategies and performance in order for them to refine their practice, e-journaling seems to be a logical tool. How well it would work in most classrooms would probably depend upon the attitudes of the students towards the exercise of e-journaling, the classroom dynamic, and instructor’s ability to facilitate such an enterprise.

Unfortunately, this study does not include extensive information about the process of setting up the journals. It would be valuable to see what kind of prompts the students were responding to (did they differ from entry to entry?) and how they were introduced to the process.