It All Ends...Or Begins

And that's a wrap! For now. This past week, our class finished up hosting an expo where we had the opportunity to share our final projects with the community. I was very nervous beforehand--public speaking is not my favorite activity, and in addition to anxiety about my own project, I was on the team that had planned the entire event (the space, tech aspects, presentation order, etc.). But in the end, things mostly went off without a hitch. My project was one I felt passionately about, and besides, its topic (comics) was fun; so it was a pleasure to talk about it with curious members of the community as they stopped by. I had brought samples of kids' work to show off what they could do, and I have to admit I was a bit like a proud parent, pleased with the audience's oohs and awes at how creatively the kids had supplemented their limited English with pictures.

I've deeply valued the opportunity to think through my TuneItUp project this quarter. Part of what I've really liked about my Web-Enabled Teaching and Learning class has been the freedom to pursue topics that genuinely interest me. I've really tried to take advantage of that, and have been surprised by what I can do when given a sort of intellectual sandbox to simply play in. I'm now thinking very seriously about taking my prototype all the way as a master's project.

Another great insight that's come from this class has been the realization that I really enjoy blogging. I haven't always been able to dedicate as much time to it as I'd like, but there's something I find very satisfying about creating an interesting post (well, interesting to me, anyway) and being able to immediately publish it on the web. I like the short, casual form, and the ability to pull in images or link to any other resource on the Internet.

So I've also been thinking lately of starting another blog around the theme of "learning hacks." I'm very interested in the topic of informal learning--learning that takes place on the go, or in settings we don't traditionally think of as educational; and I think the topic is one that could find a wide audience. I think it would be fun to write about "hacks" that make learning easier, cheaper, or more accessible to busy people--lectures on audio, say, or using historical fiction to learn about history, or "reading" tough works of literature via Twitter. We've learned a lot during Web-Enabled Technologies for Teaching and Learning about the tools (websites, organizations, etc.) that increasingly make this possible; I want to write about the human side, about how these tools could actually fit into people's lives in the twenty-first century US. I'd like to convince people that learning doesn't have to exist in some isolated box called school but can be a part of every day.

So the class and the year are ending...but I think, really, this post is a lot more about beginnings. We'll see where it all goes in 2010. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

New places to play

This week in class, we had Prof. Curis Bonk of Indiana U. lecture us via web conferencing software. His research on the future of e-learning is interesting, and me makes much of it freely available at http://www.publicationshare.com/. I was impressed by Prof. Bonk's ideas, but even more so by his seemingly nearly encyclopedic knowledge of cool learning tools on the web. His presentation covered a lot, and I scribbled down a long list of very useful names to check out.

I thought I'd highlight a few here that struck me as particularly interesting for language learning. One was dotSUB, a site designed as a collaborative "wiki" type environment for subtitling videos. I checked out the site's tanscription and subtitling UI, which aims to make the process easy enough that anyone can do it.

I really like the idea of crowd-sourcing subtitling, a task that theoretically anyone can do--it's just the work of actually getting the subtitles into the video that most people would get stuck on. Still, I think dotSUB has a way to go in some areas--it doesn't seem to have the same rigorous fact-checking ethos as, for example, Wikipedia. Also, the transcription process relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts to start and stop the video, which many causal users may be hesitant to learn. Finally, I wonder who dotSUB believes their audience to be; they don't seem to be particularly targeting language learners. As an English-speaking learner of Spanish, I found I could search for videos in Spanish, videos in English, videos with Spanish translations, and videos with English translations; but I could not specifically search for Spanish videos with English translations. I'm interested in using more video to learn Spanish, but dotSUB didn't make the process as easy for me as I would have liked. Still, all of these problems are correctable, and I'm interested to see how this pretty cool idea develops.

A second interesting website identified by Prof. Bonk was Voxopop, a tool for creating online, asynchronous voice discussion forums. A curious user can just click "Play" and immediately hear each post of a thread played in sequence; some discussions are just a few minutes, some run for hours. Unlike dotSUB, Voxopop did seem to be heavily geared for language learning, and I could see quite a few classes already using the site for this purpose. I didn't try starting my own voice thread, but the potential for meaningful interaction between geographically dispersed learners and teachers is pretty cool. Threads can even be exported to iTunes or as an RSS feed. On the whole, these are some really exciting resources to have been made aware of.

The opposite of English

We had our second round of digital artifact presentations this week! As expected, there were some very interesting ideas. A few that that stood as particular highlights for me were a concept for a game that led students on a journey through the human body, a social networking site that matched foster kids with senior citizens, and a hip-hop curriculum. There was so much creativity and dedication on display.

One student presented a prototype for a project to preserve indigenous languages, with a focus on Tanzania (the full presentation is available here). This student and I had happened to meet and speak together about our projects earlier in the week. There was a clear relationship in that both our artifacts are language-focused, but in different ways: my solution was about bringing English language learning into India's rural countryside, whereas my classmate's focused on documenting and promoting local tongues. During our conversation, I laughingly said something like, "Well, I guess my prototype is the opposite of yours."

Is it? I sincerely hope not. I do spend a fair amount of time worrying about whether English language learning programs could be perceived as a form of cultural imperialism. The last thing I want is for local languages to be displaced by English, or local cultures to be replaced by American ways. On the contrary, one of the reasons I'm so interested in English language learning is that I believe it empowers groups to share their beliefs with the world. The Web has made this more than a remote possibility, and in many ways English is the Web's lingua franca: according to Wikipedia, 56.4% of Web content is in English, followed by German at an absurdly distant 7.7%. No doubt non-English content will increase and automated translation tools improve, but in the here-and-now, getting your message out in English gives you the widest audience.

We are also seeing the emerging idea of "Global English"--the notion that British and American English are not necessarily the "correct" Englishes, that dialects spoken around the world are equally valid, and that if there is a standard at all, it should fall somewhere between all these worldwide variations. I love the idea that English can be a tool for someone in, say, Vietnam to chat with someone in, say, Denmark, without a native English speaker even in the picture.

Of course, all this is easy for me to say: I'm a native English speaker! But in the end, I think it's hard to argue with the demand: many, many people around the world want to learn English. I think very few of these people want to give up their native tongue or culture: they simply want English as another avenue for expanding their own understanding and ability to communicate with the world.

Funny pages

Next week, a second round of digital artifacts are due in my Web-Based Technologies in Education class. This time, we're making a prototype of a media solution that addresses the needs of vulnerable/underprivileged people. We heard a bit about one another's artifacts in class this week, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what my classmates come up with. I plan for mine to involve having kids publish their own webcomics to them help learn English.

Outside of class, I've been reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," a very interesting book about the stoytelling potential of comics generally. It's not an area McCloud particularly addresses, but it occurred to me that comics are a really great medium for foreign language learning. They offer such a terrific combination of picture, story, and words. A far more interesting story can be told in a comic than a foreign language learner could read in words alone, and there are visuals to cue certain vocabulary words. Plus, it's long been a pet theory of mine that stories are key to getting people engaged--the question "What happened next?" is such an essentially human one.

So integrating stories into a foreign language classroom would be good...but even better would be getting kids to write their own stories! Let them write and draw about whatever matters to them, and learn new words along the way. Plus, the fact that most of the words in comics are lines of dialogue lends itself to in-class activities around actually speaking the foreign language...in this case, English.

I never knew what a world of comics was out there on the web until I started doing the research for this artifact. There are some really gifted(mainly adult) artists and writers publishing their stories online. Of course, in many cases kids won't be able to match the talent of fully trained adults; but I found encouraging the realization that one of the most well-read webcomics out there is xkcd, which stars a lot of faceless stick figures--about as visually simple as you can get! Clearly people look for more in a webcomic than just flashy illustrations...

The group I'm targeting is rural Indian kids, so I made a particular effort to find Indian comics. Comparisons of the kids' comics I found on the Indian website Tinkle and the kid-recommended American comics I found elsewhere on the Web highlighted the importance of cultural context. For example, I don't really think Indian kids would find a comic like this one amusing...it requires understanding of Christmas and all the bizarre little holiday doodads in stores. One of the Indian comics I saw involved a man haggling with a beggar who claimed to be blind over whether he was really blind or not; I think usually in the US we wouldn't think this was an appropriate subject for a kids' comic. But in my view, cultural differences shouldn't be a deterrent to kids reading comics produced by kids in other parts of the world. On the contrary, with some adult help, it could really open up children's minds to how similar and how different kids who live far away might be.

Hearing voices, seeing words

This week in class, we discussed different educational theories. I entered this class without a strong background in formal educational theories, so for me, this explanation was a big help. One of the most interesting theories discussed was the "dual coding" theory--the notion that people learn better when their different senses are engaged in learning the material. This could be, for example, simultaneously listening and watching, or simultaneously watching and moving the body.

The question of simultaneous input is one I've been thinking about a lot lately, as it is closely related to what happens in language learning classes. These days, the communicative language teaching theory is probably the most commonly accepted theory among foreign language teachers. The communicative approach heavily emphasizes input (and some production) in the target language, with minimal use of the students' known language. Key to this method is the teacher's ability to provide "comprehensible input"--that is, to speak in the target language and to simultaneously make that input understandable to students.

How best to do this remains an outstanding question. Probably the most traditional method, one many former language students will recognize, is for a teacher to accompany a long monologue in the target language with lots of pantomime: for instance, miming the act of carrying a suitcase and unpacking it for airport security during a lesson on travel-related vocabulary. Right here, in what is perhaps the simplest foreign language lesson plan possible, we have an example of dual coding. Foreign language learning environments lend themselves naturally to a dual coding approach because supplementary pictures are more than an illustrative nice-to-have: the task at hand is one of parsing meaning in an unknown tongue, a challenge oftentimes only made possible by the addition of visual input.

Lately, I have been thinking about how a function normally carried out by a teacher--that of providing visual input to make the target language comprehensible--can be replicated or even enhanced on a computer screen. The visual images computers can provide are not limited by time or space: rather than a teacher's pantomiming pulling a suitcase, for instance, a computer program can offer the student any number of suitcase images, which the student can replay at his or her leisure. On the other hand, human body language does communicate quite a bit that can be lost during a human-machine interaction: the raising of an eyebrow, for instance, to indicate a question. How best to map spoken content to visual input in a technology context? I've been ruminating on this of late, and haven't arrived at clear-cut answers yet. But it seems to me that the 2-D space of a computer screen is quite different from the 3-D space of the human body, and that creative thought is needed to understand the unique opportunities and limitations of the medium.

Multiplication Problems

Normal 0 This week in class, we heard a presentation from a company called EdisonLearning. Their online learning model is very interesting, and I found it a fascinating real-world application of some of the concepts we’ve been talking about in class.

Edison’s strategy is to create highly componentized course modules, which allows the firm great flexibility to re-package lessons for various clients depending on the desired syllabus, learning goals, length of school year, etc. It’s an ingenious workaround for a difficult problem: educational needs and standards vary dramatically from state to state in the US. The issue extends well beyond the education world: I used to work with vendors of software for insurance companies, and insurers faced a similar problem with state regulatory frameworks. Clever vendors were able to design flexible systems that could bend to meet different legal demands, and Edison has done something similar—except that I think it’s quite a bit tougher to deal with shifting demands in a process as sensitive as designing a curriculum.

This got me thinking about the role of policy in the world of educational technology. With the Internet, information and education have the power to spread across borders with incredible rapidity and ease, and the dissemination of personal computers (in wealthy parts of the world, at least) allows for a unprecedented ability to scale up an existing product. On the other hand, legal frameworks and, of course, educational goals and standards are still very localized, which diminishes the potential to achieve economies of scale.

In the short term, this situation presents a challenge to creators of educational technologies, although certainly clever solutions like Edison’s can help tremendously. In the long-term, however, I wonder whether learning technologies could contribute to a slow convergence of statewide educational standards. The inefficiency of the United States’ patchwork testing system has frequently been noted. Technological solutions probably will not be widely adopted by public school systems unless they are shown to be cost-effective, but of course, much greater economies of scale can be achieved if such systems can be used in more states.

One might argue that a similar principle could be applied to textbooks, and to some extent it does. However, I think there is less incentive for school systems to clamor for similar standards to lower the cost of textbooks, because I think the differences will be less dramatic: even if textbook prices drop a little, books are still physical objects that need to be re-purchased every year due to wear-and-tear or the need to update the edition. With technology, on the other hand, the difference between two or twenty states using a system could make a great difference to the affordability of the system.

The longest distance between two points

In class this past week, we each presented on a research project we’d carried out about electronic tools designed to address a social problem. The presentations were all so wonderful and ingenious! Topics ranged from documenting vanishing cultures, to youth radio stations, to resources for ADD sufferers. Really cool stuff.

During the presentations, I couldn’t help but think how nice it was that our attention was being drawn to such a diversity of ideas, organizations, missions, and technologies. It seemed like some of the groups my classmates discussed might benefit from one another’s innovations. For instance, one student reported on a group in Africa called Naledi3d that maintains a database of virtual reality tutorials—on, say, farming techniques—which enables widespread users to view and use the lesson, even if they have limited literacy. Another student reported on groups in the US that aim to help the homeless find employment. It seemed like some of the US groups could adapt the notion of a tutorial database incorporating graphic content to the needs of their audience. The skills taught would be different—guides to service industry positions, for instance, rather than farming instructions—but the underlying concept seemed transferable.

These musings led me to consider the broader concept of intellectual cross-fertilization. What’s striking here is that these groups serve quite different audiences and in most situations wouldn’t come into contact. Oftentimes, it seems that good ideas emerge from just such happenstance—two apparently unconnected concepts happen to collide in someone’s head. The web makes it easy to search for the answer to a specific question. But what about when we don’t even know what the question is, or even that we should be asking one? Especially in distance learning environments, how can we provide time and space for such collisions to occur?

Well, one way for teachers of online classes to introduce that element of serendipity might be to take advantage of the various backgrounds of the students themselves, by, for instance, requiring them to write blogs and comment on one another’s ideas. Or teachers could rely on future events to supply surprises: for instance, students could follow current world leaders in the news and hold a weekly online discussion about the leaders’ adventures, which would no doubt allow for unexpected and interesting comparisons. Another strategy might be to assign traditional research projects, but to ask students to recombine them in unconventional ways, as sort of “research mash-ups”—for instance, a pair of students in an American history class who happened to research Harriet Tubman and Woodrow Wilson might be asked to think together about what themes or principles connect these two figures.

This still seems to me to be question worthy of further thought, because so often what we celebrate about technology is its power to streamline, to find the shortest distance between two points. Here, we’re looking for the opposite—for the meandering route that offers unexpected discoveries.

Geography lessons

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about “mind maps” or “concept maps”—web-like visualizations that represent ideas, words, or objects and the relationships among them. We used mind-mapping this week for an in-class group activity, via the website Mindmeister. Although I have friends who frequently use mind-mapping to brainstorm scholarly papers, research problems, etc., I’d never used the technique myself. To be honest, I felt a little skeptical; it felt so “gimmicky.” I preferred to brainstorm via stream-of-consciousness style notes. But after our class, I was intrigued enough to give it a try.

Since we’d worked with Mindmeister as a team in class, I hadn’t carried out much hands-on work with the tool, so my first step was to try creating my own mind map. As an example, I wanted to try mapping a topic around which I had few preconceived opinions or mental schematics. I chose the topic “health” and spent about ten minutes sketching out a map. Here is the resulting diagram.

To my surprise, the mind-mapping technique really did get my ideas flowing in a different way. For instance, if I’d been taking notes in my usual linear fashion, I think I would have name-checked emotional health and moved on; noting it as an idea-node weighted equally with physical health encouraged me to incorporate the concept of emotional health into my ongoing thought process, with the result that I added “stress management” to the “lifestyle” node.

Interesting. To further spur my thoughts, I turned to one of the recommended course readings, “The effects of a concept map-based information display in an electronic portfolio system on information processing and retention in a fifth-grade science class covering the Earth's atmosphere.” The focus of this study was not on creating concept maps, but on the merits of concept map-based navigation of electronic portfolio systems (in this case, for a fifth-grade science class) versus the traditional folder-based information display. The students who accessed course information via the concept map display were found to retrieve the information more quickly, score higher, and retain the information longer than their counterparts in a control group (although both groups found the activity fun).

For me, one of the most interesting parts of the article was the teacher’s remark that one of the students, who spoke English as a second language, repeatedly said he preferred concept maps to reading long paragraphs. It makes sense that a portfolio structure encompassing visual demonstrations of relationships, as well as pictures and video representations, would be more accessible to a non-native speaker. (Although here, we shouldn’t forget that different cultures may well choose to map the same concepts in very different ways!).

This remark also made me think about how concept map creation might be used in language learning. Most obviously, one could map out concrete vocabulary nouns (“Here are objects that belong in the kitchen. Here are objects that belong in the library,” etc.). More interestingly, one might ask students to map relationships among objects using connecting arrows, then ask the students to find suitable verbs for those arrows. Or to make maps of more abstract concepts, such as “community.” I’m sure there could be many potential uses I haven’t thought of yet…

Coming back to the technological aspect, I have to say that now I’m excited about mind maps, but somewhat less excited about online tools for building them (or at least about the one I used, Mindmeister). To me, Mindmeister doesn’t offer the flexibility of a whiteboard, or of pen and paper; for instance, I found I couldn’t combine a web with a Venn diagram in my “Health” map. Of course, online tools do boast other advantages, such as the ability to share a map with the whole web or upload photos. But it would be nice to have the best of both worlds. Still, I do think that the technology will reach this point in time.

Thinking about thinking

In this week’s class, I was interested by our discussion of “meta-cognition,”—loosely defined as thinking about one’s own thinking. For example, reading a novel would simply be classified as cognition; musing “Why did I enjoy that novel so much?” would be meta-cognition.

The sheer power of the artificial intelligences that reside in today’s computers poses interesting meta-cognitive questions to learners. The example that springs most readily to my mind is the Perseus Project, an online library that hosts virtually all the most famous works in Ancient Greek and Latin—Caesar, Catullus, Homer, etc. Every word in the text is hyperlinked to a dictionary entry and various other statistics such as the frequency with which it appears in that text, frequency in other Greek texts, etc. Classics classes in literature are typically very translation-heavy, and Perseus can be an incredible timesaver to the busy student. This is especially true when it comes to Ancient Greek, in which verbs can change their morphology quite a bit, forcing the student to waste lots of time flipping through a dictionary looking for the right root form.

Whether to use Perseus or not is something of a debate among Classicists. It seems easy to dismiss the time wasted in long dictionary searches as useless. However, many professors and some students say that the process of searching forces the student to learn the various forms of difficult words, especially common ones, as well as the related words that will tend to show up in the dictionary next to it. It’s all too easy to click on a hyperlink, write down a definition, and move on—which will leave the student in poor shape when it comes time to take the unassisted final exam. A student who owns up to using Perseus will often sheepishly add something like, “Yeah, I know it’s evil, but…” Thought of in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Persues is a shortcut past the boring-but-fundamental memorization—the “knowledge”—to the fun bits, the translation and analysis.

So is Perseus really evil? Myself, I like to advocate a third, technology-enabled way: the tool also allows you to easily sort the Greek words in a text by frequency. A word that recurs several times in critical passages is most likely worth memorizing; some strange word for an herb or a type of shoe, probably not.

So here—and I think the lesson is applicable to other cases, as well—technology does allow us to study smarter. But it forces on us a certain type of discipline that wasn’t at issue before: there’s less gruntwork, but a greater meta-cognitive investment is demanded of the student, who has to honestly assess his or her own learning process. By and large, I think we come out ahead. “Know thyself”…no matter how you translate him, Socrates had a point!

It All Begins

First day of my Web-based Technologies in Education class. It’s taught face-to-face, interestingly enough, and I think it’s going to be fun. I’m very excited to have an opportunity to think deeply about this topic, which I believe could transform educational endeavor over the next ten to twenty years. I almost wrote “revolutionize” …but I'm not sure I know enough yet to make that judgment. It's knowledge I hope to gain over the course of the class.

I suppose I’ve done my fair share of e-learning over the years. I’ve used common informational websites like Wikipedia and read scholarly articles online; I’m also quite interested in language learning and used to be a serious language mp3 junkie. (I admit, it still kind of wows me that I can download an introductory Spanish Podcast or a Stanford professor’s lecture on early Christian history and listen to it standing up on the Boston subway.) Still, I realize that my own experience is just the tip of the iceberg: there are so many more tools out there, and I’m pleased that this class will give me a chance to explore them. I’m particularly looking forward to delving into what makes certain tools more effective than others and how to apply those principles to new projects.

I thought one of the most interesting parts of the class was actually the introduction/ discussion with two of my classmates. I mentioned an interest in girls’ education, and we had a great conversation about female empowerment in developing countries. Prof. Kim had spoken earlier about web-conferencing as a means of granting women greater access to male scholars in parts of the world where gender segregation is the norm, and our group found itself talking about the importance of online learning communities, where gender anonymity might encourage women to participate more freely with male classmates. Conversely, a male classmate in my group spoke about how he’d played an online role-playing game as a female avatar, and was struck by how it felt to be treated as a woman participant.

I’m particularly interested in language learning, and I already think it’s likely I’ll create a digital artifact on this subject for our first assignment. I have some awareness of existing web-based language-learning tools—LiveMocha, Lingus TV, mobile apps like Spanish Anywhere, and even traditional social networking sites like Facebook--but it’s by no means exhaustive. The trick may be to narrow it down: there’s a lot of material out there.

I know it's early, but I am already thinking that for my final project, I might like to pull in some insights from the NGO for which I’ve been volunteering for quite some time, the Nanubhai Education Foundation, which works to improve technology and English education for students at rural public schools in India. Lots of possibilities there, and—as I know!—plenty of constraints to work around. It would be really interesting to take a look at what tools are both needed and feasible in the schools where we operate, and I'd love to come up with a prototype that might be worth developing further for our kids and teachers.