tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29468860667854614102024-03-13T18:13:42.504+00:00adVancEducationadVances and adVancED techniques in EDucation<br> facilitated through principled use of Web 2.019Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-30330837603597935962020-04-12T06:59:00.003+00:002021-02-25T11:53:00.883+00:00Teacher training in the time of COVID-19: From modeling blended workshops in Thailand to TALIN, Teaching and Learning in IsolatioN<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Overview in a Nutshell</b><br />
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In my last post I was reflecting (<a href="https://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2020/02/when-i-wasnt-dreaming.html" target="_blank">when I wasn't dreaming</a>) on my experience one week into the eLearning component of my English Language Specialist assignment through RELO Bangkok. I had been asked to prepare a set of <i>blended </i>workshops (partially online, partially face-to-face) on “<a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978496/Model_Teacher_Unit_1" target="_blank">Using multiliteracies and 21st century skills and tools in your own professional development</a>” and on “<a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978496/Model_Teacher_Unit_1" target="_blank">Writing in tech-enhanced multiliterate classroom</a>s” for delivery to university teachers of English and second and third year education students at various university language centers and institutes around Thailand. The workshops were prepared for delivery through a blended learning platform, based at <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/</a>, which I created using free tools available online, with intent to model for participants how they could implement flipped and blended learning in their own classrooms and with their own students as I had been doing in my own classes throughout the latter part of my teaching career.<br />
<br />
This was followed by a <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/" target="_blank">plenary at Thai TESOL on flipped learning</a>, and then by the 3-week online learning course on <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank">Learning how to create and use a blended learning classroom</a> which I had created in Schoology, also a free tool, and which at the time of my last post, I was one week into facilitating.<br />
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The online course was intended to allow the participants in the workshops to engage in consultation with me, the EL Specialist, on the concepts introduced in the workshops. As the timing of this eLearning course coincided with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic during which many teachers participating in the online course were being thrust into totally online environments with little preparation, my work took on special relevance as it became apparent that those who had already been practicing blended learning techniques were best equipped to adapt to the new circumstances. In hopes of modeling for others how they might move from blended to completely online environments, the materials for the workshops, eLearning, and ongoing community space have been left online where anyone can explore them (at <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com</a> and from there to reach the links embedded in some of the text above).<br />
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<b>A Broader Overview</b><br />
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As one who specializes in teaching languages through technology, and having been invited to come to Thailand and give two intensive weeks of workshops as an English Language Specialist, I had to first propose a menu of workshops that teachers and students at university language centers in Thailand might be interested in. To my relief only two of my topics were chosen, and then I had free reign to design materials to fit those topics. I like to work online, and when face to face teaching is involved, this is often what is meant by 'blended'.<br />
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I had also agreed to give a plenary on flipped learning at Thai TESOL, so my idea was to place materials online in advance for both the workshops and the plenary which participants could access beforehand, then present the materials to the live audience and participants, and finally leave all the materials online for participants to explore later, and in the case of the workshops link to artifacts left online by the many participants in those workshops.<br />
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You almost replay and reconstruct the plenary from my Learning2gether blog post here<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/">https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/</a><br />
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The eLearning component was due to take place for three weeks after the two weeks of workshops and the Thai TESOL conference. My purview as I understood it was not to re-teach what I had taught in the workshops, but to act as a consultant for participants to explore the tools more deeply and apply them to their context. So I set up an interactive environment in Schoology that linked back to what I had presented before, and set projects, one for each week, meant to get participants to use the tools in “<a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank">Creating and Using Blended Learning Classrooms</a>”, the title of the online course.<br />
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When I went to Thailand at the end of January, COVID-19 was just becoming a concern. By the time I wrapped up the online course on March 11 schools were starting to shut down worldwide and it was becoming apparent that what I had been doing the previous six weeks, modeling how to teach f2f in a blended learning environment and then transitioning that to online in my eLearning course, had some potential as a model for others to follow suit in their new circumstances. Participants we spoke to during the course who were having the least difficulty taking their teaching online were ones who were already working in blended learning environments. In that case all that was needed was a synchronous classroom space, such as Zoom. But the first challenge to making that transition is to understand and become familiar with the basic components of a blended learning classroom.<br />
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There was a common thread uniting all of these activities. All modeled the flipped learning approach, whereby materials were put online in advance of the workshops and plenary. The participants could have seen them before each event, but while participating, I explicitly encouraged them to access to the materials, and in every case the complete set of materials was left online for follow up and further exploration by the participants or anyone else who might come along afterwards.<br />
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Here's what I left online and where to find it. It’s all available for use under creative common license, attribution / share alike.<br />
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The blended workshop course materials which I introduced face-to-face at several locations in Thailand are here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/</a><br />
<ul>
<li>Artifacts that the participants created online at each workshop can be found here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138117909/archives2020">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138117909/archives2020</a></li>
</ul>
These records were made of my plenary and workshop at Thai TESOL<br />
<ul>
<li>My plenary on on The What, Why, and How of Flipped Learning: Harmonizing diversity by developing skills in podcasting, webcasting, and digital storytelling <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/">https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/</a></li>
<li>My workshop on Teaching English through coding using collaborative projects that don’t require specialist skills or even a computer <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137987313/Coding_without_computers">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137987313/Coding_without_computers</a></li>
</ul>
The eLearning course portal through which I facilitated use of the materials from the workshops is here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom</a><br />
<ul>
<li>The interactive part of the course was in Schoology; accessible only to enrolled users via the instructions here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom#Howtojointhiscourse">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom#Howtojointhiscourse</a></li>
<li>There were 10 webinars conducted in the eLearning course, recorded on YouTube and archived here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138675954/eLearning_Archive">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138675954/eLearning_Archive</a> </li>
</ul>
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<br />
<b>The Workshops</b><br />
<br />
The workshops aimed to create a model of a teacher who him- or herself models effective ways of learning to his or her students. I hoped to be that role model for the participants in my workshops by giving them a variety of things to do through an interface that any one of them could themselves create in their own classes (not using any tools that would need to be purchased). Blended learning implies that there are various modalities to that learning, one usually being face-to-face, as in a classroom. So it encourages teachers to have a web portal through which they can work in a transparent way where everyone can find course materials in a predictable location, not handed out to be stored in binders that students may or not have with them on a given day in class, or for other reasons not be able to get access to in the disorder of their binders.<br />
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Online access has its drawbacks as well, but is in the long run a more stable and more efficient platform in contexts where the technology supports it. So my workshops were aimed at modeling how to set up blended learning environments that the participants could bring up on their devices, explore and interact with during the workshop, and take home with them at the end of it along with some ideas on creating their own.<br />
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<b>The eLearning Component</b><br />
<br />
This brought us into the final phase of the project, the eLearning. Timed to begin about three weeks after the end of the on-site blended component, I understood that I was to set up consultations for any participants in the workshops who would like to explore blended learning in greater depth one-on-one with the English Language Specialist. Accordingly I set up a Schoology portal for it with interactive forums which linked for content to the workshop materials I had put online for the face-to-face workshops. I structured the 3-weeks of the course to encourage further exploration of the tools for blended learning, and assigned participants a project at the end of each week. The first was to use digital tools to create a digital poster of some kind, the second was to craft a digital story, and the third was to create a lesson or a portal that might mount online something the participants would want to teach. For each project I created my own model examples, and highlighted the work of participants who completed theirs.<br />
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Few participants carried out any of these assignments, but the course coincided with increasing concern over the COVID-19 pandemic. By the second week of the course, schools in Thailand and elsewhere were starting to close, and there was a sudden need for teachers to learn quickly how to move into purely online environments. It turned out from our webinars that teachers who had best succeeded at doing that quickly had already been using blended learning in their face-to-face classes, and as one teacher from Korea told us, if you were working from an existing blended portal, to go online, “just add Zoom”. It’s probably not that simple, but this was in fact what my online course was modeling, going from the blended learning format that I had modeled at my face-to-face workshops in Thailand, to a completely online one now that I had returned home and was working to carry on these consultancies in a totally online space.<br />
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Of the 42 people who signed up for the eLearning, only a few were from Thailand, but I had opened the course up to my wider network in an effort to bring in multiple voices and perspectives, and increase the volume of interaction. It is common for people to register in online courses and then not participate (i.e. lurk) but by the end of the three weeks there were 23 unique participants who had joined us at some point. This is not a huge number, but our 10 webinars remained consistently attended, and from the recordings you can see where the ones in March became increasingly focused on the need for teachers to come to grips with technology that would help them to engage their students in meaningful learning in their increasingly isolated situations.<br />
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<b>Reflections</b><br />
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It is not easy to predict how a project will evolve over the course of its delivery considering what is learned day to day in meeting participants where they normally work and study and learning more about their contexts each day, and altering one’s product as a result of each encounter. One great advantage to working in an online space is that changes can be made daily if necessary (and often were) to reflect what was learned one day and thereby improve the next encounter. Thus many parts of my workshops were changed, even the emphasis and order of presentation of materials, from the first week to the next. And also, what participants can see now online for their workshops is likely improved slightly over what they actually did in those workshops, especially if I met them in the first week.<br />
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The eLearning course was even more susceptible to subtle and not so subtle feedback from participants on a day to day basis. Because so few of the expected participants (from Thailand) signed up for the eLearning, I had to discern the interest of those who did pretty much on the fly and tweak the course accordingly. In other eLearning courses I have conducted where there is no extrinsic reason for participants to be there (no certificates or fulfilment of prerequisites for a larger goals), the course has to respond to their interests and curiosity, and I have found that participants might not have much motivation to perform the exercises envisaged for them by the facilitator, whereas they might more wholeheartedly engage in interactions more meaningful to them. As Jay Cross once put it, people love to learn but they hate to be taught, so my most successful online ventures have been ones where the community drives the curriculum, and I have sustained communities of practice for as long as 20 years now on the strength of the mutual interests of their participants.<br />
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What happened with this eLearning course was that it became especially relevant to that group of participants who were both active in the course and who were also having to suddenly meet their students online. In addition it was becoming apparent, especially after our March 1 webinar, that blended learning was a critical precursor to moving courses online, and also that this is exactly what was being modeled in this course. So we began focusing on this aspect, especially in the last webinars in week three, where we started attracting teachers from around the world to share with us how they were coping with the abrupt shift in expectations of how they would be teaching their students in the near future.<br />
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<b>The Aftermath in time of COVID-19</b><br />
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The course ended on March 11 but not the interest in this topic, which was starting to impact students, their teachers, and trainers of those teachers all over the world. In my case, I don’t teach students per se, but I interact with colleagues from all over the world in numerous online spaces as well as as face-to-face conferences, such as the TESOL conference in Denver, which were then on the verge of being canceled. TESOL and the CALL Interest section, to name just two professional associations, were scrambling to identify resources for their members, and the topic was not going away.<br />
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So I took steps to perpetuate the blended learning course community by creating a MOOC / Community, a space for open ended interaction, which I left up as a permanent announcement on the Schoology course, and as a link from the sidebar of the Blended Learning Workshops wiki here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138923232/MOOC_Community_Extension">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138923232/MOOC_Community_Extension</a><br />
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In that document I outlined how the community could move itself forward in pursuit of its exploration of resources for dealing with COVID-19. Under the heading of What can you do here? there are two suggestions. One is that community members could help us crowd-source resources for people having to transition suddenly from face-to-face to online. For that purpose I set up a crowd-sourced Google Doc on which anyone with the link could write, here<br />
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pm4Q_jJbrWKu38-xv8-2QFrn-ialnZBT-qDofoXAWcY/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pm4Q_jJbrWKu38-xv8-2QFrn-ialnZBT-qDofoXAWcY/edit?usp=sharing</a>.<br />
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I began to move community suggestions into a page I had set up in the last week of the course<br />
<a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138990084/What_if_my_school_suddenly_closes">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138990084/What_if_my_school_suddenly_closes</a><br />
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I had also set up a listserv for the MOOC / Community space at <a href="https://groups.io/g/blendedclassrooms/">https://groups.io/g/blendedclassrooms/</a>. However this list only attracted 3 course participants besides myself. Meanwhile though, other communities I was in were starting to jell around the issue; in particular <a href="https://groups.io/g/webheadsinaction/topics">https://groups.io/g/webheadsinaction/topics</a>.<br />
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<b>TALIN, Teaching and Learning in IsolatioN</b><br />
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Webheads in Action is a community that I had started 20 years ago. It had been experiencing a gradual revival slowly on its own but this accelerated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This prompted me to take yet another initiative which I called TALIN, Teaching and Learning in IsolatioN. The idea for TALIN was prompted by suggestions in what I called “numerous cross-fertilizing communities of practice that there was needed a space where members of these CoPs could meet online and talk informally to one another about how they are dealing with changes in their personal and professional contexts and what they are doing to help others in this trying time of pandemic.”<br />
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I set up TALIN in another crowd-sourced Google Doc at TinyURL: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/talin2020">https://tinyurl.com/talin2020</a>, but this one requires users to request edit access and provide credentials. I even created a Facebook page for it at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/talin2020">https://www.facebook.com/groups/talin2020</a>. Since that group’s creation around the first of April, the Facebook group has attracted 24 members, and the group has held or is planning a webinar every two days through the first three weeks in April. I expect this to be sustained for as long as schools are closed for the pandemic, but the group is under my <a href="https://learning2gether.net/">https://Learning2gether.net</a> umbrella, and its activities should extend the number of podcasts produced since 2010 to well over 450.<br />
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So, as regards sustainability, successful efforts appear to be strongly community-based. As Clay Shirkey so well explained in his book <i>Cognitive Surplus</i>, such movements are motivated by some collective desire to achieve outcomes mutually beneficial to a group, and they work only as long as they are free, inclusive, and driven bottom-up. Many well-meaning initiatives are driven top-down, and these are the ones that are hardest to sustain. But as we see from this example, the movement might be sustained but be in danger of losing its connection with its original impetus.<br />
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Find more about TALIN here from a presentation I gave on May 9, 2020 at the Virtual Round Table Web Conference organized by Heike Philp:<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/05/09/talinvste-kotoba-miners-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-at-the-2020-virtual-round-table-web-conference/">https://learning2gether.net/2020/05/09/talinvste-kotoba-miners-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-at-the-2020-virtual-round-table-web-conference/</a></span></li>
<li>Slides: <a href="https://bit.ly/talin2020">https://bit.ly/talin2020</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and the YouTube video </span><a href="https://youtu.be/iOYPkmWPAiY" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://youtu.be/iOYPkmWPAiY</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></li>
</ul>
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<b>Conclusion</b><br />
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My experience in Thailand was highly positive. The work was challenging but the Thai participants were gracious and appreciative, and receptive to learning and experimenting with new tools. At the end of each workshop, one participant was tasked with standing before the group and delivering some words of thanks for the time we had just spent together, and then everyone would put their palms together and nod respectfully and in unison in my direction. I was particularly pleased with the way I was encouraged to create the materials I used in whatever way I saw fit, and with the hospitality and logistical support of the RELO office in Bangkok.<br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-30776648545416943262020-02-23T03:40:00.003+00:002020-02-23T05:49:17.841+00:00When I wasn't dreamingLast night, when I wasn't dreaming, I was thinking. Now I'm a week into the eLearning course which I managed to get set up for a kickoff webinar that was delayed to February 20. You can find the description of the course here, <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom</a>, and here's the recording of the first webinar:<br />
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I had been given reassurance that the course would go ahead as planned when the RELO team in Bangkok informed me on February 8 that they were about to start promoting it. I was at CamTESOL in Phnom Penh at the time with a workshop to give the following day, and the day after that my beautiful assistant Bobbi and I flew to Thailand on a well-deserved break, having pre-paid for diving for three days. I downloaded Schoology manuals on my cell phone and took them on the boat with me, but didn't have much time or energy to focus on the eLearning course from the 8th until the day we spent transiting airports February 14, and I woke up in Penang on the 15th with only two days before the planned start of the course.<br />
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The first snag had been that I really didn't know much about Schoology, the platform I had selected on the basis of having experienced courses which others had developed, and been a collaborator on one that someone else had set up. Had I finally over-extended myself this time? I had come to the realization that there was a lot about Schoology that was not intuitive and that others had done for me in the past. So I had to set a full day aside to start googling my questions about Schoology and then systematically read the hits on the manuals that Schoology had thoughtfully placed on line to help users get started with the tool. Through this effort I was soon in position to get the course set up.<br />
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By then RELO Bangkok and I had decided to start with the first webinar on Feb 20, but the next problem was getting the course populated. There were not many respondents from Thailand to the announcements about the course from the week before and the original start date of Feb 17 came and went with only a 4 participants signed up besides another handful who were in other ways associated with managing the course. But RELO Bankok was amenable to my reaching out to my other networks, and once I had posted an invitation to my Facebook groups and on three TESOL Communities lists, we had 30 people registered before day of the first webinar on Feb 20.<br />
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Because the course had been planned as follow-up consultancies for participants whom it was assumed would have mostly been familar the my workshops at <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/</a>, I had not built in any tutorial materials into the mix, and I had no idea who the new participants were, so I set up discussion forums asking who they were and why there were there. And on Feb 20, a few of them appeared at the opening webinar and I began to get an understanding of what direction the course should take. <i>When </i>we should meet was the first issue, but I was able to set up <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BoG7NzRjwmlj557V4rnaXkiQbSvKiM3FYobwCravYVk/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">a kind of calendar</a> once I discovered the participants responding were in South America (EST time zone), the Middle East, Thailand of course, and the rest of Asia (but not Japan, which would have been one time zone too far). From this we were able to fix a time for most of our events, 1400 UTC, waking hours morning and night for our complete range of participants.<br />
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So now we're working on the content for the course. I had loosely planned it on having participants learn by doing. Accordingly, there were three tasks, one for each week of the course.<br />
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<h3>
Week 1 - create a digital poster or infographic</h3>
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The first task for the week that ends three days from now is to create a "digital poster." This could be anything a participant wanted to project, as long as it had a link. I suggested it should have some mulitimedia element, or be an all-media presentation (a screen cast using Screencast-o-matic, for example). The the purpose of the assignment was to get participants to surface their existing digital literacies and to add to that tools I had referenced from my workshops, or that they might have learned about from others in the course. It's a community-as-curriculum approach, where participants drive what gets learned around their interests and what they need to know, and an active hands-on approach, where they learn by doing, making mistakes and correcting them, and from meaningful problem solving.<br />
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The problem with that approach is in getting participants to DO it with minimal guidance, though I have been tryng to steer them to my workshop materials, where the guidance is, expecially on the three tools I find most useful for creating blended learning environments and classrooms. Here are the links to those tools in my workshops:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Jing for screen image (and even video) capture<br /><a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Imagecapture" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Imagecapture</a></li>
<li>Screencast-o-matic for capturing video screencasts along with mic and webcam<br /><a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Screencasting/capture" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Screencasting/capture</a></li>
<li>PBworks for cobbling together a quick portal which I find invaluable for drafting my ideas for blended learnng environments<br /><a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Createafreeportalspace" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Createafreeportalspace</a></li>
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I would like to add to Week 1's mix one more element, Yo! Teach.<br />
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Yo!Teach! is a backchannel chat tool that was developed to replace Today's Meet, which died at some point last year, despite having become quite popular for passing messages to and from classes and other gatherings. I learned about Yo!Teach via an article in the TESOL CALL-IS Newsletter:<br />
<a href="http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html" target="_blank">http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html</a><br />
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Yo!Teach is also listed as one possible replacement for Today's Meet at this website<br />
<a href="https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement" target="_blank">https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement</a><br />
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When meeting blended learning classes online, it can be useful to set up a back channel. Then if anyone is having a problem, that person can post a message in Yo!Teach and stand a chance of there being someone at the other end who can help. If there is no one there you can at least leave your message and someone should see it and reply, or if you leave a name or contact, get back to you at some point.<br />
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Yo! Teach was designed as a back channel to be used concurrently with live events. So I can monitor it during office hours, for the benefit of anyone who wanted to ask a question asynchronously (or synchronously) and know that they would be able to get it answered in live chat during office hours.<br />
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Week 2 - Create a digital story</h3>
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The follow-on task for the second week is to advance from exploration and budding skills with the recommeded tools into something that can illustrate a narative, or digital story. This came up in the first week at the first office hour of the course, when Magali from Ecuador appeared and told us about a platform being developed at her university which featured a means for students to create digital stories using the primitive tools built into the platform. I suggested that she could use tools available online that she would have more control over, and link from the school's platform to the online artifacts that she and her students created in the wild using pre-existing Web 2.0 tools. That conversation was recorded, and you can see it here.<br />
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Digital storytelling is a concept that transcends multiple purposes. As with the simpler "digital poster", it would be an excercise that pushes participants to carry their skills forward from a simple infographic the first week to a narrative using digital tools which they would bring to bear on the project according to their abilities. And the benefit of that would be that everyone would see what everyone else's abilities were and scaffold one another when those abilities were a rung or two up the scaffold. Everyone would learn from one another.<br />
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So now that I'm getting some interaction from participants in the course, three days into its emergence, I have clearer ideas about how to proceed. Now I'm ready to move forward with materials for the second week that would focus us on tools that, through the ruse of finding and using them to create a digital story, would get people thinking about and working with the tools that would be most useful in creating and using blended (and flipped) learning classrooms.<br />
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<br />Week 3 - Create some aspect of a blended learning classroom</h3>
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The third week asks participants to start some aspect of a blended learning classroom. Again there is no instruction apart from what the instructor / English Language Specialist is modeling. When put in the position of having to appear in Thailand with a platform that would encompass my workshops, I fell back on PBworks. I tried both Wix and Weebly but found those frustrating. PBworks allows me most flexible control over my portals. I can embed images and other graphics and even videos. It's HTML-based and I can get at the code. It's quick to work with so I can alter it one day to the next. I have a system of setting up archives and using the sidebar for easy navigation around the site. The sidebar and table of contents widgit create bookmarks throughout the site which can each be linked to, so pointing participants to exactly where you want them to look is quick and easy. I haven't found anything better than or that even comes close to PBworks for power, simplicity of implemetation, and speed and alterability, except perhaps Google Docs, which could do almost the same thing but without the sidebar.<br />
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For the eLearning I added the Schoology layer because PBworks lacks a way for users to interact with one another. Schoology can host forums and announce events. It's also quick and easy to work with, moreso than Moodle. Although the complexity of Moodle makes it more robust, Moodle has to be hosted through someone who maintains the server, and this creates problem both in the permissions you have to control your own course and the stability of that server. If you want to host with someone whose business it is to host other people's Moodles, that usually comes with a fee. Schoology at the moment offers reliable hosting with no fee for the basic functions. So it's a good starter platform for creating an LMS.<br />
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The foregoing two paragraphs in this post are my content for Week 3, but I'm not explicit in teaching that in my coursel My intent is to model to participants how to create blending learning classrooms by getting them into one and letting them see how it looks and feels, and do the same in their own contexts if the wish, or apply the look and feel to other tools if they have access to others. So that gets us through week 3 and to the end of the course.<br />
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After the course, once I've stopped dreaming</h3>
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But life goes on, and this is what I was thinking about last night as I lay awake at dawn, the realities I'm recording here encroaching on my dreams. In April I am scheduled to give a presentation at the TESOL conference in Denver as a member of a panel on "Creating Materials in a Digital World," which has been included in the TESOL 2020 convention program in Denver, April 1st, 2020, 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM in room 402 at The Colorado Convention Center.<br />
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This came about when the Materials Writers Interest Section, in conjunction with Career Paths Professional Learning Network, issued a call last August for panelists "who have experience adapting, creating, and using digital materials to teach English and train English teachers. ... Such experience may include, but is not limited to, blended and hybrid learning, online learning, gamification, differentiated learning, building online learning communities and teacher education." The abstract for the panel is:<br />
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As the world becomes more dependent on technology ELT professionals find ways to adapt. This presentation shows participants in all stages of their career paths various ways they can adapt, create, and develop materials for digital learning in a variety of contexts for language teaching and teacher training.</blockquote>
Although I had neither conceived nor imagined this English Language Specialist project when I applied to be on the panel, it is definitely what I'll be focusing on.<br />
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This brings me to one last part of the jigsaw puzzle. Every three months I have to produce an article, preferably an edited one, for the On the Internet column of TESL-EJ, <a href="http://tesl-ej.org/" target="_blank">http://tesl-ej.org/</a>. I wrote <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume23/ej92/ej92int/" target="_blank">the last one</a> and it is perhaps bad form for an editor to write two in a row for his own column, but I may have little choice, as my calls for papers go unanswered. A write-up of my TESOL presentation might make a worthy article for the next issue of OTI if no one else comes forward.<br />
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In this post, I may have got started on that article :-)Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-18398221606222626342020-02-15T04:00:00.000+00:002020-02-15T10:01:43.788+00:00And now, after a month of workshops and conferences, the back side of the flip<div>
Bobbi and I just returned home after midnight last night from the most amazing month. I guess I'll be piecing it together over the coming month, picking up the pieces off the internet and putting them together in an even better picture of what took place, but here is where the pieces have kind of come together.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12hlh3qHrYc/XkdzCy4xhVI/AAAAAAAAQFM/ToMHXtkqjHQy7GdJaKD_8UG2DQ_7IfKvACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/2020jan23_151732.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12hlh3qHrYc/XkdzCy4xhVI/AAAAAAAAQFM/ToMHXtkqjHQy7GdJaKD_8UG2DQ_7IfKvACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/2020jan23_151732.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
I was invited to do an English Language Specialist gig in Thailand involving giving workshops from January 20-29, a plenary and another workshop at the ThaiTESOL conference in Bangkok, followed by three weeks of eLearning to be delivered from my home in Penang. So, we flew to Thailand on Jan 18 and were put up in the Conrad Hotel, nearby the US Embassy and in the most congested part of Bangkok, Sukhumvit Road. We were on the executive floor which had breakfast in a special lounge, full buffet without crowds, and came with an evening happy hour with enough of a buffet to fill us for dinner. Lunch was usually provided by the RELO's office or the places where I gave workshops while we were there, but if not, we never felt the need for it. </div>
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After dinner I usually had to focus on my next day's workshops anyway, which I constantly fine-tuned according to what I'd learned the previous day (i.e. how to improve them) and made changes to accomodate the next day's audience, whether I would be presenting to undergraduate students or practicing EFL teachers, Thai or native speakers, number of participants (anywhere between 14 and 40), and length of the next day's workshops, which could be anywhere between 2 and 4 hours. All this was manipulated and archive through the wiki portal I'd set up as a home page for the workshops, here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.<wbr></wbr>pbworks.com/</a> .<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtjGDvtTK9o/XkdzSUFf4iI/AAAAAAAAQFQ/_dvWBp5TaDczoMk_81k1uxf6LkaK4U70ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/2020jan24_145727.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtjGDvtTK9o/XkdzSUFf4iI/AAAAAAAAQFQ/_dvWBp5TaDczoMk_81k1uxf6LkaK4U70ACLcBGAsYHQ/s400/2020jan24_145727.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
The workshops were on flipped and blended learning and I was modeling how to create a blended learning environment and flipping that to optimize meaningful and self-directed learning. The wiki was the core to that but I also had a Google Slides presentation, <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HwSaXa3mT2HrcQz2dh7dD1e7fTHaofIbU7hzexHp-ZU/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">https://docs.<wbr></wbr>google.com/presentation/d/<wbr></wbr>1HwSaXa3mT2HrcQz2dh7dD1e7fTHao<wbr></wbr>fIbU7hzexHp-ZU/edit?usp=<wbr></wbr>sharing</a>, the better to walk participants through the parts of my wiki that I would cover on a given day. </div>
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The wiki included polls, Padlet, and places where teachers could create wiki backchannels for communicating with students asynchronously or on the fly, in the classroom. I always encouraged participants to aggregate what we did in any workshop around a Twitter tag, unique for each day. This vacuumed up a lot of what the participants produced each day which I dumped onto a wiki archive for each set of workshops, here: <a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138117909/archives2020" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.<wbr></wbr>pbworks.com/w/page/138117909/<wbr></wbr>archives2020</a><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R6P62SxEYN0/Xkd2diDXKeI/AAAAAAAAQFo/8APYajVE2d0zR70xPCoDBnXnqVJ3RGRGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/20200128_110208.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R6P62SxEYN0/Xkd2diDXKeI/AAAAAAAAQFo/8APYajVE2d0zR70xPCoDBnXnqVJ3RGRGQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/20200128_110208.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
To complicate things Bobbi and I were flown or driven between four different cities in Thailand -- in and out of Bangkok to Ubon Ratchathani, Bangsaen, and our favorite, Chiang Rai, which ironically we'd just passed through the year before on our two-day boat trip up the Mekong from Luang Prabang, on our way down to Chiang Mai. Normally we'd leave our hotel before breakfast and fly (or in the case of Bangsaen, drive) to the next destination, give a workshop there, overnight in a hotel, and give more workshops in the morning before returning to Bangkok to rest at the Conrad before workshops in Bangkok the following morning, rinse and repeat for two weeks, with time off on Saturday and Sunday.</div>
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This went on until my last workshop in Bangkok Wed Jan 29, and then the next day the annual ThaiTESOL conference started, and I was the plenary speaker on the first day right after lunch. The talk was on Flipped Learning so I got Jeff Magoto, a colleague in Oregon who was conducting an <a href="http://evo2020proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/135536043/Flipped_Learning_in_language_teaching" target="_blank">EVO session on that topic</a>, to allow me to simulcast it to his participants. He recorded it in Zoom for me, and I blogged it, with the video recording and all the slides and ancillary artifacts flipped onto the Internet here: </div>
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<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-what-why-and-how-of-flipped-learning-harmonizing-diversity-by-developing-skills-in-podcasting-webcasting-and-digital-storytelling/" target="_blank">https://learning2gether.<wbr></wbr>net/2020/01/30/vance-stevens-<wbr></wbr>plenary-at-thaitesol-on-the-<wbr></wbr>what-why-and-how-of-flipped-<wbr></wbr>learning-harmonizing-<wbr></wbr>diversity-by-developing-<wbr></wbr>skills-in-podcasting-<wbr></wbr>webcasting-and-digital-<wbr></wbr>storytelling/</a></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FXEhAHul0bU/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="340" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FXEhAHul0bU?feature=player_embedded" width="540"></iframe></div>
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I also gave a workshop the following day at the ThaiTESOL conference, on teaching EFL through coding, coasted through the last day of the conference, and then Bobbi and I flew back the following day to Penang, where we repacked and flew just a few days later to Phnom Penh, where I gave the same workshop at the CamTESOL conference.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NHRxQuWbT5k/Xkdu6OCQDdI/AAAAAAAAQFA/MpTn7mg_6ZMIOxjMttnqCVaDlRiSH7x3wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/20200208_monks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NHRxQuWbT5k/Xkdu6OCQDdI/AAAAAAAAQFA/MpTn7mg_6ZMIOxjMttnqCVaDlRiSH7x3wCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/20200208_monks.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
I recorded this one myself, with a larger audience, better delivery on my part, and livelier dynamics with the participants, here: <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2020/02/09/teaching-english-through-coding-using-collaborative-projects-that-dont-require-specialist-skills-or-even-a-computer/" target="_blank">https://learning2gether.<wbr></wbr>net/2020/02/09/teaching-<wbr></wbr>english-through-coding-using-<wbr></wbr>collaborative-projects-that-<wbr></wbr>dont-require-specialist-<wbr></wbr>skills-or-even-a-computer/</a><br />
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While at CamTESOL, I found that the Regional English Language Officer, RELO Bangkok, was preparing to announce the 3-week follow-up to my workshops to be held online from Feb 17 to March 7. This had been in the overall plan but details had been left way up in the air until the RELO got back from a retreat in Bali Feb 8. Meanwhile we had arranged to fly the day after CamTESOL to Phuket in Thailand and then get a taxi an hour north to Khao Lak where there was reputed to be good diving. We executed this plan, dived for three days, and then flew back from Phuket to Penang via KL. </div>
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Now I've got to come up with a store full of goodies for the eLearning that starts in just two days. I've got a storefront up here, </div>
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<a href="http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom" target="_blank">http://workshops2020.pbworks.<wbr></wbr>com/w/page/138546024/Create_<wbr></wbr>Your_Blended_Learning_<wbr></wbr>Classroom</a></div>
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but at the Schoology link, I've yet to stock the shelves. I need to get that done today and tomorrow.</div>
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I'll complete this post with pictures and videos when I get a moment, and create a new post on the eLearning in March. Meanwhile, you can follow a lot of this at my more often updated blog, <a href="https://learning2gether.net/">https://learning2gether.net/</a></div>
Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-50163355297835687782019-12-08T14:23:00.003+00:002019-12-13T10:42:02.183+00:00Presentation idea: Flipping conference presentations in 2019APACALL Newsletter #23 has just come out. I wrote an article for it. For the record, it's:<br />
Stevens, V. (2019). Flipping conference presentations. <i>APACALL Newsletter 23</i>, December, 14-18. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.apacall.org/news/APACALL_Newsletter23.pdf">http://www.apacall.org/news/APACALL_Newsletter23.pdf</a><br />
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I want to turn this into a blog post so that I can update and annotate it. So what follows is the text of the article as published above, but illustrated and hyperlinked in such a way that readers can better follow the flip. Here goes:</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Flipping Conference Presentations in 2019</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Vance Stevens</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://learning2gether.net/"><b>Learning2gether.net</b></a>, Penang, Malaysia</span></div>
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At conferences I have attended this year, I have given several presentations primarily focusing on two themes. </div>
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<li>The first of these was <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GWVtAH2yfp5tL3bdMg58_M5Deq36Ot_jQ_w8rflsGuA/edit#heading=h.wwfgxw6e65fd" target="_blank">SMALL, a construct I have been writing about since 2009</a> </b>and which stands for Social Media-Assisted Language Learning. </li>
<li>The other theme I have been pursuing is a technique I have developed for encouraging weak non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers to develop fluency in their writing by giving them feedback in Google docs using the voice option available on mobile and tablet computers (<a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf" target="_blank"><b>Stevens, 2019a</b></a>). </li>
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These presentations might be of more than passing interest to readers of this blog because of how I managed to “flip” them, which is to say, </div>
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<li>get them up online in advance of the presentation, </li>
<li>refer the live or online audience to the slides and other materials for viewing at their fingertips and on their personal devices while I am presenting, </li>
<li>and then put these and all related materials online so that the audience, or anyone for that matter, might view the materials later. </li>
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For this purpose, I use <a href="https://learning2gether.net/"><b>https://learning2gether.net/</b></a><a href="https://learning2gether.net/" target="_blank">,</a> which is a podcast site where I have produced over 430 episodes since 2010 on various aspects of bridging learning technology with language learning pedagogy. <b><a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/34456755/archiveindex" target="_blank">You can see an index of all these podcast episodes here</a></b>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Thinking SMALL</i></span></div>
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One of the better examples of this occurred in April, 2019 at the Penang English Language Learning and Teaching Association (PELLTA, <a href="http://pellta.org/"><b>http://pellta.org/</b></a>) international conference in Penang, Malaysia where I presented a version of my paper entitled Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning (<a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf" target="_blank"><b>Stevens, 2019a</b></a>).</div>
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I had earlier that year conducted a survey of teachers on their perspectives on using social media with students and had <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TCUtMPy7LerMd1N7gYNH1tkS-8MCKtCA0q0rk3RLGUU/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">presented the results</a></b> in March as part of a panel at a CALL-IS Academic Session on SMALL: Research, Practice, Impact of Social Media-Assisted Language Learning, which had been Webcast from TESOL 2019 in Atlanta, so we had a recording of the entire symposium; and I had placed my Google Slides online, where they can be found at <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TCUtMPy7LerMd1N7gYNH1tkS-8MCKtCA0q0rk3RLGUU/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b>Stevens 2019 (March 13)</b></a> along with the video link to my part of the panel.</div>
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That talk focused more on the research results than did the one I was planning for Penang. Based on what I had presented in Atlanta, I revised the Atlanta Google Slides presentation to reflect what changes I intended to make in Penang, and placed it on open access where anyone with the link could view it here: <b><a href="http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-family: Verdana, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s linear 0s; vertical-align: baseline;">http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance</a>.</b> </div>
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I then rehearsed the presentation in Zoom while sharing my screen as a dress-rehearsal for the presentation itself, and uploaded the mp4 recording file to YouTube. I then put links in the Google Slides linking to the YouTube rehearsal recording, which you can see here:</div>
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I next announced to my personal learning networks that I was planning to webcast in Zoom live from my conference presentation venue. To my live and distance audiences, I noted that I would only be able to overview the topic in the half hour available to presenters; therefore the presentation would be flipped. By this I meant that the full version of the presentation; i.e. slides, write up, and rehearsal video, were being made available for viewing before the brief live presentation itself.</div>
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To make the link more accessible to my on-site participants I created a TinyURL to the slides, <b><a href="http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance">http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance</a></b>, and communicated that to them at the beginning of my presentation, rather than try to get across to them the full and more complex link to the Google Slides. With a tiny URL, the TinyURL.com part is easy for audiences to remember or type into a browser, and I was able to specify the logically remembered <b>pellta2019vance </b>when I generated the TinyURL.</div>
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During the on-site presentation, I pointed out to those present that they could bring up my slides right then if they wished on their personal devices and not only follow them that way, but have access to all the live links that existed on almost every slide to provide greater depth to the presentation. I pointed out that after the presentation, they could review the slides, read the write-up, and watch the rehearsal recording to see what I had intended to say, as well as see the recording that I was making of the presentation itself, which I would upload later to YouTube. I told them I would place the link to the video and all the other artifacts I would afterwards put online, at the link they already had, as you can now see in slide 2 at <b><a href="http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance">http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance</a>.</b></div>
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One of those links to other artifacts was to the blog post I created on my Learning2gether site, where they and anyone reading this would not only be able to reconstruct the presentation, but seek greater depth in the presentation that I had already given in Atlanta, and also in the one that I would be giving that summer at the CALL Research Conference in Hong Kong, which I also recorded in Zoom, and which furthermore resulted in a formal chapter being published in the conference proceedings (<a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf" target="_blank"><b>Stevens, 2019a</b></a>). All of this material and all these links can be found online in my blog at <b><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/" target="_blank">Stevens 2019 (April 19)</a></b> and in my <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ls3ZeIEk9vssYXBxoVbzn0_K99Wz9vcxWJU_v3wmgSA/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b>Google Slides presentation, slide 25</b></a>.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
Supporting Student Writing with the Help of Voice-to-Text</i></span></div>
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In another example of flipping presentations this year, I presented a technique I had developed for using voice to encourage revision from student writing. The technique has the students share an empty Google Doc with the teacher but start their writing on paper in class. The teacher collects the papers and then reads them correctly into the blank Google Docs using speech-to-text. The teacher makes printouts of each student’s Google Doc, which now has what they had written expressed in correct language and writes notes on these printouts suggesting revision and improvement to the papers. The paper printouts are returned to the students along with their original papers, and the students continue writing in Google Docs, for as many revisions as possible, now focused both on content and on whatever errors occur or re-occur. </div>
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I had presented a paper on my work with this technique at the ALLT conference in UAE in 2018 and had published a description of my research into the technique in the conference proceedings (<b><a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf" target="_blank">Stevens, 2019b</a></b>).</div>
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On March 7, 2019 I was asked to demonstrate the technique from my home in Penang, Malaysia online to a group of EFL teachers physically attending a webinar event at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. This gave me an opportunity to consolidate my previously published research on the topic and focus it into a practical presentation. I webcast the event in Zoom and archived it as <b><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/07/vance-stevens-presents-on-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/" target="_blank">Stevens, 2019 (March 7)</a></b>. The archive of the presentation consolidated previous work I had done on this technique, included <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z4n8Pef9owDeufTI6QWDLctP391-LnD36nhTtMPpuPs/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">a slide show attempting to clarify the demonstration</a></b>, and in addition produced a video of the demonstration itself.</div>
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Meanwhile, I had submitted a proposal to the GLoCALL 2019 conference in Danang, Vietnam, offering to demonstrate again the technique in a workshop, which was accepted and scheduled for delivery at the conference, as a workshop mind you, in the ridiculously short time of only 25 minutes.</div>
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Fortunately I was able to get my point across in that time by flipping my presentation not only from having done it online the previous March, but by having had the opportunity to present it online at MMVC19, the 8th annual Moodle Moot Virtual Conference, only a few days before the presentation in Danang; see <b><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/04/learning2gether-with-vance-stevens-at-mmvc19-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/" target="_blank">Stevens (2019, August 4)</a></b>. Here, in preparation for both the online and on-site conferences, I had not only improved my slide presentation but I had written out what I intended to say, and the online conference had produced a video of how the Danang presentation might ideally go if I had had more time to present it. As with previous conferences, I was able to tell my audience in Danang where they could find the slides by again given them a TinyURL link, <b><a href="https://tinyurl.com/glocall2019vance">https://tinyurl.com/glocall2019vance</a></b>.</div>
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That TinyURL led to a complete <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GHi_E7u1yfcgsOW7DapcjLr9O9OCWKID3eQm3K9ljA/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">writeup in Google Docs</a></b> of what was meant to take place during the workshop in Danang. At the top of the write-up one can now find a link to <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DU67TWYqF2MxW0h36Js23upkTZKlw7oLsmVoi5nEUH8/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">the Google Slides deck</a></b> and a link to the archive blog post at <b><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/09/supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text-presented-on-august-9-at-glocall-2019-in-danang-vietnam/" target="_blank">Stevens, 2019 (August 9)</a></b>. At slide 23 in that slide deck, one can see the MMVC19 rehearsal presentation, embedded there from its YouTube link, here: https://youtu.be/6QnTds__hf0</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>DIYLMS: Tools used</i></span><br />
This is roughly the topic of some workshops I'm planning prior to ThaiTESOL in Bangkok the last couple of weeks in January, 2020. I plan to discuss flipped learning and model how to do the flip, introduce the tools, and reflect on what’s happened to some of our best free tools .lately. So let's look a what the tools are in the first place? To start with, what tools did I use in the example sited in this blog post?<br />
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<b>Polls </b>give students things to write about. For the research mentioned here, I used Google Forms, but there are many more; e.g.<br />
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<li><a href="https://www.polleverywhere.com/">https://www.polleverywhere.com/</a></li>
<li>Survey Monkey; <a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/">https://www.surveymonkey.com/</a></li>
<li>some teachers like Plickers, <a href="https://get.plickers.com/">https://get.plickers.com/</a></li>
<li>YouTube and Facebook both allow you to conduct polls</li>
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More tools are described at 8 Best Polling Apps for Android and iOS Smartphones<br />
by Gaurav Bidasaria June 15, 2019: <a href="https://techwiser.com/best-polling-apps/">https://techwiser.com/best-polling-apps/</a><br />
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<b>Blogs and wikis</b> provide space to host your portal and centralize your message. I’m using Blogger for this article, and <a href="https://learning2gether.net/">https://learning2gether.net/</a> is based in <a href="https://wordpress.com/">https://wordpress.com/</a> for its podcast and archives, and PBWorks for its planning and index pages, <a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/</a>.<br />
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Other options include Weebly (I’m not fond of the free version; limited functionality with no ‘undo option for example). I prefer Wix; see Wix vs Weebly vs WordPress: Web War III, October 7, 2019, by Dan Barraclough. Google Docs is also an excellent option as a wiki portal<br />
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I did the <b>webcasting </b>mentioned above through Zoom, <a href="https://zoom.us/">https://zoom.us/</a>. Other useful tools for webcasting are OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), a robust, full featured open-source and freely downloadable screen capture and simulcasting tool, <a href="https://obsproject.com/">https://obsproject.com/</a>. There are also Facebook Live and YouTube Live.<br />
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For pre-presentation <b>screen capture recording</b>, I used Zoom for this purpose as well. But other options are:<br />
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<li>Screencast-o-matic, a versatile and easy to use full-featured screen capture tool for recordings of up to 15 min.; downoad for free at <a href="https://screencast-o-matic.com/">https://screencast-o-matic.com/</a></li>
<li>OBS has more options than you’re likely to need and not so easy to use, but an amazing but of software, constantly being improved, and also completely free, I've suggested its use for "multiple purposes"; e.g. not only webcasting but as a screen capture tool in materials preparation here:<br /><a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12KL1390JLzBsopdsMLMi6ZHNC23CEzT2biNp0mCOV3M/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12KL1390JLzBsopdsMLMi6ZHNC23CEzT2biNp0mCOV3M/edit?usp=sharing</a></li>
<li>Jing for image capture is available for free at <a href="https://www.techsmith.com/jing-tool.html">https://www.techsmith.com/jing-tool.html</a> and the newly launched video feature in Screencast.com, <a href="https://support.techsmith.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033233672">https://support.techsmith.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033233672</a> will avoid the problem of flash video output in the existing tool.</li>
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<b>Image capture</b> is essential for materials creation. There are hard and easy ways to capture images from your screen. Sometimes you have to use the hard way; for example if you want to show users a website with its context menus exposed and mouse over the one you want so that it’s highlighted, you’ll need to use your operating system's screen capture tool (PrtScr in Windows; button combinations on iPad and Android) and then share the captured image in iOS or Android, or by pasting to Paint in Windows, saving it as a file, and then sharing the file.<br />
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But for cropping and capturing a part of a screen, you can use the Snipping Tool in Windows, or, my favorite, Jing, mentioned above. I like Jing over almost all other tools because you can save your capture as a file on your computer, or on the web at Screencast.com where you immediately get its URL (saved to your memory buffer) so you can paste it into a chat, let’s say, or send it in an email, and the receiver can see your screen via the URL you paste into the chat or email.<br />
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<li>Another tool that does what Jing does, also for free, is LightShot <a href="https://app.prntscr.com/en/index.html">https://app.prntscr.com/en/index.html</a>.</li>
<li>Many more such tools are discussed in <a href="https://beebom.com/snipping-tool-alternatives/">https://beebom.com/snipping-tool-alternatives/</a> - 7 Best Snipping Tool Alternatives by Abhijith N Arjunanm, December 22, 2018</li>
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I use Jing a lot in <b>preparing slides</b>, which these days I do in Google Slides, where you can prepare your show online, collaboratively, for free, and have its URL as you work on-the-fly, which you can share directly with an audience. Google Slides these days imports MS PowerPoint slides almost faithfully (as far as I can see; though it didn’t always used to). It also seems to export faithfully to (download as) MS PowerPoint slides.<br />
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Faithful correspondence between Google Slides and PPT is handy in case you use <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/">https://www.slideshare.net/</a>, which was acquired a few years ago by Linked In, which gives it a certain social presence. When I present and have uploaded my slides to Slideshare.net, I can tell my audience that they can find them at <a href="https://slideshare.net/vances">https://slideshare.net/vances</a>. Of course they would also have a direct URL, but that short link pulls up my latest slide show off the top and is fairly mnemonic in case you want to give an audience the opportunity to follow your slides while you are presenting. And another affordance is that Slideshare.net hyperlinks all the URLs. My slides always have a lot of links that give them much greater depth than would be possible to convey in the presentation itself, so this is an important feature in case people in your audience want to explore your concepts either while you are presenting or afterwards.<br />
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Of course, Google Docs has all of these features as well, except for the mnemonic URL. Google URLs are quite long and need to be shortened. Fortunately, there are many <b>URL shortening tools</b>; e.g. the three dozen listed at 37 URL shorteners and how to create custom branded shortlinks, October 6, 2017, by Eric Sachs, <a href="https://sachsmarketinggroup.com/37-url-shorteners-create-custom-branded-shortlinks/">https://sachsmarketinggroup.com/37-url-shorteners-create-custom-branded-shortlinks/</a>, but the one I prefer is TinyURL because it’s reliable (it's been around for a long time) and allows you to specify the URL you wish to shorten. All TinyURLs begin with <a href="https://tinyurl.com/">https://tinyurl.com/</a> but the interface allows you to specify what appears after the slash. This allows me to create mnemonic URLs for those very lengthy Google Docs and Google Slides presentation URLs.<br />
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This takes us up through preparing your materials in advance and having your audience follow them during their presentation, but how can your audience share these materials with their social audiences or with you, as a <b>backchannel</b>, while you are presenting if you wish, or afterwards?<br />
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The key is in creating a unique tag for the event. It could be the mnemonic part of your TinyURL, so that the tag for https://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance could be #pelta2019vance. Or it could be a course tag, such as the EVO Minecraft MOOC course we have coming up for EVO 2020, #evomc20. Or it could be a conference tag such as #glocall2019, whose hits you can see aggregated at <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=glocall2019">https://twitter.com/search?q=glocall2019</a>.<br />
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The latter is a good example of how participants at a conference can crowd-source through Twitter their impressions of a conference, tag them with the conference tag, and then watch as their colleagues share their own impressions. Participants in one session can track what’s going on in sessions they are missing even as they help their colleagues know what’s going on where they are. Since all the tweets carry a picture (or icon) of the person tweeting, it’s not uncommon for two people in the same session to see that someone else is tweeting in that session, look around the room, and find the other person looking for them. In such a way, bonds are formed between like minded colleagues.<br />
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What works for conferences can work for courses, either at a distance or blended, or in physical classrooms, or in workshops. Hash tags aggregated on Twitter or Facebook or through other means can form an ePortfolio of what the students or participants are doing collectively. They enable to collection of artifacts in one place where they can be displayed to demonstrate the outcome of whatever the task or project was.<br />
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These are components of a <b>DIYCMS</b>, a do-it-yourself content management system (CMS). All the tools mentioned so far are for creating, storing, and displaying content, and as it happens, for free. A CMS is a portal where content for a learning journey can be placed online for others to find and follow.<br />
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Add to that a means for having users upload their own content to the space, for this user-generated content to be responded to and evaluated, perhaps by peers in forums, then you have an LMS, or learning management system. If this is based in free tools such as Moodle, Schoology, Canvas, or Edmodo, or in a wiki where the community can upload content and interact with each other, then we have a <b>DIYLMS</b>, see <a href="http://diylms.pbworks.com/">http://diylms.pbworks.com/</a>.<br />
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<i>Still to come, stay tuned …</i><br />
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<i>Audio and video editing tools</i></h3>
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<i>And a reflection on the tools we have lost</i></h3>
Here are a few I'd like to mention:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Ning, one of our first community-shattering turnabouts - Stevens, Vance. (2010). The Ning Thing. TESL-EJ 14(1), 1-7. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf">http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf</a>; also available: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/</a></li>
<li>Google+ Communities, which abruptly went offline one year ago</li>
<li>Yahoo Groups, which has been hosting many of our communities since last century, is disappearing as we speak, on only a few months notice (gone as a CMS after Dec 14, 2019</li>
<li>PBWorks only let’s you have one free workspace now</li>
<li>Today’s Meet disappeared this past year, </li>
</ul>
But there’s Yo!Teachj, a backchannel chat tool that can replace Today's Meet, which I used to use for passing messages to and from classes and other gatherings. I learned about Yo!Teach here<br />
<a href="http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html">http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html</a><br />
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Yo!Teach is one of the similar tools listed at this website, Jeff Knutson, February 12, 2019, Give students a chance to connect with each other and be heard.<br />
<a href="https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement">https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement</a><br />
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What happens next? What if we lose Google? Imagine when you have to download all your data from there on short notice, or lose it?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Conclusion</i></span></div>
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I have developed my presentation techniques over decades of presenting at online and on-site conferences, and in hopes of improving on the offers of many colleagues, whose presentations I have attended, to send them my email address and they would send me a copy of their slides. The flipped method provides a means for attendees at conferences to be better prepared to follow a speaker’s presentation by having access to presentation materials on hand during and possibly even before the presentation, and attendees can have a means of following up on their learning which provides much greater depth than what can be gleaned from a skeletal slide show. </div>
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Furthermore, flipped learning is an approach intended for teachers to apply in their classes. In my presentations I hope to model for my peers how the flip works in a way they can understand experientially. Hopefully, on careful consideration of this approach, attendees at my presentations might try it out in their own professional lives, both with their students in class, and with their audiences when they present at conferences.</div>
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References </i></span></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019a). Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, Q. Ma, & J. L. F. King (Eds.), <i>Proceedings of the Twentieth International CALL Research Conference: Social CALL</i> (pp. 257-272). Hong Kong: The Education University of Hong Kong. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/CALL2019proceedings_stevensSMALL.pdf">https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/CALL2019proceedings_stevensSMALL.pdf</a></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019b). Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings. In Zoghbor, W., Al Alami, S., & Alexiou, T. (Eds.), <i>Proceedings of the 1st Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Conference: Teaching and Learning in a Globalized World</i> (pp. 22-47). Dubai: Zayed University Press. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf">https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf</a></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019, March 7). Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text. [Blog post]. Retrieved from</div>
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<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/07/vance-stevens-presents-on-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/07/vance-stevens-presents-on-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/</a></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019, March 13). CALL-IS academic session on SMALL: Research, practice, impact of social media-assisted language learning – Webcasting from TESOL 2019 Atlanta [Blog post]. Retrieved from <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/</a></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019, April 19). Thinking SMALL at the 2019 PELLTA conference in Penang, Malaysia. [Blog post]. Retrieved from</div>
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<i>https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/</i></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019, August 4). Learning2gether with Vance Stevens at MMVC19 – Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text. [Blog post]. Retrieved from <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/04/learning2gether-with-vance-stevens-at-mmvc19-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/04/learning2gether-with-vance-stevens-at-mmvc19-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/</a></div>
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Stevens, V. (2019, August 9). Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text – presented at GLoCALL 2019 in Danang, Vietnam. [Blog post]. Retrieved from <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/09/supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text-presented-on-august-9-at-glocall-2019-in-danang-vietnam/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/09/supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text-presented-on-august-9-at-glocall-2019-in-danang-vietnam/</a></div>
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-1823660195679595202019-11-17T01:45:00.002+00:002019-11-17T06:00:27.403+00:00Learning2gether ten years after, and going on beyond episode 430I often feel guilty about not posting more here, but I blog most regularly these days at my Learning2gether blog,<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/">https://learning2gether.net/</a><br />
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Learning2gether was an offshoot in 2010 of the three WiAOC conferences we famously crowd-sourced under the auspices of Webheads in Action in 2005, 2007, and 2009 (<a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm</a>). L2g has been going strong since 2010 and is almost up to its 430th episode as I write this post. Normally I post notices of events on the L2g Facebook page, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/</a>. I also keep an index of all L2g events, going back since their inception in 2010, here:<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/34456755/archiveindex">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/34456755/archiveindex</a><br />
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I'm going there now to retrieve the following information which I need to paste here in order to create the state of play I'm focusing on in this blog post.<br />
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Learning2gether episode 426 took place on Tue, Oct 15, 2019. I soon afterwards blogged it, but I had always meant to go back and 'complete' the post. I have by now found time to revise this post and annotate it by adding further anecdotes and detail and expanding on my links to further information. So even if you have seen it before, you might want to revisit'<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/10/15/steven-herder-interviews-vance-stevens-in-the-itdi-teachers-room/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/10/15/steven-herder-interviews-vance-stevens-in-the-itdi-teachers-room/</a><br />
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Meanwhile, Electronic Village Online coordinators and moderators (<a href="http://evosession.pbworks.com/">http://evosession.pbworks.com</a>) have been gearing up for EVO2020, which is the 20th year of EVO by the way, and as I am one of the EVO coordinators I was involved in the EVO moderator PD (professional development) month which has been taking place during this time. Each Sunday during the month there were events where moderators were supposed to attend and raise questions and discuss issues relating to EVO. Since this was ostensibly EVO business, I didn't feel right about inviting all and sundry, which is why I never made an announcement on any of the L2g spaces, but Jane Chien and I were responsible for preparing the third week of moderator PD (in Schoology, <a href="https://app.schoology.com/course/2264046012/">https://app.schoology.com/course/2264046012/</a>) and the topic was what group spaces to use, such as Schoology, and how to replace groups that had recently disappeared; e.g. the Google+ Communities which had served us so well, and YahooGroups, which EVO Coordinators had been using (and both groups have now gone over to Groups.io).<br />
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Since the topic was relevant to anyone involved in eLearning or professional development through communities of practice, Jane and I suppressed the business part and held the session as a discussion, and produced L2g Episode 427 on Sun, Nov 3, 2019: Vance Stevens and Jane Chien host Learning2gether with Week 3 EVO Moderator Professional Development – Online spaces, certificates, and badges<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/03/learning2gether-with-week-3-evo-moderator-professional-development-online-spaces-certificates-and-badges/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/03/learning2gether-with-week-3-evo-moderator-professional-development-online-spaces-certificates-and-badges/</a><br />
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Again I did not announce the EVO Moderator PD Month event for the following Sunday on Learning2gether, but that link above contains at the end of it, a video embed starting at 25 min 35 seconds, which is where Nellie asked for moderators to come on and discuss the online spaces they had chosen for their sessions. First up was Graham Stanley, who spoke about how his Escape the Room session is organized, and he invited me to join him in the discussion, which also makes interesting listening. Here it is, starting with Graham:<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1547&v=0W--5Kuk2mA&feature=emb_logo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1547&v=0W--5Kuk2mA&feature=emb_logo</a><br />
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Heike Philp, who co-moderates the Escape the Room session with Graham, was at that event and she mentioned in it that she was doing a simulcast from Firenze in a week's time on educational applications of virtual worlds, and I asked her to send me the information. When I hadn't heard from her a few days later and as time was growing short, I sent her a reminder -- and, as she is a writer at <a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/</a>, she didn't reply to me directly, but wrote up the information directly on the wiki and asked me afterwards if I could come on in the Q and A period and take 5 min to talk about EVO Minecraft MOOC. Because she had entered it in the wiki and invited me to speak, I made it the next L2g episode, which is archived as L2g Episode 428, Wed, Nov 13, 2019 - Learning2gether with Heike Philp and GUINEVERE simulcasting colloquium on games in virtual worlds<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/13/learning2gether-with-heike-philp-and-guinevere-simulcasting-colloquium-on-games-in-virtual-worlds/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/13/learning2gether-with-heike-philp-and-guinevere-simulcasting-colloquium-on-games-in-virtual-worlds/</a><br />
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So that brings us up to the present where on Monday Nov 18, the annual Global Education Conference starts. It's a 3 day conference where presenters who fit fixed, but also flexible, criteria self-select to put their events up on a Ning and then schedule themselves to present at the conference. You can find more information here:<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#MonNov18WedNov20The9thAnnualGECGlobalEducationConference">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#MonNov18WedNov20The9thAnnualGECGlobalEducationConference</a><br />
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I'll be co-presenting on day 3 of the conference with Hanaa Khamis, who has been hosting L2g events recently from Egypt in my L2g Zoom Room. Our presentation is on Wednesday Nov 20 on upgrading teachers' tech-enabled pedagogical skills via the power of participatory learning through communities of practice and PLNs of like-minded peers. That event is announced here:<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#WedNov200900UTCHanaaKhamisandVanceStevensatGECnbspParticipatorycultureofCPDthroughselfsustainingPLNs">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#WedNov200900UTCHanaaKhamisandVanceStevensatGECnbspParticipatorycultureofCPDthroughselfsustainingPLNs</a><br />
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And finally (or at least, it will be time for a break) when I did the interview with iTDi back in October, I told Steven Herder and Phil Brown that I was very curious to talk to to them about their business iTDi, which has some free components which they put on while trying to balance against the bottom line, so I got them to agree to come on L2g on my terms and discuss those issues.That happens on Thursday Nov 21, and there is more information here:<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#ThuNov21noonUTCSteveHerderandPhilipShigeoBrownoniTDiandthechallengeofcommercialviabilityvssocialcommunityneeds">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#ThuNov21noonUTCSteveHerderandPhilipShigeoBrownoniTDiandthechallengeofcommercialviabilityvssocialcommunityneeds</a><br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-44872016836666497292019-09-25T02:44:00.002+00:002019-09-25T05:30:38.116+00:00Workshops for teachers and teacher trainersNow that I'm retired, I am sometimes asked what kind of workshops I could do for teachers, so I've gone into my websites and compiled an inventory of my skills and pretensions, hopefully more the former than the latter. Two places where I address this directly are on my CV at <a href="https://vancestevens.com/papers/CurriculumVitaeVance.pdf">https://vancestevens.com/papers/CurriculumVitaeVance.pdf</a> and at the top of my ongoing listing of presentations and publications at <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html">http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html</a><br />
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I've come up with a list of 24 topics, which derive from a set of concepts which explain and contextualize the workshops I have in mind. The concepts relate to projects I've been working on actively over the past year, since I left my last paid EFL teaching job in July, 2018, and the list of 24 workshops appears at the end of this blog post.<br />
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But I mean for this post to be a work in progress. That is, I might use this as a space to flesh out my ideas and concepts and possibly come up with more ideas for workshops. But every journey starts with a first step.<br />
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<b>Where I've derived my expertise</b><br />
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The first steps in my current tangents started with a two year journey mostly overland through Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in the 1970's which plopped me back in Texas, <i>table rase</i>, ready to start a new life teaching English. Within a year my new job had taken me to the TESOL conference in New York in 1976, where I was able to find an EFL job in Saudi Arabia that very year. This is where I first got my hands on a computer in my workplace, leading to my being appointed to head a task force to develop a CAI facility for EFL at the university where I worked.<br />
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By 1981 I had started an MA in Hawaii which produced a thesis relating to what we were then calling CALI, and an invitation to attend a symposium in Toronto in 1983, where the acronym was changed to CALL, and which put me in position to co-found the CALL Interest Section in TESOL in 1985 and become its first chair. By then I was teaching EFL and working in CALL at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman where I developed and managed the Learning Resource Center and produced CALL software there. This qualified me, when I left SQU in 1995, to get a position as Director of EFL Courseware Design and become involved in producing CALL software at a start up company in Cupertino, California.<br />
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This was where my career path headed toward the mountain top. Because I missed teaching, I got involved with teaching online as a volunteer. Two years later I was in Abu Dhabi working as a consultant for a language center being envisioned there. We were putting in a LAN and suddenly I could hang out online. In my spare time I upped my game and created websites which gathered followers in the Webheads student and teacher movements. In 2003 I became a coordinator with EVO, Electronic Village Online, now in its 20th year as a significant precursor to what are now known as MOOCs. This is where I started working in various ways on the projects described below.<br />
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<b>Coding in ELT</b><br />
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Based on my experience with coding language teaching materials, working 2 years full-time as a software developer, and having recently co-written an article on coding in English language teaching, <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/</a>, I proposed a workshop at CAMTESOL 2020 on practical coding activities for language teachers to use in the classroom, even without computers (currently awaiting acceptance):<br />
<ul>
<li>The presenter gives examples of language teachers who use coding in language classes to promote the 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking, analysis, and problem solving, in addition to the more obviously language-related skills of communication and collaboration. The workshop introduces and guides participants through a simple activity using a step-by-step approach, presented in accessible terminology, that can clarify for them this relationship between coding and language development. The activity is set out in a handout that participants can use during the workshop and with students later in class. The activity requires neither a computer nor prior knowledge of programming, only the instructions on the handout, and participants will be pointed to repositories of many more such activities.</li>
</ul>
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The proposal is for a 30 min “workshop” and for an audience that may not have devices handy, but can be extrapolated to a longer one that can be done using computers</div>
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<b>Technology in the Classroom/E-learning/Blended learning/CALL</b><br />
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I have been teaching online since 1998 and since then have consistently taken initiatives to seed and nurture communities of practice of learners and teaching peers, one of which, <a href="http://webheads.info/">http://webheads.info</a>, has been in action for 20 years. In all of my teaching jobs since then I have taken on roles such as CALL coordinator, computing instructor, Moodle administrator, software developer, and professional development coordinator. I blend learning for my face-to-face classes by creating wiki spaces where students can download materials and submit work online. This could suggest a variety of different workshop topics<br />
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One could be simply <b>practical technologies for classroom use - </b>specifics would depend on what kind of facilities existed at the target institution: do students have Internet or just teachers or neither; do students have their own devices? Personal phones, tablets, PCs, personal or in lab configurations? Do teachers have access to smart boards, some way of projecting in the class? Etc. I blogged issues faced when giving this kind of workshop in Khorat, Thailand in 2008, <a href="http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html">http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html</a>. More recent materials along these lines can be found at another of my blogs, <a href="http://toolkit4learning.blogspot.com/">http://toolkit4learning.blogspot.com/</a>.<br />
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<b>DIYLMS</b><br />
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DIYLMS stands for do-it-yourself-learning-management-system, or the tools needed to cobble together a portal and other free Web 2.0 tools facilitating blended or online learning, to whatever degree appropriate. The concept is illustrated in two workshops I gave on the topic in 2012, in Dubai <a href="http://diylms.pbworks.com/">http://diylms.pbworks.com/</a> and Erzincan, Turkey, <a href="http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/">http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/</a> where there is a wiki portal (i.e. handout) for the workshops and links to the materials to be covered in the workshops, and a means of students submitting work to the facilitator.<br />
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Also in 2012 I gave a plenary in Marrakech on the topic, recording and slides at <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2012/02/08/learner-centred-do-it-yourself-learning-manag/">https://learning2gether.net/2012/02/08/learner-centred-do-it-yourself-learning-manag/</a>. I gave other presentations around that time, and published on the topic, which in 2011 I was calling MePortolios, <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2011/08/22/me-portfolios-putting-the-me-in-me-learning-v/">https://learning2gether.net/2011/08/22/me-portfolios-putting-the-me-in-me-learning-v/</a><br />
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<b>Professional development through networking in communities of practice</b><br />
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Another kind of workshop I could give could be on ways to engage in continuing professional development through engaging in networks of other learners / teachers and communities of practice.<br />
I have been a coordinator of EVO (the TESOL sponsored Electronic Village Online) since 2002 and for the past two decades I have conceived and moderated several EVO sessions designed to train teachers in topics ranging from pursuing professional development online through communities of practice, leveraging multiliteracies and 21st century skills and tools in their teaching and PD, and most recently, gamification.<br />
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It happens that I may be in Thailand at the end of January. I would be just starting a 5-week session of EVO Minecraft MOOC, <a href="http://minecraftmooc.org/">http://minecraftmooc.org</a>. That is, I will be interacting online in a live on-going (in its 6th year) community of practice whose purpose is to understand what gamification is and feels like through participation in Minecraft, and how what we learn can be used with our students and impact their learning. Therefore, I could give workshops on<br />
<ul>
<li>Minecraft itself, </li>
<li>on game-based learning and gamification (two similar but different things), </li>
<li>or use the opportunity to have a live community of practice on hand to illustrate the look and feel of ongoing professional development in such a context.</li>
<li>EVO - Electronic Village Online: Recharge your professional development with the friendliest and most engaging trainers on the planet, free<br /><br />Since these sessions will have just started (Jan 11 through Feb 16, 2020, <a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/">http://evosessions.pbworks.com/</a>) it occurs to me that a great workshop would be to introduce EVO to participants, get them to enrol in a session, and then follow up by getting them to introduce themselves to their chosen community, and get started on the first week’s activities. It wouldn’t matter too much if they were a little late to the party</li>
</ul>
<b>Multimedia skills</b><br />
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My definitive work in regard to multimedia professional development is <a href="https://learning2gether.net/">https://learning2gether.net</a>, a podcast series I have been doing for the past ten years, without any funding, using free Web 2.0 tools. Besides the community of practice and networked learning aspects, this work requires numerous media skills which I could also train via workshops. These include<br />
<ul>
<li>the rationale for podcasting in language learning, </li>
<li>spaces for meeting synchronously online, </li>
<li>recording, editing, and streaming audio and video, </li>
<li>harvesting recordings and uploading to YouTube and Vimeo. </li>
<li>Using screen casting to create podcasts, interactions with teacher or student peers, and even produce lesson materials<br /><br />e.g. the simple-to-use Screencast-o-matic to the more complicated but more versatile OBS (Open Broadast Software), which I have used to “Record Lesson Materials On-the-Fly” as presented at TESOL in Seattle, 2017, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/tesol2017vance">http://tinyurl.com/tesol2017vance</a>. I am part of a team using this software for live webcasting from the last three TESOL conferences. </li>
</ul>
Another aspect of this work is tagging and making your materials known through social networking, as in my 2010 BrazTESOL workshop on <a href="http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/TagGames">http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/TagGames</a><br />
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<b>Task and Content-Based Instruction / Content and Language Integrated Learning / ESP</b><br />
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From 2003-2011, I taught computing as a subject in its own right, through the medium of English to EFL students, when I was a computing instructor at Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, and in 2004 I published a book chapter on using task-based learning in an EFL online context. From 2013-2018, I helped develop curriculum and materials, and adapted materials directed at pilot and aviation support cadets while teaching EFL at a UAE air college. I could give workshops on developing materials for ESP<br />
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<b>Research Writing and Publication / Academic Writing</b><br />
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This is usually what I volunteer to teach when I am working as a teacher. I have produced and edited hundreds of publications. I have often taught at the college level and specialized in teaching academic writing to low to intermediate proficiency students. I usually create wiki portals to help my students with concepts and activities; e.g. one I created to teach academic writing for my students at New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi, at <a href="http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/">http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/</a>.<br />
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Some of my most recent publications and presentations have been on technology-enhanced techniques for giving feedback to students and dealing with plagiarism. My particular focus is on utilizing the voice capabilities of modern mobile, tablet, and PC devices for improving effectiveness and efficiency in giving well-directed feedback on writing to students, something that can take a lot of a teacher’s time.<br />
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<b>Workshops on teaching ESOL skills</b><br />
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As a teacher with 40 years experience in EFL I could also give workshops on more traditional topics such as grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, vocabulary. I would have a lot to impart about the latter topic through my background of research and publication in concordancing and familiarity with a number of corpus-based and gamified tools for vocabulary acquisition.<br />
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<h3>
<b>Here’s the above distilled into a list, which I may develop further here in the future:</b></h3>
<ol>
<li>Coding in ELT: Empowering teachers to integrate coding into their language lessons, and why (or why not?)</li>
<li>Technology in the Classroom/E-learning/Blended learning/CALL environments</li>
<li>Practical technologies for classroom use (need to narrow down its purpose based on need)</li>
<li>DIYLMS: Designing classroom ecologies (do-it-yourself-learning-management-systems) from free and easily available Web 2.0 tools</li>
<li>Helping students direct and archive their learning in MePortfolios</li>
<li>Continuing professional development through engaging in networks of other learners / teachers and communities of practice</li>
<li>EVO - Electronic Village Online: Start today, NOW, right in this workshop, to recharge your professional development with the friendliest and most engaging trainers on the planet, free</li>
<li>Learning2gether to teach and learn through communities of practice</li>
<li>Using multiliteracies and 21st century skills and tools in your own PD so that it helps you model to students how to learn in a future world that is here already</li>
<li>Minecraft in language learning, why and how?</li>
<li>Interacting live and online with EVO Minecraft MOOC,</li>
<li>Gamification or game-based learning? What’s the difference and how can they be utilized in my classrooms</li>
<li>Joining MOOCs and communities of practice to help you broaden your learning through free and self-directed continuing PD; or start your own MOOC</li>
<li>What multimedia skills do you need for language teaching?</li>
<li>Podcasting in language learning: Helping students learn through both consuming and creating content that helps them learn English</li>
<li>Record lesson materials on-the-fly using tools for capturing images, audio, and whatever else happens on your screen</li>
<li>Using YouTube and Vimeo in language learning as both a consumer and creator of content.</li>
<li>Tag games: Bringing groups of learners together through intelligent use of tagging and aggregating content (making your materials known) through social networking</li>
<li>Task and Content-Based Instruction / Content and Language Integrated Learning / ESP</li>
<li>Improve you research writing and publication skills: Academic writing for teachers and learners</li>
<li>Utilizing the voice capabilities of modern mobile, tablet, and PC devices for improving effectiveness and efficiency in giving well-directed feedback on writing</li>
<li>Help your students improve their vocabulary skills through use of concordancing, and other corpus-based and gamified tools for vocabulary acquisition</li>
<li>Kick your pronunciation teaching skills up a notch: Exploring the videos in the ESL Teachers’ <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej88/ej88int/" target="_blank">Guide to Pronunciation Teaching Using Online Resources</a></li>
<li>Grammar, reading, listening, writing: Which should you teach first and why? Defend your choice!</li>
</ol>
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-77046995325485614282019-07-10T04:34:00.000+00:002019-07-19T02:21:52.655+00:00Why not call CALL SMALL?I'm giving a talk in Hong Kong today entitled "Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning," from a distance due to a mishap. I know what to say - I'm trying to nail down how to say it. Hence this blog post.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ9l-igKmD6hX_r18Y_QZ8d4PfUqGZ3ESypufxv0MHVBe4IVzpx4Af0F4ceLzHIb5BGGI5XhmSWzaiA/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=60000" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="450"></iframe>
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I've given this talk twice already this year, or one like it (and my talk in HK will be different from the other two). Both of those earlier talks were entitled "Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning," but the focus on each was slightly different. Both gave a background for my thinking on SMALL over the past decade, based first on my credentials in using social media in communities of practice with students and teaching peers stretching back past the turn of the century, and pointed out that I was possibly the first to use the term SMALL in the literature, as far as I can tell from my searches on Google Scholar. I have a slide for that.<br />
<br />
But in those two talks, that's the point where the focus shifted. The first was delivered at the annual TESOL conference in Atlanta in March 2019 and reported on a survey I had done on educator attitudes on teacher and student perceptions of social media used for learning. This happens to be what I proposed to talk about in Hong Kong. I blogged that presentation here,<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/</a><br />
<br />
The second was delivered at the biannual PELLTA conference in Penang a month later and reported on a project I had done the year before in my last teaching gig in Al Ain, UAE, on using the voice capabilities inherent in Google Docs (on Android, OS, or Windows devices) to give feedback through Google Docs to poorly performing and unmotivated students on their writing (Stevens, 2019a).<br />
<br />
I am a great fan of flipped learning, including flipping presentations, which is to say I make sure that the materials I plan to cover are all online, so that rather than having to, in 25 short minutes, explain in exquisite detail all I have to say, I can overview what I would have covered if I had had more time, and refer people to the links for them to follow down whatever rabbit holes they wish to step into. Furthermore, my presentation at PELLTA in Penang was double-flipped. In rehearsing my presentation prior to the conference (to test how was I going say what I hoped to say in the 25 minutes I had for that one) it occurred to me to record the rehearsal in Zoom. So when I went to the presentation I told my audience that they could find online, at the TinyURL I provided them:<br />
<ul>
<li>the slides for my presentation </li>
<li>a prose write up of what I intended to say </li>
<li>the rehearsal recording online</li>
</ul>
As far as I can tell, people rarely take me up on my suggestion to follow along in my slide show or prose presentation versions during my presentations. They are not conditioned for it, but one day, they will be! And then they will expect of presenters to lay out their slides in advance, and also have a recording of the presentation available afterwards.<br />
<br />
That was the second flip -- to record the presentation as I gave it in Zoom, so that the audience could listen later if they wished. And I told the audience where they could find the link to the recording. In my last slide in the materials listed above, I had a QR code up that they could shoot, and I gave them a mnemonic URL,<br />
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance">http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance</a>, which would take them to my slides, and which would in turn, in due time, have the link to the recording I had just made.<br />
<br />
So it was all there, and all that material can be found at my blog post here:<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/</a><br />
<br />
I plan to do something similar for my presentation to the HK audience, for which I had created a similar link http://tinyurl.com/call2019vance (but I broke the link here because I was not able to update the slides stored there with the latest version, now uploaded to Google Slides).<br />
<br />
And here's what I told the delegates at the conference on the day.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bwG-4nNKSkE/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="380" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bwG-4nNKSkE?start=187 feature=player_embedded" width="540"></iframe></div>
<br />
The presentation is in three parts:<br />
<br />
1. Background regarding the case for CAI, CALL and SMALL<br />
2. Why teachers must model productive social media techniques with one another<br />
3. Survey of the extent to which teachers are preparing students to engage in collaborative work models<br />
<br />
<b>1. Background regarding the case for CAI, CALL, and SMALL</b><br />
<br />
First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I do not advocate for any changes in acronym or disruption to the established order where the term CALL has served us so well. I do not suggest that the follow-on to this CALL Research Conference on the theme of social CALL should be the SMALL Research Conference 2020. That would be ridiculous.<br />
<br />
As we know, Stephen Bax is perhaps best known in CALL circles for his suggestion that computers have become so normalized in today's world that the C in CALL is decreasingly descriptive (Bax, 2003 and 2011). This has led many to discuss whether a better acronym would more accurately characterize the role of computers in language learning.<br />
<br />
In their article, renowned for its (depth of analysis as well as its) title, Why call CALL “CALL”?, Levy and Hubbard (2005) argue for the retention of the term CALL because the term is serviceable and practical; it describes what we do, and the term had been in use for two decades at the time the article was written, over three decades at this juncture.<br />
<br />
However, CALL was not always CALL. Prior to the formation of the CALL Interest Section in TESOL in 1984, the use of computers in education was most often referred to as CAI, for computer assisted instruction. The symposium at the TESOL conference in Toronto in 1983 that kicked of the formation of the CALL-IS the following year was called the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Symposium. The program for it can be found here online:<br />
<a href="https://www.call-is.org/WP/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/83_TESOL_Conference_Papers.pdf">https://www.call-is.org/WP/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/83_TESOL_Conference_Papers.pdf</a><br />
<br />
The term CAI became CALL in just ten minutes at the symposium on CAI when John Higgins proposed, and "argued eloquently that the name of our endeavor should be changed forthwith to CALL, to place the emphasis on 'learning'" Stevens (2015, n.p., 4th paragraph in body of article). A discussion ensued. I argued at that time for the retention of CAI, citing essentially the same arguments as did Levy and Hubbard in 2005: the literature was all in reference to CAI, and people had been calling it that since computers had started guiding students through whatever could be taught in an algorithm and keep people on task until "mastery learning" was achieved. A vote was taken, democracy prevailed, and we started referring to our field as CALL.<br />
<br />
So, nothing lasts forever. However, there are many contenders continually being mooted for a replacement to CALL. I concede that agreement from among proponents of alternative acronyms is unlikely: MALL, SMALL, TALL, TELL ... I haven't heard MELL yet, and SMALL does not lend itself to this kind of transformation. But Levy and Hubbard also insert a longevity caveat into their argument for retention of CALL, where they note that “perhaps … the label CALL cannot ultimately make the transition from pre-network to network-based teaching and learning,” (pp. 143-144).<br />
<br />
So why not call CALL SMALL? Now that we find ourselves in just such an age of network-based teaching and learning, and gathered together here at a CALL Research Conference on Social CALL, it is worthwhile to consider how we have re-positioned ourselves, whether or not some chose to call it SMALL, albeit subsumed under the umbrella term, CALL.<br />
<br />
This year, I felt for the first time since I started promoting the term ten years ago that SMALL might be coming of age when I was asked to join the panel on what was proposed as a CALL academic session on Social Media Language Learning at the 2019 TESOL conference in Atlanta. After some negotiation with the other panelists, and passing along some of my articles and book chapters on the topic (e.g. Stevens, 2014), they agreed with me to change the title to Social Media-Assisted Language Learning, or SMALL. It was the first time I had ever achieved agreement from a group of respected peers on my choice of acronym in what Levy and Hubbard had referred to as this new age of 'network-based teaching and learning'.<br />
<br />
That's my main message for my talk tomorrow, but in my limited time remaining I'd like to touch on the following areas which I touched on in my proposal.<br />
<br />
<b>2. Why teachers must model productive social media techniques with one another</b><br />
<br />
Second, how modeling SMALL with peers is precursor to teachers using it with students. Many of these tools and skills work through peers scaffolding one another to bring each other up to speed on the ins and outs. I don't anticipate having time to cover this in greater detail today, but I refer my audience to slide 15 in this presentation<br />
<a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ls3ZeIEk9vssYXBxoVbzn0_K99Wz9vcxWJU_v3wmgSA/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ls3ZeIEk9vssYXBxoVbzn0_K99Wz9vcxWJU_v3wmgSA/edit?usp=sharing</a><br />
<br />
Here, those wishing to explore further can find more background on the importance of social media in communities of practice of educators learning how to use social media in their own learning in collaboration with one another in order to be in a position to use social media with their students. I share here my background working within such communities of practice since 1998, and relate some stories of how individuals have made use of their participation in these communities when working with students.<br />
<br />
In my presentation today, I add one more such story …<br />
<br />
I have been 'column' editor of the <i>TESL-EJ "</i>On the Internet column" since taking over from Jim Duber in 2002. My editing style is unique to any I have experienced with any other editor I have ever worked with. I have authors whose work I am editing share their work in Google Docs and then use the powerful feedback tools in Google Docs to work with authors to negotiate optimal wording of their work to be published later in <i>TESL-EJ</i>.<br />
<br />
I recently worked with Gavin Wu as editor of an article he published in the <i>TESL-EJ </i>(Wu, 2018). Gavin mentions how this worked for him in this passage from his article:<br />
<br />
"collaborative work is very much needed and workplace collaboration is viewed as a necessary skill for current and future global employees (Jones & Hafner, 2012). In academia, cross-national collaboration is nothing new (e.g., the teacher/researcher in Hong Kong collaborated productively in Google Docs with the section editor in the United Arab Emirates on this piece of work), however, the question we may need to consider is to what extent our students are prepared for engaging in such collaborative work modes?"<br />
<br />
Indeed! Gavin appears to have responded positively to scaffolding through working with me in using Google Docs to arrive at a publishable version of his article, and after he had experienced that, he used it as an example of a point he was making to begin with. So, we learn by doing, especially by doing in collaboration with one another, and once we've absorbed that lesson, we pass these skills on through engaging our students in the same and similar techniques.<br />
<br />
<b>3. Survey of the extent to which teachers are preparing students to engage in collaborative work models</b><br />
<br />
And finally, I plan to mention a few salient results from the 60 responses to a survey I created gauging educators’ perceptions of certain aspects of using social media with each other and with students. I'll settle on two or three salient take-aways to highlight in my brief presentation, whereas the complete report should be available in the conference proceedings (Stevens, 2019b).<br />
<br />
I haven't placed the materials I covered here in this blog post, but you can see them in the slides embedded at the beginning of this post, and they were selected from parts of the following documents:<br />
<ol>
<li>A “long” version of the chapter I submitted to the conference proceedings containing my findings shared publicly here:<br /><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVhvkr8moLB_BgLbvhO2UY2v4-VQVOlNfyjU6l58-IU/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVhvkr8moLB_BgLbvhO2UY2v4-VQVOlNfyjU6l58-IU/edit?usp=sharing</a></li>
<li>The updated replacement version of my slides which I place on Google Slides because Slideshare.net removed an essential function from its service, the ability to replace slides uploaded before giving a presentation with a version with the tweaks you make after the presentation. The latest and definitive version of these slides is now here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iqCH3O-b5XELHiUx77qhmC6_7DlBASB8_KET2Flrp1U/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iqCH3O-b5XELHiUx77qhmC6_7DlBASB8_KET2Flrp1U/edit?usp=sharing</a>.</li>
<li>The recording of my presentation in Zoom which is embedded in this blog post and is available on YouTube here: <a href="https://youtu.be/bwG-4nNKSkE">https://youtu.be/bwG-4nNKSkE</a></li>
<li>The Learning2gether episode #415 blog post in which the most current and updated version of the slides appears, and in which the video and also an audio mp3 of the talk are embedded:<br /><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2019/07/10/thinking-small-about-social-media-assisted-language-learning-vance-stevens-presenting-at-the-2019-call-research-conference-hong-kong/">https://learning2gether.net/2019/07/10/thinking-small-about-social-media-assisted-language-learning-vance-stevens-presenting-at-the-2019-call-research-conference-hong-kong/</a></li>
</ol>
<ul>
</ul>
And there are more notes on SMALL documenting more of what I touch on here, at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/small2014">http://tinyurl.com/small2014</a><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<b>In Conclusion</b><br />
<br />
The title of this post is Why <b>NOT</b> call CALL SMALL. Without the emphasis shown here, this could be interpreted as <b>WHY NOT</b>, so that the question appears to be a suggestion that we do just that. However, with the emphasis shown this could be interpreted as presenting an argument for why we <b>NOT </b>take such a step.<br />
<br />
I do not intend in my presentation to call for radical change. Looking back, it appears that such a change was called for back in 1983, and as a result the CALL Interest Section in TESOL did not become the CALI-IS; whereas CALICO, the computer assisted language instruction consortium, itself founded in 1983, carries forward to this day the concept of CAI as opposed to CALL, |<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALICO_(consortium)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALICO_(consortium)</a>.<br />
<br />
I don't anticipate seeing the formation of a social media assisted language instruction consortium in my lifetime. However, as the presentations at the 2019 CALL Research Conference on Social CALL should suggest, this appears to be a robust and viable interest in CALL in this new age of 'network-based teaching and learning'. Certainly a prime and current focus in our using computers in language learning should be on what computers do best for language learners, which is to facilitate communication among them and with native speakers of a language, largely through social media.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>References</b><br />
<br />
Bax, S. (2003). CALL – Past, present and future. <i>System, 31</i>(1), 13–28. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jonrein/internettech10/bax_03.pdf">http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jonrein/internettech10/bax_03.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Bax, S. (2011). Normalisation revisited: The effective use of technology in language education. <i>International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 1</i>(2), 1-15. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.academia.edu/3754724/Normalisation_Revisited_The_Effective_Use_of_Technology_in_Language_Education">http://www.academia.edu/3754724/Normalisation_Revisited_The_Effective_Use_of_Technology_in_Language_Education</a><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Levy, M. and Hubbard, P. (2005). Why call CALL “CALL”? <i>Computer Assisted Language Learning</i>, July 2005. DOI: 10.1080/09588220500208884. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Levy2/publication/233230354_Why_call_CALL_CALL/links/5897d0fdaca2721f0dae16b5/Why-call-CALL-CALL.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=gUEYAXTMSAEJqnABvUeS3-Y4E2caew9pQZekqVkco3LSyFnvr3RbvhljS1V7seKX5pZQzOjlOeFnLdmWVcparQ.BKYx2g4p4fhCzo9m_LbUzfqemHI2wHd8NEpGW_o03S2fhuHTdna1PlmeYvzLiq_FCsBIkIpQBvJnNUYz6Lwwbw&_sg%5B1%5D=ioqaXAvTG6pJHsNhRiLHK-zPksSXvtp_dd13eGWqwwvbcsK5fFI_ez-vQ9S77T_l39Ttj_IvvhI6kpWtgKb1zh4Zpm-0sWxoucNnRpwfj_W7.BKYx2g4p4fhCzo9m_LbUzfqemHI2wHd8NEpGW_o03S2fhuHTdna1PlmeYvzLiq_FCsBIkIpQBvJnNUYz6Lwwbw&_iepl=" target="_blank">Research Gate</a>.<br />
<br />
Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development. In J. Son (Ed.). <i>Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools</i>. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2014connectivist_learning.pdf">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2014connectivist_learning.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Stevens, V. (2015). How the TESOL CALL Interest Section began (updated). On CALL (Sept 2015). Retrieved from <a href="http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2015-08-25/1.html">http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2015-08-25/1.html</a><br />
<br />
Stevens, V. (2019a). Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings. In W. Zoghbor, S. Al Alami & T. Alexiou, (Eds.). <i>Proceedings of the 1st Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Conference: Teaching and Learning in a Globalized World</i>. Dubai: Zayed University Press, pp.22-47. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.zu.ac.ae/main/en/research/publications/_books_reports/2018/ALLT2018Proceedings.pdf">https://www.zu.ac.ae/main/en/research/publications/_books_reports/2018/ALLT2018Proceedings.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Stevens, V. (2019b). Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, Q. Ma, & J. L. F. King (Eds.). <i>Proceedings of the Twentieth International CALL Research Conference: Social CALL</i> (pp. 257-272). Hong Kong: The Education University of Hong Kong. The unpaginated PDF submitted for inclusion is available:<br />
<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/12idx3CM3iixWLWvzfupIU53VfFPw6sYD/view">https://drive.google.com/file/d/12idx3CM3iixWLWvzfupIU53VfFPw6sYD/view</a><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Wu, J. G. (2018). Mobile Collaborative Learning in a Chinese Tertiary EFL Context.<i>TESL-EJ, 22</i>(2), Available: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej86/ej86int">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej86/ej86int</a>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-40247702595630914102019-01-18T11:13:00.000+00:002019-01-22T08:18:58.935+00:00Hold that thought: Ideas big and SMALL about blending social media and eLearning 3.0 regarding hosting participatory communities of practice and online conferencesI didn't meant to brainstorm my impetus for this post into such a long title: Hold that thought: Ideas big and SMALL about blending social media and eLearning 3.0 regarding hosting participatory communities of practice and online conferences. Here's what the title is about:<br />
<br />
<h3>
Hold that thought</h3>
<br />
The Hold that Thought part was because all the ingredients of this post have been percolating around my brain for a few weeks and I'm under pressure to get them down in writing by the end of the month so I can propose some talks at an upcoming round of conferences this year. At some point you have to start writing about them. This post is my attempt at grabbing that tiger by the tail and wrestling it to the ground where I can get a grasp of all the ideas at interplay.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Thinking SMALL </h3>
<br />
Thinking SMALL is something I've been doing for some time. SMALL, or social media assisted language learning, is a term I coined ten years ago on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of CALL-IS at the 2009 TESOL conference, Denver (see slide 8 here):<br />
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances/celebrating-25-years-of-call">http://www.slideshare.net/vances/celebrating-25-years-of-call</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="485" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/pEuNKWprMpiI3V" style="border-width: 1px; border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;" width="595"> </iframe> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 5px;">
<strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/vances/celebrating-25-years-of-call" target="_blank" title="Celebrating 25 Years of CALL">Celebrating 25 Years of CALL</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/vances" target="_blank">Vance Stevens</a></strong> </div>
<br />
I've laid claim consistently to the term since then, as I've <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GWVtAH2yfp5tL3bdMg58_M5Deq36Ot_jQ_w8rflsGuA/edit#heading=h.wwfgxw6e65fd" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">documented here</a> in links to a dozen blog posts and presentations from 2009 to 2013 where I mentioned SMALL. In 2014 I articulated my position on SMALL in a book chapter (Stevens, 2014), available at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/small2014">http://tinyurl.com/small2014</a>.<br />
<br />
Despite my frequent 'mention' of it over the years, my acronym never got traction, mainly because there were so many other good acronyms out there trying to make the same point. The point is, as Stephen Bax was arguing eloquently and prolifically at the time, computers had been normalized to the point that the 'computer' part of CALL was hardly any longer meaningful. Many replacements for the C word had been suggested: MALL (mobile assisted), TALL (tech assisted), TELL (tech enhanced), MALL (mobile assisted), BALL (blog assisted), SNALL (social network assisted) etc. and these often came up in conversations where I would put forward my own choice of acronym, but I could see that there was a variety of opinion on the matter, all with more or less equal merit, and therefore the best course of action was the one with least resistance, just continue using the term that everyone was familiar with and that everyone understood to be the umbrella term for all the sub-acronyms: CALL.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, I have continued to attend TESOL conferences each year, because I am invited to give a talk or join a panel, or am involved in Webcasting, and I plan to attend the TESOL conference in 2019 in Atlanta to appear on a panel as a result of the invitation worded as follows:<br />
<br />
"Thank you for your proposal submission for the TESOL 2019 International Convention & English Language Expo. Your proposal, number 1020-004276, titled, "<b>SMALL: Research, Practice, Impact of Social Media-Assisted Language Learning</b>," has been included in the TESOL 2019 convention program, held on 12-15 March 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA."<br />
<br />
The title of this event was agreed to by all the co-panelists (Sandy Wagner, Susan Gaer, Elke Stappert, and Maria Tomeho-Palermino, and myself) following my suggestion that we adopt my acronym. And they all agreed :-) Traction at last!<br />
<br />
Toward achieving that agreement, I had sent my co-panelists the link to my book chapter on SMALL at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/small2014">http://tinyurl.com/small2014</a>. In order to work on our proposal, the panel collaborated on a Google Doc, the use of which, incidentally, is a prime example of how SMALL works (Stevens, 2015). The document can be edited by only the panelists but is shared publicly here:<br />
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1buLaqwYcs4vdjE1vwg_qtiJ7ETQkL4Rw3_A5Qjfsa2s/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1buLaqwYcs4vdjE1vwg_qtiJ7ETQkL4Rw3_A5Qjfsa2s/edit?usp=sharing </a><br />
<br />
As indicated in the above document, the following is my proposed contribution to the panel:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
==============================</div>
<br />
<b>Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning</b><br />
<br />
CALL by definition is COMPUTER assisted language learning, but these days almost everything has a computer. As Stephen Bax used to eloquently and prolifically remind us, the 'computer' part of CALL has long been tending toward normalization. It no longer seems that the computer part of the equation carries significant weight. The weight has shifted to what computers DO.<br />
<br />
What computers do best for language learners is to facilitate communication between them and other speakers of the target language, most predominantly through social media. I believe that SM assists LL more than does the old C, so I have been calling CALL SMALL at every opportunity and encouraging people to "think SMALL" in order to de-emphasize the computer part of CALL as we evolve toward SMALL.<br />
<br />
Language is all about communication, and it is through meaningful communication that students of languages learn them, and to a much lesser extent through learning about the structure of the language (though of course, learning how to correctly shape communication and developing predictive knowledge of the language can help with understanding by helping to decode what people are saying). This in turn facilitates communication which in turn forms the substrate for language learning.<br />
<br />
I am aware that there is a clamor of other acronyms to describe our field; e.g. TELL, MALL, SMLL etc etc and whenever I nudge SMALL to the fore it is usually drowned out by others suggesting equally qualified acronyms with the same passion as my suggestion. In my presentation I will summarize some of the arguments I have been making for SMALL over the years since I first started mooting the concept in 2009.<br />
<br />
Also, a part of my message is that many of these tools and skills work through peers scaffolding one another to bring each other up to speed on the ins and outs. In a piece I just edited for Gavin Wu for the TESL-EJ On the Internet column (Wu, Junjie Gavin. (2018). Mobile Collaborative Learning in a Chinese Tertiary EFL Context.TESL-EJ, Volume 22, Number 2, Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej86/ej86int/) Gavin mentions how this worked for him in this passage from his article:<br />
<br />
"Collaborative work is very much needed and workplace collaboration is viewed as a necessary skill for current and future global employees (Jones & Hafner, 2012). In academia, cross-national collaboration is nothing new (e.g., the teacher/researcher in Hong Kong collaborated productively in Google Docs with the section editor in the United Arab Emirates on this piece of work), however, the question we may need to consider is to what extent our students are prepared for engaging in such collaborative work modes?"<br />
<br />
Using Google Docs to arrive at a publishable version of an article in process appears to have been a new experience for Gavin, but after being exposed to it, he used it in his article as an example of the point he was making to begin with. So, we learn by doing, and pass these skills on through engaging our students in the same and similar techniques.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
==============================</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Meanwhile, I am preparing an abstract for the XXth International Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Research Conference to be held at The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong from 10 - 12 July 2019, <a href="https://www.call2019.org/">https://www.call2019.org/</a>. The conference theme is "Social CALL" meaning "the social dimensions of CALL, more specially the social challenges and responsibilities in respected discipline." The call for papers has been issued with abstracts due at the end of January, 2019, <a href="https://www.call2019.org/call%20for%20papers.php">https://www.call2019.org/call%20for%20papers.php</a>.<br />
<br />
I am planning to attend several other conferences this year if my proposals are accepted. These will follow on the trajectory of my work in social CALL laid out in <a href="http://tinyurl.com/small2014" target="_blank">my book chapter on SMALL</a>, as traced from Writing for Webheads and Webheads in Action (WiA) at the start of this century, <a href="http://webheads.info/">http://webheads.info</a>, and the three free, global WiA online convergences we mounted in 2005, 2007, and 2009, <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm</a>. Another thread binding my work since the turn of the century has been my work with Electronic Village Online (EVO, <a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/">http://evosessions.pbworks.com/</a>) in which I have participated as both a coordinator and moderator of sessions since 2002.<br />
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One of my longest running sessions was Multiliteracies, which I conducted in one form or another from 2004 through 2014, and which was known in its latest renditions, once I had bit the koolaid of connectivism, as MultiMOOC, <a href="http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/">http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/</a>.<br />
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My latest and most recent project, run under the auspices of EVO since 2015, has been EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC, <a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/</a>). The social interaction in this project has been best captured in the wide-ranging and graphically colorful interaction of its Google+ Community (G+C, <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671</a>). Google plans to shut down this community in April of this year due to known hacking of the platform, apparently because they don't wish to address the threat of congressional oversight as has happened with Facebook since 2016 (and Google+ is not the financial mainstay of Google so they have decided not to defend it). Thus we will need to harvest as much data as we can from this platform before April in order to be able to use what we have built there in any analysis of how we fit in with the participatory culture that makes Minecraft so compelling for language learning.<br />
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We have already used blog tools experimentally in this effort; e.g. Mircea Patrascu's harvest of posts through the end of the year here, <a href="https://evomcarchive.blogspot.com/">https://evomcarchive.blogspot.com/</a>. We are presently engaged in our most current EVOMC session, #evomc19, so we will need to make a last harvest when the session ends in February. I hope to use the resulting data in my presentations, updating what we have learned about gamification of SMALL through this effort, as it has evolved over the years each year since 2015.<br />
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Two other conferences I'm planning to attend, assuming my proposals are accepted, are:<br />
<ul>
<li>PELLTA 17-19 April 2019 in Penang, <a href="https://ielt-con2019.webnode.com/">https://ielt-con2019.webnode.com/</a>, deadline Jan 31</li>
<li>GLoCALL 2019/VietCALL Aug 8-10 in Danang, <a href="https://glocall.org/">https://glocall.org/</a>, deadline March 15</li>
</ul>
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Blending social media and eLearning 3.0 into a substrate for hosting participatory communities of practice</h3>
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The loss of Google+ Communities (G+Cs) is going to be a huge blow to thousands of communities of practice, who stand to lose not only their data and transaction histories, but their connections with one another that were made possible only through the community. We don't necessarily have a way of contacting the 350 people who are members of the G+C EVO Minecraft MOOC. Our links with each other, except in the many cases where we have formed personal bonds with our community members, is through their Google profiles, which, except when hacked, Google disguises as to true identities. This is sure to be the biggest blow to educational CoPs since Ning withdrew its free services in 2010 (Stevens, 2010) or the more recent demise of Wikispaces ( whose end came on July 31, 2018 for sites used purely for education).<br />
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It's also going to send all these CoPs out looking for new homes. EVO Minecraft MOOC has already started experimenting with Google Groups and Google Classrooms, though neither seem all that compelling. We have also been considering Moodle, since a couple of people in our group have experience and training on that platform, the platform is free an open source, and training opportunities abound. Other possibilities include (off the top of my head here) Canva, Schoology, Edmodo, Peer-to-peer university (P2PU), Wikiversity ... I'll add to this list as others occur or are suggested to me.<br />
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eLearning 3.0</h3>
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The eLearning 3.0 part is a concept put forward by Stephen Downes in a recent MOOC he hosted by that name, <a href="https://el30.mooc.ca/">https://el30.mooc.ca/</a>, and which I described (to an extent) in a blog post here:<br />
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2018/12/17/learning2gether-with-stephen-downes-about-elearning-3-0/">https://learning2gether.net/2018/12/17/learning2gether-with-stephen-downes-about-elearning-3-0/</a>. The most interesting thing to me about this and all of Stephen's MOOCs is the platform he has developed for hosting his events, which he calls gRSShopper. The grasshopper flits about collecting content via RSS feeds and couches it all in a platform that runs personal learning environments (PLEs) such as MOOCs. The platform has evolved over the years since Stephen co-hosted the first MOOC in 2008, Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge (CCK08, <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08---the-distributed-course">https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08---the-distributed-course</a>).<br />
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The portal pages for these early MOOCs seem to have disappeared from U of Manitoba's servers, but these early cMOOCs were proofs of concept that algorithms could manage the massive part of MOOCs, the large numbers of participants. The idea was that the participants could learn from one another without any direct intervention from a teacher directing that learning from on-high (in other words, knowledge was distributed through aggregation, not delivered top-down). I recall that Stephen's scripts aggregated all content tagged #cck08 and displayed it via his gRSShopper-driven portal script (and to prevent spam, he required bloggers in CCK08 to register their blogs, and the script would aggravate all tagged content only from trusted users).<br />
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Here's how Stephen describes gRSShopper. Visit <a href="https://grsshopper.downes.ca/">https://grsshopper.downes.ca/</a> to learn more.<br />
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I don't recall exactly how much of the platform was in operation in 2008 but Stephen explained and demonstrated gRSShopper at an Innovation Forum presentation as a prototype for a PLE on Jul 07, 2009. The YouTube link is <a href="https://youtu.be/1W6frOLNgLU">https://youtu.be/1W6frOLNgLU</a>.<br />
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Stephen not only uses gRSShopper as the PLE driving all his MOOCs but invites others to use it freely. He explained in some detail during the eLearning 3.0 MOOC how it works and how anyone can do that. You can tease out the relevant material through the links on this page, <a href="https://el30.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm">https://el30.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm</a>, which, if followed systematically, would allow you to replay the entire course. At the bottom of the page, you can see that the page itself is generated from gRSShopper (I did a ctrl-F search on that page to get the notice to highlight in yellow before making the screen capture).<br />
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<h3>
Blending social media and eLearning 3.0 into platforms for online conferences</h3>
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This project is one requested of me by the president of <a href="http://www.apacall.org/" target="_blank">APACALL</a> Jeong Bae Son. APACALL is considering holding online conferences. Jeong Bae and other colleagues in APACALL were participants in our WiaOC conferences, which at the time seemed to set a new standard for hosting conferences by using free Web 2.0 tools and ignoring pay walls, as was the norm for other online conferences taking place before that time. Nowadays, the standard is much more rigorous, but Jeong Bae asked me to look into how other conferences host their online events.<br />
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I've addressed this in a couple of blog posts.<br />
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<ul>
<li>This one outlines some benefits of face-to-face conferences making a portion of their programs available online: <a href="https://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2016/04/can-paradigm-shift-in-conference.html">https://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2016/04/can-paradigm-shift-in-conference.html</a></li>
<li>And this one compares how IATEFL successfully puts almost their entire conference online these days; whereas TESOL have always restricted online access to theirs: <a href="https://learning2gether.net/2017/04/07/learning2gether-with-iatefl-2017-glasgow/">https://learning2gether.net/2017/04/07/learning2gether-with-iatefl-2017-glasgow/</a></li>
</ul>
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My report to APACALL, when I am able to focus on it, will combine an annotated listing of successfully run online conferences, an inventory of essential and desired features in mounting one's own, and some suggestions on how APACALL might move forward on the concept based on what is learned from reacting to the changing playing field given the considerations noted above.</div>
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& Etc.</h3>
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Another project I have been working on obliquely is one proposed to me by Jennifer Verschoor a couple of years ago. Jennifer's idea is for us to put our heads together on developing coding as a focus for language learning. We created a rationale for it in Stevens and Verschoor (2017) but we haven't developed the notion much beyond that. In both our cases, we simply lacked time to work on it, Jen because she is in so much demand in her consultancy work, and me because I had a full-time job. Now that my full-time work has ended, that will be one less constraint on our time (once the other wheels alluded to in this post are set in motion and running of their own accord).</div>
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References</h3>
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Stevens, Vance. (2010). The Ning Thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/</a>; pdf: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf">http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf</a>.<br />
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Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development" in Son, J.-B. (Ed.). Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. <a href="http://www.cambridgescholars.com/computer-assisted-language-learning/">http://www.cambridgescholars.com/computer-assisted-language-learning/</a>;<br />
Also available at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/small2014">http://tinyurl.com/small2014</a>.<br />
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Stevens, V. (2015). Finding Your Voice: Teaching Writing Using Tablets with Voice Capability. TESL-EJ, Volume 19, Number 3, Available: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume19/ej75/ej75int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume19/ej75/ej75int/</a>.<br />
Also available at: <a href="http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf">http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf</a>; pp. 1-11 in pdf.<br />
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Stevens, V. & Verschoor, J. (2017). Coding and English Language Teaching. TESL-EJ, Volume 21, Number 2, Available: http://<a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/">www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/</a>. Also available at: <a href="http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej82/int.pdf">http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej82/int.pdf</a>; pp. 1-15.</div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-66005145245418921402018-11-13T02:27:00.000+00:002018-11-18T01:38:52.225+00:00EVO Minecraft MOOC travels to WorldCALL 5 in Concepción, Chile<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm in Concepción, Chile, for my 3rd WorldCALL conference. They happen every five years. I was at the first one in Melbourne, Australia in 1998. I met Jeong Bae Son there and was asked to join him on the executive committee at APACALL (<a href="http://www.apacall.org/">http://www.apacall.org/</a>) shortly after that, and have been active in that organization ever since. I believe JB, as he likes to be called, will be in Concepción this year.<br />
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I missed the second WorldCALL in Banff in 2003 but went to Fukuoka in 2008. I was not able to attend Glasgow in 2013 but it looks like I'm consistently attending every other one. This one November 13 to 16, 2018, is only the 5th WorldCALL conference ever, <a href="http://worldcall5.org/">http://worldcall5.org/</a>.<br />
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<b>EVO Minecraft MOOC at WorldCALL 5 in Concepción</b><br />
<b><br /></b>My talk at WorldCALL 5 will be on <b>Gamifying teacher professional development through Minecraft MOOC</b><br />
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<i>Abstract</i><br />
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EVO Minecraft MOOC is an ongoing community of practice of language teaching practitioners which invites newcomers to join in every January / February and then continues throughout the year with a dedicated group of teaching peers who have been interacting online in Minecraft for the past 4 years. This presentation explains how the group was formed, how it functions, and what we have learned about gamifying learning by experiencing it ourselves when playing the game Minecraft with one another. More importantly we reflect continually on how this informs our approach to teaching and learning. This presentation shares our insights and perspectives with our audience and invites them to join us online if they wish to learn more about what gamification feels like as a learning experience.<br />
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<i>Summary</i><br />
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Electronic Village Online is an annual teacher training event run under the auspices of TESOL CALL-IS. EVO Minecraft MOOC is a 5-week session that has taken place in Minecraft, a wiki, and Google+ Community space each Jan / Feb since 2015. The presenter conceived the idea for EVO Minecraft MOOC as a way that he himself could develop expertise in the game and thereby use it with students. Other teachers were attracted to the concept, including some who had some experience in the game. Participants were attracted to the session for the same reasons — not that their learning paths had been prescribed for them in a neatly pre-set syllabus but that by entering the “game” or session, learning would happen for them in a way that participants would come to understand by experiencing the process that Ito et al (2010) characterize as “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.”<br />
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We have found that Minecraft is capable of reversing the normal student teacher dichotomy whereby teachers traditionally are assumed to know more than their students. We have found through the experience of participants in our EVO session that that participants tend to take charge of their learning by guiding one another in the vagaries of the game.<br />
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This presentation explains what teachers (who are learning about the game through the experience of playing it as learners) are learning about designing worlds within the game context that will meet their curriculum objectives and create an engaging and enjoyable experience and task-based environment for learners. But above all, the paper explores how teachers can be made aware of the affordances of Minecraft by creating such spaces for one another and interacting in those spaces. It also serves as an example of how we teachers can use what we have learned through our experience with MOOCs to form communities of practice to reboot our own learning, using the community as curriculum model (Cormier, 2008).<br />
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A trailer for my presentation in Concepción appears here<br />
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I blogged how this came about at my more frequently updated podcast blog here,</div>
<a href="https://learning2gether.net/2018/11/01/vance-stevens-presents-lightning-talk-on-engaging-students-in-gamified-classrooms-using-minecraft/">https://learning2gether.net/2018/11/01/vance-stevens-presents-lightning-talk-on-engaging-students-in-gamified-classrooms-using-minecraft/</a><br />
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The video was the result of a concatenation of events. I was taking an iTDi Teaching Online course facilitated by Heike Philp and one of the projects was to produce a video teaching something to an imaginary class of online learners. Meanwhile I had been asked to prepare a "lightning talk" of 5 or 6 minutes explaining EVO Minecraft MOOC for the Games and Learning Community Group session at EDUCAUSE in Denver and have it ready for their face-to-face session on November 1<br />
<a href="https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/2018/agenda/games-and-learning-community-group-session-open-to-all">https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/2018/agenda/games-and-learning-community-group-session-open-to-all</a><br />
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The YouTube video is online here, <a href="https://youtu.be/aKzE43EsPsk">https://youtu.be/aKzE43EsPsk</a>. It is a quick run-through of the slides accompanying my WorldCALL 5 presentation, which I have placed online here:<br />
<a href="https://tinyurl.com/vance2018worldcall">https://tinyurl.com/vance2018worldcall</a><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="304" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSOJL5p_Apjws7V_o8a7eRsKkzOD0S0ypQYx9Xk18_sqUekgiOp9kiqa1i68aClvUc1br8nNZD5Vq5D/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=6000" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="432"></iframe><br />
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So that is the flipped learning side of my presentation in Concepción. Having done all this preparation, and as the slides are online, I plan to simply talk about them in the 30 minutes I have available to me at WorldCALL.<br />
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One thing I would like to emphasize in my presentation is something that Yuko Kato, one of my colleagues in the iTDi course, asked me: What is the language purpose of this? This is a question that is quite critical to keep in mind at a WordlCALL conference on computer assisted language learning.<br />
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I co-wrote an article which might be a good starting point, Smolčec, M., Smolčec, F. and Stevens, V. (2014). Using Minecraft for Learning English. TESL-EJ 18, 2. Available: <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/</a>. This gives many examples of students using MC to practice and improve learning a FL.<br />
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Several of the colleagues who appear in this article have formed a community of practice called EVO Minecraft MOOC. The purpose of this community is to help teachers experience the affordances of MC for communication, critical thinking, problem solving ... all elements underpinning real communication i.e. the desire to learn and use a language. The following article explains how EVO Minecraft MOOC helps teachers to understand the participatory culture which players enter and how to apply the affordances of the game to language learning contexts, Stevens, V. (2017). Gamifying Teacher Professional Development through Minecraft MOOC. In Zoghbor, W., Coombe, C., Al Alami, S. & Abu-Rmaileh, S. (Eds.). Language Culture Communication: Transformations in Intercultural Contexts. The Proceedings of the 22nd TESOL Arabia Conference. Dubai: TESOL Arabia. Pages 75-92. Available: <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evomcmooc_TACON2016.pdf">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evomcmooc_TACON2016.pdf</a><br />
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I'm trying to get Flipgrid to work. The following is experimental ...<br />
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<b>Writingmatrix at WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka</b><br />
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I preserved the following notes from WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka in 2008<br />
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At the <strong>August 6-9, 2008</strong> WorldCALL congress in Fukuoka, Japan, <a href="http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/">http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/</a>, my 45 min. session on Engaging collaborative writing through social networking was listed in the program at <a href="http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/docs/Web_20080728.htm">http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/docs/Web_20080728.htm</a> in the Aug 6 time slot from 17:25 to 18:10 Tokyo time. Nelba Quintana, a collaborator on the Writingmatrix project I was reporting on, joined me at the podium for the presentation.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" height="289" src="https://vancestevens.com/pix/VanceNelba450.jpg" width="450" /><br />
<em>Nelba Quintana and I after we gave our presentation - photo by Joseph Dias</em></div>
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<li>The presentation is based at <a href="http://www.wix.com/vances/worldcall08">http://www.wix.com/vances/worldcall08</a> (this was my handout; it is still online but requires Flash to be fully appreciated).</li>
<li>The slides are at <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/vances/worldcall-fukuoka-2008">https://www.slideshare.net/vances/worldcall-fukuoka-2008</a></li>
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<li>An Elluminate recording of the live session was made, following the slides, here: <a href="https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2008-08-06.0111.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr">https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2008-08-06.0111.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr</a><br />(you need to have Bb Collaborate installed to view this, but you can still listen to the recording, next bullet).</li>
<li>I made an mp3 file from the presentation recording and podcast it here: <a href="http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2008-08-12T06_24_26-07_00">http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2008-08-12T06_24_26-07_00</a> or <a href="http://tinyurl.com/worldcall08vance">http://tinyurl.com/worldcall08vance</a></li>
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As mentioned, Nelba Quintana, one of the original Writingmatrix teachers, joined me at my session, and Rita Zeinstejer and Sasa Sirk joined in online, as you can hear in the recording.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bMev8qbAm8I/W-oof9znbXI/AAAAAAAAHfA/gIMTffhE0pAZUPmBU5iuW7A5rhyqDifGQCLcBGAs/s1600/tomRobb_webheadsFukuoka.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bMev8qbAm8I/W-oof9znbXI/AAAAAAAAHfA/gIMTffhE0pAZUPmBU5iuW7A5rhyqDifGQCLcBGAs/s400/tomRobb_webheadsFukuoka.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Several Webheads (<a href="http://webheads.info/">http://webheads.info</a>) attended this conference. Some are shown in the photo above, taken by Tom Robb (also a Webhead). They might have been about to listen to Vera Menezes give an interesting plenary address on CALL development in the context of chaos theory and how strange attractors create butterfly effects impacting subsequent development of a field like CALL felt all around the world. For example ... imagine huge auditorium, huge screen dwarfing tiny podium with speaker on stage, who clicked on a slide on ... Webheads in Action, and another slide on Writingmatrix. Erika Cruvinel was also mentioned in one of Vera's slides where she talked about Erika's model project sharing with Claudia's class in La Plata. </div>
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I found this picture at the Webheads Posterous blog which was moved (when Posterous shut down) here <a href="http://webheadsinfukuoka.wordpress.com/">http://webheadsinfukuoka.wordpress.com/</a>.</div>
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I wrote up my talk for the conference proceedings</div>
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Stevens, Vance. (2009 July 15). Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking. In Koyama, Toshiko; Noguchi, Judy; Yoshinari,Yuichiro; and Iwasaki, Akio (Eds.). Proceedings of the WorldCALL 2008 Conference. The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology (LET). ISBN: 978-4-9904807-0-7, <a href="http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/proceedings.pdf">http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/proceedings.pdf</a> pp.68-71.</div>
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My paper Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking appears in the online version of the WorldCALL 2008 proceedings <a href="http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd12/index.php?id=5">http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd12/index.php?id=5</a>. The paper linked from those proceeds is available here <a href="http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/d-052.pdf">http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/d-052.pdf</a>, while a proof version can be found here <a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/WorldCALL2008_proceedings_vancestevens.pdf">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/WorldCALL2008_proceedings_vancestevens.pdf</a>) </div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-71828032638239991492018-05-25T13:49:00.003+00:002019-01-18T03:54:36.591+00:00The Enduring Spirit of Webheads in Action<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In March of this year I attended the International TESOL Conference in Chicago, where at the Wiley publishers' booth I was able to lay my hands, literally, on a copy of my chapter in the TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a22OT0PMGkU/WwfiYXt0k1I/AAAAAAAAFlk/q-PH_BswoAkH_ccKxiKy-HiNgq3nWpxTwCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-25_1410vanessa.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="511" data-original-width="552" height="370" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a22OT0PMGkU/WwfiYXt0k1I/AAAAAAAAFlk/q-PH_BswoAkH_ccKxiKy-HiNgq3nWpxTwCLcBGAs/s400/2018-05-25_1410vanessa.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>Vanessa Vaile. who shared on my timeline the picture I had posted to Facebook earlier</i>,<i> has been a participant in many MOOCs I have participated in myself, including the one I founded in 1998, before the term was coined, Writing for Webheads, and after 2002, Webheads in Action, <a href="http://webheads.info/">http://webheads.info</a></i><br />
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Here was the byline of my original post:<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YR3T8EznnQA/WwfkyalFBCI/AAAAAAAAFlw/BbsdWJaJrA4G7OJawrcXtRjx5IZlAmHzwCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-25_1413showingoff.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="207" data-original-width="567" height="145" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YR3T8EznnQA/WwfkyalFBCI/AAAAAAAAFlw/BbsdWJaJrA4G7OJawrcXtRjx5IZlAmHzwCLcBGAs/s400/2018-05-25_1413showingoff.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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There were numerous replies on my post. Here is a sampling taken off the top of the feed:<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E1AZF9qtKIU/WwflTQUFddI/AAAAAAAAFl4/vfKfD0zSOUg8D2HWcaL43b17Mu3zPxH3wCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-25_1414replies.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="492" data-original-width="568" height="346" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E1AZF9qtKIU/WwflTQUFddI/AAAAAAAAFl4/vfKfD0zSOUg8D2HWcaL43b17Mu3zPxH3wCLcBGAs/s400/2018-05-25_1414replies.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Communications with the publisher suggest that I am permitted to post a pdf of my chapter on my personal website, so here it is:
Stevens, V. (2018). Webheads. In Liontas, J. (Ed.). The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. Wiley-Blackwell. 5824 pages. This work is also available as an online resource at <a href="http://www.tesolencyclopedia.com/">http://www.tesolencyclopedia.com</a>. Pdf available: <a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/9781118784235eelt0458webheads.pdf">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/9781118784235eelt0458webheads.pdf</a><br />
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The posts and book chapter make great testimonials to the impact that Webheads in Action has had on hundreds if not thousands of colleagues, associates, and acquaintances in language learning and educational technology, many of whom have become good friends over the years.<br />
<br />
I imagine my virtual work and social networking with Webheads in Action will continue for some time to come. However, the face-to-face teaching and CALL coordinating I have done in UAE for the past 20 years is coming to an end shortly.<br />
<br />
I've been clearing out the papers I have accumulated here, making pdfs (now that the technology is not only available but ubiquitous, not the case when many of these were produced), and posting as much as I can at my papers repository at<br />
<a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html</a><br />
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This has led me to relate a story. This one starts when Curt Bonk gave a talk at Abu Dhabi Women's College early this century. I was a fan of his due to his writings on learner-centered, constructivist, and sociocultural components of collaborative educational learning tools (e.g. Bonk and Cunningham, 1998, available on Curt's <a href="http://www.publicationshare.com/">http://www.publicationshare.com/</a> page, one of his many web pages where he shares whatever he can of everything he produces). I made it a point to attend the talk, which was inspirational, and at the end of it he asked those in the room to share how they would make changes in their practice as a result of what they had learned in his talk. He went around the room drawing effusive promises from participants, and when it came my turn I stood up and said I was going to invite him to come online and speak to colleagues virtually in the group that I had been interacting with, Webheads in Action. He looked at me oddly, nodded, and quickly moved on to the next person.<br />
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When Dr. Bonk was next in Abu Dhabi I sat near him in the audience between presentations and told him more about Webheads and he took enough of an interest that when we put on our first Webheads in Action Online Convergence in 2005, he agreed to give not one, but two keynotes. All of our keynote speakers at that seminal event are listed here:<br />
<a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/convergence2005keynotes.htm">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/convergence2005keynotes.htm</a><br />
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Curt has kept in touch over the years, and when Curt's friend Jay Cross came to Abu Dhabi, Curt encouraged him to get in touch with me. On the afternoon of the last day of the conference Jay was involved in, not one to which I had been invited, he called my mobile cell phone, and I agreed to come and get him at the Abu Dhabi Hilton and show him the town. His first request was to visit a beach, so I took him to the nearby stretch of sand where the Emirates Palace Hotel now stands and he got out of the car, took his shoes off, and walked on the beach happy as a kid, squishing the sand in his toes. I don't recall where else we went but we had a delightful time, ending at a fish souq on the piers where the dhows used to moor, and I picked up a kilo of shrimp and I brought him up to our apartment with its night view of the Abu Dhabi corniche where my wife Bobbi fixed it for dinner. When I returned Jay to the Hilton late that night he was well refreshed.<br />
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I stayed in touch with Jay through his Internetime Ning. Fast forward a bit to 2007, and Jay had been invited to speak at a conference on "New Learning for Sustainability in the Arab Region" taking place 30 August - 1 September 2007 at the famous library in Alexandria, Egypt (actually the famous one burned down; the modern reconstruction is engaged in making digital copies of as many books as possible). The event was subtitled "Motivating Change: New Learning in Formal Education for Sustainable Development", and the conference was hosting regionally-based experts working in informal learning, web 2.0, active bloggers, etc. I hardly considered myself an expert on sustainability, but Jay could not attend and was asked to recommend someone else in the region who might fill in for him. I would imagine Jay was planning to talk about informal learning, since he wrote <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-ae/Informal+Learning%3A+Rediscovering+the+Natural+Pathways+That+Inspire+Innovation+and+Performance-p-9780787981693" target="_blank">a book on that topic</a>, but I agreed to come and address Web 2.0. I wrote out everything I intended to say on that topic here:<br />
<a href="http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/2007alexandria/web20arabia.htm">http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/2007alexandria/web20arabia.htm</a>.<br />
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In my notes of the event, on my web page here, <a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#070831">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#070831</a><br />
I noted that there was a conference blog. The blog address is still good, but I had to search on the term 'sustainability' to find that the posts pertaining to the event in Alexandria were still online:<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZovK76aoOG0/Wwf4m4i8aPI/AAAAAAAAFmE/REpZw95QzVAkg2dCVtSACODJZsK6kFqkQCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-25_1543brightgreen.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="1236" height="153" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZovK76aoOG0/Wwf4m4i8aPI/AAAAAAAAFmE/REpZw95QzVAkg2dCVtSACODJZsK6kFqkQCLcBGAs/s400/2018-05-25_1543brightgreen.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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The chronologically earlier post,<br />
<a href="https://brightgreenlearning.com/2007/08/talking-about-tagging-finding-our-event.html">https://brightgreenlearning.com/2007/08/talking-about-tagging-finding-our-event.html</a>, mentions that I gave a "very interesting presentation" and promises a post about it "later" (still waiting :-). But it also mentions that Buthaina Al Othman was one of the speakers at this conference. And as this post is about the spirit of Webheads, this requires another aside.<br />
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Buthaina, whom we knew as Buth, was one of our original Webheads in Action participants in 2002, but we did not meet until Sunday, November 16, 2003, when Michael Coghlan and I were scheduled to be presenters at the annual and entirely online Global Learn Day VII event. Michael was one of the co-founders of Writing for Webheads, and our presentation was on "Meet the Webheads: An experiment in world friendship through online language learning." Our presentation was unusual in that Michael happened to be in Abu Dhabi, so we had arranged to cybercast our presentation live from the Lecture Hall where I worked at the Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi.<br />
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I had invited my colleagues at PI to come and witness the event, but it was late in our working day, and I was told later that we were competing with a rugby test on the telly, so only 5 or 6 of my real-life colleagues were there to occupy a few of the 100 some odd available seats. But Buthaina flew from nearby Kuwait to Abu Dhabi especially to be on hand to join us in the live presentation. Buthaina posted pictures and archived the event at her website: <a href="http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm">http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm</a>, which amazingly remains online.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CBRV33A-wBY/Wwj5B6ENtzI/AAAAAAAAFmc/NAvQ0wLeFc8X0M_AMcdIRPY0Mx1NQ91UwCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-26_1003gld2003.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="987" height="116" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CBRV33A-wBY/Wwj5B6ENtzI/AAAAAAAAFmc/NAvQ0wLeFc8X0M_AMcdIRPY0Mx1NQ91UwCLcBGAs/s400/2018-05-26_1003gld2003.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Michael became the Webheads community troubadour after composing and recording our theme song, "</i><i>Webheads all over the World", available on Wikispaces until July 31, 2018. <br />Listen soon! (or maybe Michael will post it elsewhere for us.</i></div>
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<i><a href="http://webheadstheme.wikispaces.com/">http://webheadstheme.wikispaces.com/</a></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Note from Jan 2019, I found a capture here; </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">no mp3 link though</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180707230759/http://webheadstheme.wikispaces.com:80/">https://web.archive.org/web/20180707230759/http://webheadstheme.wikispaces.com:80/</a></span></div>
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To bring this aside to a close, I next met Buth in person at the 9th EFL Conference at the American University of Cairo, held in January, 2004, where I had been invited to deliver a plenary address (Stevens, 2004) and a few workshops. As a guest of the conference organizers, including the US Embassy in Cairo, I was invited to many events in the course of my stay, and as Buth and I were often seen together at the conference, she was usually included in the invitations. To the many people we met, I was introduced by my proper credentials and as one of the speakers at the conference, and Buth was introduced as "a Webhead." Buth was first to notice this pattern, which we interpreted as a sign that Webheads had taken on a stature in the context of this conference whereby it was as natural to introduce someone as a Webhead as to give their affiliation in the normal way, and it seemed to be accepted on as equal a par by the professors at the event as with any other identity.<br />
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Buth and I both met again in Alexandria a few years later at the conference in 2007 on New Learning for Sustainability in the Arab Region, again by coincidence, and both of us were mentioned in the same blog post as the conference got under way. That part of the story continues on the web page where I record my papers and presentations:<br />
<a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#0070901">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#0070901</a><br />
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In addition to my formal presentation at the conference in Alexandria, I had been offered an opportunity to mount a poster session at an event called the New Marketplace at New Learning for Sustainability exhibition (with wireless available), so I was able to illustrate some of the concepts I'd brought up in my talk by demonstrating some of the tools we use in Webheads and Worldbridges Webcast Academy, <a href="http://webcastacademy.net/">http://webcastacademy.net/</a>. The computer-mediated communications tools I was using at the time would have been similar to those described in Stevens (2005), and <a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesol/arabia/metsmac2005gvs.htm" target="_blank">presented at the METSMaC conference</a> in Abu Dhabi that year. The Alexandria presentation worked well, the conference delegates were interested, and I was offered an additional slot for a workshop on Saturday Sept 1, the last day of the conference, from 9 a.m to 11:30 a.m. in Egypt<br />
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This would be an extemporaneous event. I dubbed it "F.U.N. Fare - UnWorkshop on Computer Mediated Communications Tools for Distributed Social Learning Networks." F.U.N. was an acronym I had coined standing for Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense, which I was arguing in those days that teachers should tolerate, even encourage, in their teaching in order to push their lessons toward the bleeding edge of the envelope of what was possible in engaging their students (and each other) with the newly emerging enabling Web 2.0 technologies.<br />
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At the TESOL conference in March, 2004 I had given a presentation entitled "Voices heard having F.U.N. in online communities of practice" as part of a Colloquium on “Multiple perspectives on the on-line conversation class” organized by David Nunan:<br />
<a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesol/colloquium2004/fun00.htm">http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesol/colloquium2004/fun00.htm</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GF8zFfQD674/WwjmkVTuCHI/AAAAAAAAFmQ/hxIJ-mb1Tf0icxPec3V2BPpIisNHxtBYgCLcBGAs/s1600/nunan040403.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="533" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GF8zFfQD674/WwjmkVTuCHI/AAAAAAAAFmQ/hxIJ-mb1Tf0icxPec3V2BPpIisNHxtBYgCLcBGAs/s400/nunan040403.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>Buth appears in the picture at the top of that web page, taken at the conclusion of the colloquium; she used to often attend TESOL conferences in that era. <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/convergence2005keynotes.htm" target="_blank">David Nunan appeared on the program</a> (with Curt Bonk) at our Webheads in Action Online Convergence the following year, 2005. The gentleman on the right is another Webheads participant, Jeong Bae Son, president of <a href="http://apacall.org/" target="_blank">APACALL</a>.</i><br />
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I introduced that final, unplanned and unanticipated, unWorkshop event in Alexandria as a concatenation of two convergent communities of practice, Webheads in Action and <a href="http://worldbridges.net/">http://worldbridges.net/</a>, who were constantly together exploring new computer-mediated communications (CMC) tools for percolating knowledge through their overlapping distributed learning networks, and leveraging many properties of social networking (Lebow, 2006). I promised that members of those communities would be invited to join us online, and the (un)workshop would take place informally, without fixed agenda, and in response to the direction suggested by the online participants and those present in Alexandria.<br />
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Among the spaces we would explore were:<br />
<ul>
<li>The Webheads in Action <a href="http://webheadsinaction.org/">http://webheadsinaction.org</a>, and Worldbridges, <a href="http://worldbridges.net/">http://worldbridges.net</a>, Drupal portals</li>
<ul>
<li>The Worldbridges chat room here: <a href="http://webcastacademy.net/">http://webcastacademy.net/</a>chat (we were basing our streaming there)</li>
</ul>
<li>Skype, with a demonstration of webcasting through Worldbridges Webcast Academy</li>
<ul>
<li>Online participants would find Vance on Skype ID vancestev. This would be streamed at <a href="http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen">http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen</a>. Webcastacademy volunteer Jose Rodriguez agreed to handle the backup stream.</li>
</ul>
<li>Tours of Edunation and Boracay in Second Life</li>
<ul>
<li>Online participants in SL would offer friendship to 'Webhead Link' and request teleport</li>
</ul>
<li>Elluminate and Alado voice and whiteboard-enabled presentation chat rooms</li>
<li>Tapped In and Twitter text spaces</li>
<ul>
<li>Participants could join VanceS at <a href="http://www.tappedin.org/">http://www.tappedin.org</a> and on Twitter, follow VanceS</li>
</ul>
<li>Wikispaces and PBWiki</li>
<ul>
<li>I set up a wikispace for my Virtual Strand plenary coming up between Sept 5-8, 2007</li>
<li>In preparation for the demise of Wikispaces July 31, 2018, I created HTML and PDF backup of <a href="http://eurocall2007vs.wikispaces.com/">http://eurocall2007vs.wikispaces.com</a>:</li>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2007eurocall_vs.html">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2007eurocall_vs.html</a> and</li>
<li><a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/eurocall2007vs-home.pdf">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/eurocall2007vs-home.pdf</a></li>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Slideshare, Bubbleshare, Webshots, Voicethread, Flickr</li>
<li>Facebook, Moodle, Pageflakes</li>
</ul>
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What ensued was a definitive display of the Spirit of Webheads<br />
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The BrightGreenLearning blogger observed the following</div>
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<a href="https://brightgreenlearning.com/2007/09/having-f-u-n-with-vance-stevens.html">https://brightgreenlearning.com/2007/09/having-f-u-n-with-vance-stevens.html</a></div>
<br />
Vance Stevens, of the Petroleum Institute (Abu Dhabi) and founder of Webheads in 1998, gave a two hour Un-Workshop this morning at our Arab Region New Learning for Sustainable Development Workshop that he titled F.U.N. * Fair: Computer Mediated Communications Tools for Distributed Social Learning Networks. This was a face-to-face un-workshop, a veritable souk of activity, connectivity and interaction both in our training room at the Library of Alexandria, where we are now in Egypt, and with his online colleagues from Barcelona, the West Coast of the US, and so on, who joined us in Second Life, on skype and on worldbridges.net.<br />
<br />
The Un-workshop had an open door policy, people were popping in and out. Laptops and terminals all on different pages, the clattering of keypads, exploring and trying out the URLs that Vance was introducing to us, talking us through, answering ten questions simultaneously. There were plenty of technical challenges, and at the same time lots of patient people who were excited by the possibilities, mystified by Second Life (one Egyptian participant said it should be called “Second Wife” instead), and eagerly starting their journey in the technology-mediated environment. It was great to have Vance as a guide. What you can learn from seeing it, trying it, and being able to query it in real time is so valuable, plus his enthusiasm is catching. You could tell that we weren’t the only ones having F.U.N.*<br />
* Frivilous Unanticipated Nonsense<br />
<br />
Indeed!<br />
<br />
I wrote a report on the plane on my way back to UAE and sent it out to the Webheads Yahoo Group list so everyone could see what F.U.N. Buth and I had had in Alexandria running this particular session. The report can be found online here:<br />
<a href="https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/conversations/topics/16194">https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/conversations/topics/16194</a>,<br />
and here is the full text from that message:<br />
<br />
Today was a case of if anything can go wrong it will. The Alexandria Library is about a ten min walk from my hotel. There was no point in arriving at the conference hall too early because the rooms would all be locked until just before the start time of my session, though once I got into the center, wireless Internet would available from anywhere inside. So I left my hotel 45 min before I was due to present, carrying two laptops, wires, a USB mic, webcam, adapters, etc. Though the presentation room was locked when I got there, I got out my computer and booted it, and waited for someone to open the door to let me in.<br />
<br />
At 20 min before the start of my session, someone came around with keys, so I got into the room, plugged the laptop into the mains, the one with webcast software installed and ready to go, and discovered my first problem of the day. My a/c adaptor had not been working well, I was having to massage it over the past week to get the charge light to hold, but today it didn't want to charge at all. I worked with it for a couple of minutes, decided to leave it for a while, and started Skype to keep my appointment with Jose Rodriguez who had kindly offered to backup my stream at <a href="http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen">http://www.webcastacademy.net/listen</a>.<br />
<br />
Jose was online and on task. He informed me that he was streaming at that moment on Sandbox B. I was expected to take A since I'd been planning to demonstrate streaming at my unWorkshop but working with the charger required two hands and was taking valuable time. Nevertheless I managed to keep up some kind of chatter in the Skype stream, and Jose reassured me that all was well there. Meanwhile I turned on my second computer, which I planned to use for Second Life.<br />
<br />
A technician arrived and helped get the projector on my webcasting laptop projecting onto the wall. I looked for Nick Noakes in Second Life but didn't see him, so I left it and went to the Webcast Academy chat room and texted to the people there. Sasa (one of my Webheads collaborators on the Writingmatrix project, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com <i>(note from 2019; we moved this to <a href="http://writingmatrix.pbworks.com/">http://writingmatrix.pbworks.com/</a>)</i> and Stevens et al. 2008) and someone else were listening to the stream but unable to Skype in, so no voices were joining Jose and I. Graham Stanley meanwhile offered me a teleport to a space called Egypt in SL. I completely forgot about Twitter.<br />
<br />
With battery depleting on my laptop, I worked the charger every chance I got, trying to find the magic fit for plug in socket that would get it working. My battery was a quarter low when participants started showing up fifteen minutes into start time. They had been delayed by a previous event that had run overtime. I asked the first person to arrive at the un-workshop in Alexandria Egypt, Ule from Germany, to take over talking with Graham in Second Life Egypt. Three or four others followed and I tried to explain to them what I was doing while also addressing participants online in the stream.<br />
<br />
It was clear that the on-site participants in Alexandria were most interested in SL and they came around behind that computer, while the EdTechTalk chat (Worldbridges) displayed on the big screen. There wasn't much Graham could show us in Second Life Egypt so he moved to Boracay and teleported us over. Ule passed the chat to the next person, and so on as newcomers arrived, and Graham was very welcoming to each newcomer. My wife Bobbi, from her computer in the UAE, arrived in World and we teleported her to Boracay. Graham was by now speaking to us, voice having started working by magic in SL, and we started voice-chatting with Graham there.<br />
<br />
I moved the USB mic connected to the Worldbridges stream to the speakers of the SL computer and the face-to-face participants were able to talk to Graham in such a way that the conversation was<br />
clearly audible in the Webcast Academy stream being maintained by Jose, according to feedback from Jose.<br />
<br />
The SL computer now had the attention of the face-to-face audience so we switched the one monitor projector to that computer which was configured for hi res. This caused the projection screen to split down the middle but I didn't notice at first. I was still text chatting in the EdTechTalk chat room, working out who could and who couldn't join us in SL, and trying to talk to those who could access SL and help them reach the location where we were in SL by offering friendship, and then extending a teleport. This took us up to the top of the hour, 10 a.m. in Alexandria.<br />
<br />
At about that time Buth and several others arrived from elsewhere at the conference in Alexandria, and we had to explain to the on-site newcomers what was going on. At about that time the mic on my Skype chat simply stopped working. I became aware of it when one of the distant participants, Jason, kept dropping out and trying to reach me. He would call, I would answer, but he couldn't hear me. I called him, he answered, hello? Hello? And then he would ring off. I tried troubleshooting, but couldn't find the problem without being able to drop everything else and focus on it. I was also trying to give the newcomers some clue of what we were doing, and prevailing on Buth to get into Skype on her laptop and tell Jose what was happening. Meanwhile the battery on my Skype computer was getting worryingly low. I still couldn't fix the power supply, and I decided to just switch that computer off so I could do a controlled shutdown rather than lose power and not be able to retrieve my most recent files later. This removed me from the stream and EdTechTalk text chat.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Graham was taking the conference delegates around Better World, a water conservation simulation, and they were greatly interested. At one point Graham suggested they fly to another part of the island and the delegate at that moment on the keyboard held down the up button and soared into space. We didn't realize what he was doing till he was well out of earshot of Graham (in SL you can only hear people talking when you are near to them in-world). He was very much enjoying the sensation of flying but I had to take control and get teleported back to where Graham was.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile there was a request in the face-to-face audience that we show them Elluminate so I decided to start it on my Second Life computer. I launched Mozilla and was surprised when I typed in the URL that an IE window was launched separately. At the same time a McAfee notice came up demanding action. This was a month-old computer and McAfee had been bundled with it free for one month (but with a debilitating Catch-22). In fact, this was Bobbi's computer and she had noticed before I borrowed it for my trip that McAfee was about to expire. She had installed Avast on it but had not removed McAfee. Now McAfee was informing me that it was no longer protecting my computer and that another program (Yahoo Messenger) had wanted to visit the Internet and I would need to type in my credit card details right there and then in the middle of my unWorkshop. This being a very unwanted distraction at that point I tried to dismiss it and close the IE window but that window froze and the browsers ceased to function.<br />
<br />
I discovered later when I had a chance to look at it that McAfee had basically blocked my browsers from accessing the Internet (though SL and IM chats continued to work) and only when I removed the program completely was I able to browse the Internet again. But at this moment in my presentation I went to the Task Manager and tried to find IE in order to kill it. It was open and frozen on my computer screen but it wasn't listed under applications running, so I switched to processes, found explorer listed there, and zapped it. This turned out to be windows explorer so I lost my task bar. At that point there was nothing to do but reboot, goodbye to Second Life. I informed the SL crowd of that. Graham had gone to breakfast by that time anyway, having taken everyone to Camp Dharfur, on our way to what I had wanted to show them: Meteora.<br />
<br />
We were now at the top of the second hour, and had half an hour to go in the unWorkshop. We still had Buth's computer in Skype and the Webcastacademy text chat. So while my computer was rebooting I decided to make Buth's computer display to the room via the projector, and meantime to run Elluminate from one of the 6 other computers in the room. One of the participants was talking to Jose, who was still doggedly streaming the proceedings via Worldbridges. We hooked up Buth's computer to the projector and hit the key combo that should have toggled screen modes. However we got an error at the projector, illegal resolution (not just a 'no signal') and Buth's screen display disappeared! We toggled over and over, no projector display, with Buth's screen now unusable. Our on-site participant was still chatting with Jose, Skype sound being unaffected by the problem, however we had to explain to the stream that we were going to have to go off the air for yet another reboot.<br />
<br />
With 15 minutes left in our presentation our face to face participants had nothing to see except as they were milling about behind us watching us try to recover. When my computer came back on I adjusted screen resolution down so that it now synched with the projector and no longer gave a split screen and I returned to SL. Richard, another distant participant, was there, having found us via the Worldbridges stream. His voice in SL was working well but he was hearing his echo because I had no headphone on my SL computer, so I decided to plug in the USB mic there because there is an on-off switch on it which would allow us to mute our mic while he was talking. This new computer had the new Vista, and of course Microsoft in its wisdom has changed the interfaces for configuring sound from the familiar XP way, so I was having to figure out how to get at my mic controls and disable the onboard one and configure my computer to accept the USB one.<br />
<br />
This took another pregnant couple of minutes but meanwhile Buth had restored our presence in the Skype event and in the EdTechTalk text chat, and technicians were working on getting the third computer into Elluminate and projecting that onto the screen. They left when that was done but we discovered that whereas we could now text chat in Elluminate we could neither hear nor speak there. We had Elluminate on our overhead projector, text only, we were in the Skype stream, and we were talking to Richard in Second Life at Camp Dharfur, and to Graham who had by then returned.<br />
<br />
We were at the end of our allotted time but the master of ceremonies for the plenary coming up in Alexandria was with us and enjoying the show. The technicians had by then returned and got us speaking in Elluminate, and we could hear what was being said. Since the master of ceremonies was the one who had requested that demo, she was in no hurry to make us stop. So, something interesting happened.<br />
<br />
We were talking to Graham and Richard in Second Life and to Jose, Sasa, and Moira (who had participated in our Webheads in Action Online Convergence in 2005; see Hunter, 2006) in Elluminate (Hala, a Webhead participant from Sudan, had just left). Graham was in no space other than SL, and as these were separate spaces, I was going to my SL mic to talk to him and to the Elluminate computer to talk to the others. But Richard noted that when I spoke in Elluminate, he could hear what I said on his computer. It clicked that Jose was streaming Elluminate into the Webcast and Richard was hearing that. So I could talk to Richard as well as everyone else in Elluminate and he could respond to us in SL voice. It occurred to me then to include Graham in the conversation by talking into the tethered USB and Elluminate mics at the same time. This caused Richard to hear my SL chat (and then get the delayed rendition in the stream so he had to turn that off) but we had successfully patched a conversation taking place in SL into one going on in Elluminate, and for those in the unWorkshop it was one of those WOW moments.<br />
<br />
I'm not quite sure how we got there. In the past three hours we had had almost every conceivable meltdown. Starting with equipment failure, power adaptor failing to function, relegating the prime presentation laptop to limited use -- we had moved on to browser crash brought on by McAfee crapware, that sort of design being the reason I had declined to purchase the program in the first place, and subsequent reboot. We had lost Buth's display at about the same time, and had been working with split screen projection up to then where my computer video signal was incompatible with the projector resolution (easily resolvable, but when you are juggling so many balls that some are bouncing on the floor, what would be more obvious at a calmer moment remains ellusive). With two computers down we had fought through technical problems with a third computer and managed to get all computers running in the end and bring the unWorkshop to a close on an epiphany moment.<br />
<br />
Later in a plenary recap session, feedback on our unWorkshop was positive, with all concerned saying they had learned a lot from Webheads. The only criticism was that SL appeared to be perhaps too addictive, potentially could take time away from family, and of course that it would be perhaps inaccessible to a majority of stakeholders the sustainable ecologies people were trying to reach in places where the pinch of limited resources is being felt most. Other than that the participants seemed to be quite taken with the potential, and spoke of having eyes wide opened.<br />
<br />
Many thanks to Buthaina for her competent and timely support! Amazing dedication Rita (Zeinstejer, another Writingmatrix collaborator, Stevens et al. 2008). Thanks John for your kind encouraging words (John Hibbs perhaps, founder of the Global Learn Day movement), and Graham you were the star of the show, taking everyone on voice tours of eco simulations in Second Life. As this was for a conference on environmental sustainability, the conference delegates were really putting the twos and twos together as a result of their encounter with Webheads in Action.<br />
<br />
-----------------<br />
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And that, dear children, is the true and enduring spirit of Webheads in Action.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>References</b><br />
<br />
Hunter, M. (2006). Are You on the PD Cybertrain or Still Hesitating? IATEFL Poland Computer Special Interest Group Teaching English with Technology A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 6, Issue 3 (August 2006). Available: <a href="http://www.tewtjournal.org/issues/past-issue-2006/past-issue-2006-issue-3/">http://www.tewtjournal.org/issues/past-issue-2006/past-issue-2006-issue-3/</a>.<br />
<br />
Lebow, Jeff. (2006). Worldbridges: The Potential of Live, Interactive Webcasting. TESL-EJ 10, 1. <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej37/int.html">http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej37/int.html</a>.<br />
<br />
Stevens, V. (2005). Computer-mediated communications tools used with teachers and students in virtual communities of practice, in S. M. Stewart and J. E. Olearski (Eds), Proceedings of the First Annual Conference for Middle East Teachers of Science, Mathematics and Computing (pp. 204-218). Middle East Teachers of Science, Mathematics and Computing: Abu Dhabi.<br />
<div>
<a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesol/arabia/stevens-METSMaC-I.pdf">The PDF file of the paper as it appears in the conference proceeds is here</a><br />
<br />
Stevens, Vance. (2004). The Skill of Communication: Technology brought to bear on the art of language learning. TESL-EJ 7, 4 (On the Internet). <a href="http://tesl-ej.org/ej28/int.html">http://tesl-ej.org/ej28/int.html</a>.<br />
<br />
Stevens, Vance, Nelba Quintana, Rita Zeinstejer, Saša Sirk, Doris Molero & Carla Arena. (2008). Writingmatrix: Connecting Students with Blogs, Tags, and Social Networking. In Stevens, Vance & Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, Co-editors. (2008). Special Feature: Proceedings of the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, 2007. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 4: <a href="http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html">http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html</a><br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-621776750511295082017-04-20T04:45:00.002+00:002018-04-15T04:23:42.761+00:00Implementing teacher training in gamification through Minecraft: Putting the forces in motionThe following is a rationale for using Minecraft with students where I work teaching EFL in a military academy setting. I thought I would post it here and perhaps develop it further <i>(and I in fact have updated this slightly in April, 2018)</i>.<br />
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<b>What is Minecraft?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Minecraft is a game involving critical thinking, collaboration and cooperation, strategic analysis, creative engineering, and architectural skill that is extremely popular in its own right. In 2016 50,000 copies a month were purchased and 40 million players a month logged into the game (according to Jeff Kuhn in Kuhn and Stevens, 2017, see reference at end of this post). It is particularly being utilized in education where teachers wish to promote the skills listed above in their work with students. As evidence of how seriously this has impacted education, Microsoft has bought the game from its creators Mojang and is marketing it at huge conferences such as ISTE where their workshops on Minecraft are attracting lines out the doors of educators eager to learn more and use it in their classrooms.</div>
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<b>Why in a military academy context?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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I think it would be of particular use in my context because the game is designed with fascinating depth to suggest seemingly endless possibility. It emulates military skills such as strategic thinking, establishing a base in a wilderness, protecting it from threats arising in the game, and teaming with others to develop their base through finding resources that can be put to use in creating objects to further team goals. Use of Minecraft would introduce elements of gamification in our coursework (as opposed to using ‘games’ in class, which is not the same as gamification). Students could communicate with us in various ways about their experiences playing the game.</div>
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The things you can do in Minecraft are limited only by your imagination. You can find coal and iron and create metal objects, such as railroads, where mine carts you can ride in are powered through redstone, so you can build machines that work on wiring you devise. You can set logic gates, and program in the game. You can build and fortify, set up farms so you can feed yourself and others, raise animals, and grow your own trees so you have an endless supply of wood. You have to employ strategies and carry out advanced planning to thrive in the game. Often players will work in teams.<o:p></o:p><br />
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I created this set of Minecraft challenges for my students in the military college where I work. The challenges are designed to get them to take the tutorial that comes with the Minecraft Edu version, cross the ravine at the end of the tutorial and explore the world on the other side, and eventually parachute into a wilderness where they have to establish a perimeter, defend it, and sustain and develop it in cooperation with other players in their platoon / team.<br />
<a href="http://vancesclass.pbworks.com/w/page/117588981/49_Sections_5-6_EESP#MinecraftChallenge1nbspTheTutorialWorld">http://vancesclass.pbworks.com/w/page/117588981/49_Sections_5-6_EESP#MinecraftChallenge1nbspTheTutorialWorld</a><br />
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<b>Who enjoys Minecraft?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Children and adults of all ages enjoy it. It is played by kids as young as 4, e.g. pre-literate, so it relies more on intuition than on language. However there is much evidence of children in foreign countries becoming fluent in English through explaining in that lingua franca what they are doing in Minecraft to others around the world. This article gives an example of one such person, a ten year old Croatian boy who achieved fluency in English through Minecraft</div>
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<ul>
<li>Smolčec, M., Smolčec, F. and Stevens, V. (2014). Using Minecraft for Learning English. TESL-EJ, 18(2),1-15. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej70/int.pdf">http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej70/int.pdf</a>.</li>
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Minecraft can form the basis of writing and multimedia projects where students are highly motivated to show what they are building and doing. They also will research how to do things on Minecraft. One teacher in Turkey reported how his students went out and bought an advanced Minecraft guidebook in English, and helped each other read it, because it wasn’t available in Turkish. Dave Dodgson has recently joined the moderating team of EVO Minecraft MOOC to help teachers understand the dynamics of gamified learning:</div>
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<li>Dodgson, D. (2017). Digging Deeper: Learning and Re-learning with Student and Teacher Minecraft Communities. TESL-EJ 20, 4:1-12). <span id="docs-internal-guid-9f082986-c3aa-6fe7-d321-446f04e43fdb"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Available: </span><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume20/ej79/ej79int/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume20/ej79/ej79int/</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></span></li>
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<b>What is needed to get Minecraft working where you teach?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Any individual who plays Minecraft requires an account which must be purchased from Mojang for about $28. That’s for a lifetime license, but annual licensed logins are available through educational institutions for only $5 per user, from<br />
<a href="https://education.minecraft.net/">https://education.minecraft.net/</a>.<br />
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The Mojang user ID allows you to play any version of Minecraft. There are many versions with different capabilities. Trusted users are normally white-listed on servers, so in practice you can only play as a single player, or on servers where you are allowed to enter. In order to fully exploit the game in education, it should be played in community mode on a server available to multiple simultaneous users.</div>
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The full PC / MAC version of Minecraft is the most versatile. We are looking to purchase licenses for the education edition which I am not familiar with first hand, but it allows up to 30 to play at once, according to <a href="http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Education_Edition">http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Education_Edition</a>. It is also possible for us to get a free trial for a limited time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Training teachers<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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This brings us to the most important thing needed, and that is a cohort of teachers who are aware of how Minecraft can leverage their learning and that of their students through gamification.</div>
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Two years ago, in 2015, my interest in Minecraft as a tool for this kind of learning was such that I organized an Electronic Village Online session for the purpose of learning how to play the game and understand how we could use it to gamify learning environments. We have just completed our third year of the community that was formed then. I have become an accomplished player, and I have a network of other teachers (plus Paul) who can help us with the server side issues. </div>
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The EVO Minecraft MOOC community landing page is here, <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671</a><o:p></o:p></div>
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To start a similar teachers’ group at your institution you'd need to install the software where teachers can use it and show them how to play there using user ID from the pool requested. Where I work, we will have to experiment with networking other devices so teachers can play in leisure time, which is needed for them to become familiar enough with the game to see how their students might learn it and use it for productive class purposes. It is not necessary in this game that teachers be authoritative sources of knowledge. Students and other players will inevitably make discoveries which they will be eager to share with peers and teachers alike, using communication skills we are trying to teach them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Further reading<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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I have described the process of how teachers can learn to be proficient in Minecraft in presentations at conferences, one of which resulted in this chapter in the proceedings of the 2016 TESOL Arabia conference:</div>
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<li>Stevens, V. (2017). Gamifying Teacher Professional Development through Minecraft MOOC. In Zoghbor, W., Coombe, C., Al Alami, S. & Abu-Rmaileh, S. (Eds.). Language Culture Communication: Transformations in Intercultural Contexts. The Proceedings of the 22nd TESOL Arabia Conference. Dubai: TESOL Arabia. Pages 75-92. Available: <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evomcmooc_TACON2016.pdf">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evomcmooc_TACON2016.pdf</a></li>
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<o:p></o:p>
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The following free eBook gives comprehensive information about how and why teachers use various aspects of Minecraft to further pedagogical goals:</div>
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<li>Dikkers, S. (2015). Teachercraft: How teachers learn to use Minecraft in their classrooms. Lulu.com. Available: <a href="http://press.etc.cmu.edu/files/Teacher-Craft_Dikkers-etal-web.pdf">http://press.etc.cmu.edu/files/Teacher-Craft_Dikkers-etal-web.pdf</a>.</li>
</ul>
One of the contributors to that book is Jeff Kuhn, who is on our team of expert co-moderators of EVO Minecraft MOOC. He and I have just written an article which we have submitted to TESOL Journal, having been invited to do so by the journal editor. The article appears in the December 2017 issue of TESOL Journal, where if you are a TESOL member, you can log in and read it for free.<br />
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<ul>
<li>Kuhn, J. and Stevens, V. (2017). Participatory culture as professional development: Preparing teachers to use Minecraft in the classroom. <em>TESOL Journal 8</em>, 4:753–767. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.359" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.359</a>and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tesj.359/full" target="_blank">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tesj.359/full</a>.</li>
</ul>
Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-90432047511897006882017-01-28T17:17:00.002+00:002017-04-05T16:11:06.788+00:00A Short History of Community in EVO Minecraft MOOC<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.56; margin-bottom: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Friday Feb 3 I am scheduled to give another talk about EVO Minecraft MOOC. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/112913140/Live_events2017#FriFeb31500UTCVanceStevensandJeffKuhnonEVOMC17atthe8thannualfreeconnectingonlineconference">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/112913140/Live_events2017#FriFeb31500UTCVanceStevensandJeffKuhnonEVOMC17atthe8thannualfreeconnectingonlineconference</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have given several such talks over the past couple of years, and usually I focus on how EVO Minecraft MOOC serves as a game board for teachers to learn through experience about gamification. I normally make the point that whereas we play Minecraft, we are really learning about constructing learning environments that are compelling and self-directing, and whose basic premises might apply across a range of subjects and classroom contexts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In my presentation Friday, I might try and encapsulate some of this as background, but in this presentation I want to discuss recent developments with the EVO Minecraft MOOC community as it has evolved over the three years we have been a community. Many aspects of this evolution have themselves taught us a bit about gamification.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we started <span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">EVO Minecraft MOOC</span> in 2015 our approach was a departure from the norm in <a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/" target="_blank">EVO sessions</a> in several respects. For one thing we were the only EVO session that required a purchase, albeit a modest one (less than $30 per user ID paid to <a href="https://minecraft.net/en-us/">https://minecraft.net/en-us/</a>)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Secondly, as I have done in all my EVO endeavors, when we started a Google+ Community page, we remained in the same community space the year after, and the year after that (most EVO sessions, even if they have the same name and same moderators one year to the next, start the following year in a brand new community space, on the assumption that newcomers like to feel the session is unique to them). Another way we are different is that, although we have a <b><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j9fG2deH4L_IvMlsSWSDmuoEVXwKHFKXRjyYTPkt0L0/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">syllabus</a></b>, we have been using it less and less. We ascribe to the Community as Curriculum model (Cormier, 2008) which encourages participants to drive what we do rather than expecting them to follow a pre-ordained path through our program.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One interesting aspect of this is that, as we have evolved in our third year, our approach has changed to the point that we hardly even have tutorials. This was not so in the beginning, when we assumed that we would have to teach people how to play Minecraft from scratch. In our first year we started with a flat map server in creative mode and all met there. Monsters are benign in creative (in fact, we use them for target practice) and players have access to a full range of materials available in the game; whereas in survival mode, monsters are lethal, and players must find materials in the game and keep them safe from loss through unexpected demise. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our first year in EVO Minecraft MOOC, e</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">xperts like Jeff Kuhn and his colleague Aaron </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Schwarz</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and our young moderator Filip Smolčec showed us how to build and craft and delighted us with plagues of rabbits, booby trapped buildings, railways powered on redstone, and other such whimsical structures. We stayed safely in creative mode for about 3 weeks, and in week 4 (in the 5-week session) when we logged in, we suddenly found the server had changed. It had mountains and forests and rivers and monsters, which discovered us almost as soon as we arrived there, so we learned a lot about respawning (coming back empty handed after dying in the game) and consequently, how to prevent that.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But we also learned another important thing about gamified environments. We survived in survival mode because Jeff and others had prepared safe houses for us, so we could go out and explore in the daytime, when monsters are less threatening, and get indoors at night when they tended to prowl. When I retreated to one of Jeff's houses, he was sometimes home, so he would take me mining with him. He showed me coal seams and other places we could get resources, and he mentored me on what to do with them. We ended our 5-week session on that positive note. I was feeling good about the game with the help of others more knowledgeable in the game itself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrative has a personal side to it, because another point I have made in previous presentations is that I started this community in order to learn about Minecraft. I had been interested in the game for a long time but had not found a way to play it in multiplayer mode, most communities of students being closed to old gray-heads like myself. I got the idea to start the EVO session in order to attract experts to teach me and other noobies like me. So in our first year, I learned the game basics. But in my first year, apart from a small structure I constructed with the help of my son, who had joined me one day in creative mode, I hardly ever built anything. I was very busy organizing the session and the online events we would hold for it, but I did not have time to learn to craft proficiently, nor to create structures similar to those that were going up all around me. I tend to be slow on uptake. Like a child who never speaks until one day the floodgates open in surprisingly imaginative discourse, I am a slow absorber of creative genius, before I can set out on my own.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also after the first successful session in 2015, I didn't go back on the server much in the interim before the next one. I went to the TESOL Conference in Toronto and met Jeff Kuhn (he reminded me we had already met :-) and renewed my acquaintance with Aaron Schwarz (at the time, chair of the CALL Interest Section; I had been the first chair of that interest section 30 years before that). I hung out in brew pubs with the Ohio University crowd and by the end of that had their assurances that we would have a second year of EVO Minecraft MOOC, and they would once more host the server. That was great news.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the next year we trotted out the same proposal and syllabus as before, but this year I moved a lot of the syllabus to a wiki at </span><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #336699; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> where I thought some of the explanations of how the session was designed could be better broken down and managed. The previous year we had worked from a google doc syllabus page, and in 2016 a lot of those syllabus items were still there but now pointed to the wiki. Design-wise, I was trying to get the Google+ Community landing page to be a one-stop "game board" where everything anyone needed to know about the session (in effect, a course, as in the 'C' in 'MOOC') would be accessible in links from the G+C game board. It seemed to work. We had a lot of new people in the session, they pretty much figured out what to do, and got on with it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The session was badge-oriented, which is to say that about a third of the two dozen people who were truly participating were tracking their progress through the badge system. I've explained that thoroughly elsewhere, but what this means, is that they were following the syllabus and ticking off the benchmarks. The game board worked in that they were not asking a lot of questions, and they were building in our creative server and posting pictures in blogs, and otherwise documenting what they were doing. So we were seeing that we were effectively reaching our participants, or at least a small but creatively engaged number of them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But we also were attracting experts. One of these was Mircea Patrascu, who used scripts to create fascinating structures in creative mode, most notably entire towns with subway stations and tunnels with underground tracks leading to other parts of our server. At one end of this metro network was a structure with logic gates where if you answered three questions by setting three levers correctly, a door opened and you were admitted to a huge hangar with a roller coaster inside. You sat on the mine cart and pressed a button and off you went on the ride of your life, up and down and around. The structure was incredible, and Mircea recorded the ride on YouTube </span><a href="https://youtu.be/nJQhvLjtQn0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://youtu.be/nJQhvLjtQn0</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other people joined us and showed us around their networks. In fact, I was spending most of my time in the 2016 session organizing, recording, and archiving their events, </span><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/104666848/Live_events" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/104666848/Live_events</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Among those:</span></div>
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<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our star moderator that year Bron Stuckey gave a talk on what she was doing in MC, </span><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/24/bron-stuckey-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-projects-and-challenges-designing-and-building/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/24/bron-stuckey-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-projects-and-challenges-designing-and-building/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jeff Kuhn gave a keynote on what was possible with Minecraft, </span><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/17/learning2gether-with-jeff-kuhn-on-minecraft-an-introduction-to-whats-possible/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/17/learning2gether-with-jeff-kuhn-on-minecraft-an-introduction-to-whats-possible/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our participant Thorsten Groß took us on a tour of his hochschule where the students had built a replica of the school where Thorsten worked, and conducted us around it, </span><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/31/thorsten-gross-students-conduct-tour-of-ricarda-huch-schule-for-evo-minecraft-mooc/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/31/thorsten-gross-students-conduct-tour-of-ricarda-huch-schule-for-evo-minecraft-mooc/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Librarian Beth O'Connell hosted an EVOMC16 Server Party at VSTE Minecraft sandbox, where her own MC community was creating builds in the same spirit as we were,
</span><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/104666848/Live_events#SunFeb7BethOConnellhostsEVOMC16ServerPartyatVSTEMinecraftsandbox" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/104666848/Live_events#SunFeb7BethOConnellhostsEVOMC16ServerPartyatVSTEMinecraftsandbox</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></li>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Midway through our session, when we had gone by then into survival mode, we were joined by another talented expert Linda Gielen, who made a video explaining some of the things she was building on our server.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She and Rose Bard, another of our new moderators for that year, primarily developed our server so that there was an elaborate safe house there, and also a spawning point admin building with an accompanying tutorial area set up by Aaron Schwartz which taught newcomers how to craft using sticks and cobblestone, two easily acquired resources in Minecraft. There was also a warp chamber which you could step into to transform into another world, I believe it was back to our creative world (need to check on that). Linda and Rose set up maps, and storage boxes for everyone at the admin building. We needed only place a sign on one to claim it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Another tutorial wall from the Longhouse spawn point in EVOMC17, from Jeff Kuhn's photos</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don't think I even managed that in 2016. All my time was taken in organization. I resolved that the following year, I would spend less time organizing and more time playing. It was my turn to gamify.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another interesting thing happened in the time between EVOMC16 and EVOMC17. Rose suggested that it would be good for us to practice on the server, and Mircea rose to the occasion by creating blog posts in the voice of ersatz explorer “MP”, who had discovered a temple in some desert biome, a story which no one believed except that he had returned to his hometown to pay off all his old drinking debts using a large diamond that he had with him,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><a href="https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/new-archaeological-discovery-or-hoax/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/new-archaeological-discovery-or-hoax/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MP included some photos in his blog post which a bunch of us used to align ourselves in the biome and eventually find his temples. We did this in the course of several sessions partly documented here: </span><a href="https://learning2gether.net/2016/09/06/gamifying-professional-development-evomc17-minecraft-mooc-playdate-2/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://learning2gether.net/2016/09/06/gamifying-professional-development-evomc17-minecraft-mooc-playdate-2/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In conducting these quests, we further learned about the pleasure of meeting online in this vitual space, as well as the benefits in supporting one another in our mutual learning journeys.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This event created another milestone, tangible affirmation that our G+C had formed a community. Although some work was going on between EVOMC16 and EVOMC17 to prepare the server for the 2017 session, this was the first time of which I’m aware that community members, albeit moderators in this case, met on the server for such sustained practice and pleasure when EVO was not in session. As we make our way through EVOMC17 we see more evidence that we are a community of practice with connections to one another that extend beyond EVO.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since our inception, we have themed our 5 weeks on Dave Cormier’s 5 steps to coping with MOOCs; namely, orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus. Time after time we see our pattern of activity fall around this model, and we’ve labeled each of our weeks accordingly in our syllabus and wiki documents.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first time we ran the session, when we had no precedent or track record, we saw our <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j9fG2deH4L_IvMlsSWSDmuoEVXwKHFKXRjyYTPkt0L0/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b>syllabus </b></a>as providing structure to the course (i.e. session :-). When we did the course the </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">second time in 2016, I remember posting to the G+C each week something to the effect that “now we are in week 3, the week we will focus on our networking.” </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In that year, I noted in a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">submission to The Proceedings of the 22nd TESOL Arabia Conference 2016 in Jan 2017</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>“The missions, checklists of things to do on a weekly basis, are pretty straightforward. They must be, as participants seem to find them and do them without asking too many questions, and when they do ask and the moderators respond, the response seems to get them on task.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this third rendition, there has been very little mention of our syllabus goals, but things are simply falling into place in the pattern that Cormier described. This year there has been, apart from recycling and improving on extensive documentation, very little direction on the part of moderators, and few questions on the part of participants. The scale of participation has been similar to what it was in the past, but there has been little evidence of people asking how to play MC in the Google+ Community, and some evidence of people going into the game and figuring things out from scratch, of course with help and guidance from proficient players already in the game. In other words, there has been little demand for directives from participants in EVOMC17 not in the game, whereas a lot of learning appears to be taking place in the game.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The community that has gathered in the game has been a facilitator of this development, but another factor is adults who enter the game with their kids and develop proficiency with impetus and guidance from their children. Marijana Smolčec, one of our first co-moderators, as a good example of this (and her son Filip became yet another co-moderator and was well respected for his expertise and childlike spontaneity). Rose Bard, who became a co-moderator in 2016, is often accompanied in MC by her son Emmanuel, and a new member, Jane Chien, appears to be drawn there with her son Mattie. Another of our co-moderators, Mircea Patrascu, is an expert in MC who uses it to teach coding to children, and he often works with the help of his son Vlad.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is from a report I filed with the EVO Coordination team</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>We have 296 in the Google Community, 23 who filled in the registration form for this year, 15 from that number who have actually been on our server, but a number of others who have been on the server from previous years in our community or have been whitelisted there without having filled in the form (e.g. some community members are there with their kids, always welcome :-). We have a solid core of around two dozen committed, active, and awsome creators in-world. These latter are modeling and learning amazing stuff with one another.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Prompting lead coordinator Mbarek Akadder to respond in email</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Hi Vance, </i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>What makes EVOMC so awesome and special is the participation of kids with their parents! It looks more like a family gathering than a session! </i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We are also attracting people from other communities.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jo Kay from <a href="http://massively.jokaydia.com/" target="_blank">Jokaydia</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://eltsandbox1.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">David Dodgson</a> from British Council has rejoined us</span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.464; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve Jenkinson from the </span><span style="font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Google+ Community</span><span style="font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/communities/113884091278414495934" style="font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">Minecraft in Education</a>, with over 5000 members</div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.464; margin-bottom: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beth O'Connell and Kimball Harrison from <a href="http://vste.org/" target="_blank">VSTE</a>,</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; white-space: pre-wrap;">Virginia Society for Technology in Education</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People are venturing out. Jeff has gone on an epic trek. <a href="http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2017/01/experiencing-gamification-through.html" target="_blank">Jane has discovered by chance our old world from 2016</a>, and Rose showed us a way back to the new one. Aaron has been updating the server in the background, making possible our multiple words in creative and survival modes simultaneously</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "verdana"; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">How can we as a community envisage the end of this? Most EVO sessions do end. Our members have formed addictions and bonds and challenges that will keep us going in world long into 2017. This remains to be seen. Like one of Jeff’s treks, EVO MC MOOC is off on an adventure, a quest without a foreseeable end. More dispatches follow.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "verdana";"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jeff Kuhn and I collaborated on this slide show for our joint presentation,</span></span><br />
<a _mce_href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UmLzUVGrG-T6KmV0QJvt2-IZX99Lp2TN_mnb4TgCN2k/edit?usp=sharing" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UmLzUVGrG-T6KmV0QJvt2-IZX99Lp2TN_mnb4TgCN2k/edit?usp=sharing" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: rgb(17, 68, 136) !important; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Lucida Grande", Arial; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UmLzUVGrG-T6KmV0QJvt2-IZX99Lp2TN_mnb4TgCN2k/edit?usp=sharing</a><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana; font-size: 13.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">which was seeded by the blog post you are currently reading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>References</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate, 4(5). Reprinted with permission of the publisher; available:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/">http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/</a>.</span></div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-16321052210729726952017-01-27T17:30:00.001+00:002017-01-31T01:42:39.300+00:00Experiencing Gamification through MinecraftIt's been many months since I've blogged here but I've been having the itch to get back to it.<br />
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EVO Minecraft MOOC has taken on dimensions that are eye-opening as far as revealing what gamification is and what it does.<br />
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We start here with an anecdote. I just left the world of Minecraft (having succumbed to spiders in the dark in the wild tiaga), but the journey was incredible.<br />
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I had logged on to the server two hours earlier. I arrived at the place I had left the night before, the one at the end of this video.<br />
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I pressed TAB to see who was in-world with me. Maha was there as well as Jane and Mattie. Maha is from Egypt, and Jane is Mattie's mother. She and Mattie are from Taiwan. They play with us frequently.</div>
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I asked where everyone was and mentioned I was at the village that Dakota had walled off to protect its citizens from mobs (explosive creepers and mindlessly lethal zombies that attack the villagers at night). In return for his protection, the villagers allowed him to trade with him. He was raising sugar cane at a farm inside the village and from cane you can make paper. Many of the villagers were librarians and would exchange emeralds for paper. So the village was a source of emeralds, which could be used to obtain other valuable objects which other villagers might have in exchange for the emeralds.</div>
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Jane said that she and Mattie would like to see the village. We had all got there the night before by using the warp command. Warp lets you appear at a designated point but when you get there by magic you don't know where you are in relation to where you have been, and I couldn't remember the exact warp word, except that it had two capital letters (but it's in the video above, somewhere). Maha, elsewhere on the server, was reading our texts and told us what the command was, so Maggie used it to teleport to where she thought I was.</div>
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We later found that Maha had looked up the destination from a /warplist on the server and had given Jane the wrong destination. On arrival at her new destination, Jane said she was at Rose's house there, but there was no Rose's house where I was. So I decided to warp myself to her location and there we both were.</div>
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Rose appeared coincidentally online just then and she quickly figured out that we had warped to her old house on the server space we had developed the year before. She joined us and we started looking around. For Jane it was a brand new world. For me, it was nostalgic to visit places from last year, still intact, though it took me a few minutes to re-orient.</div>
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Rose didn't want to remain there because she thought we should be focused on developing the world from this year's rendition of EVOMC17, so she suggested we warp back to our world. I asked if we could just head that way, and in which direction. Rose said it was far away, but she offered to lead us there.</div>
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There was a rail system connecting the two worlds beknownst only to few on our server. It emanated from stations in the old world that had been built the previous year, but to use it we needed to have mine carts. We found that among us, only Mattie had enough iron ore to craft them, so with his resources we quickly came up with the carts. What followed was an amazing ride south and east that I'm going to video one of these days.</div>
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I'll put that video here.</div>
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Regarding gamification, this was it. Rose had to explain to Jane and Mattie how to operate the carts. Their behavior is such that if someone stops on the tracks the next cart back hits it and then reverses out of control. There is no control because the system is powered by redstone to propel the carts forward, or if they strike another cart, backwards, with no brakes until you reach a station. One problem is that as we came to stations on our way forward we didn't know at first to hold down the W key to avoid stopping, so we'd reach one and stop there. Then the next cart to appear from behind hit the cart that had stopped there, and then headed backwards, hitting the cart behind it, and when the next cart appeared, chaos ensued, and so on,as we lurched backward and forwards along the first stretches of track. </div>
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When we managed to all come to a stop (each of us out of sight of the others) and coordinate a way forward, we reached a part of the journey where there were no stations, but barriers which would stop the carts literally in their tracks, but if another cart came along, it would plow into any cart still on the tracks and reverse. So we had to get out of our carts and destroy them quickly before the next cart arrived, to prevent the boomerang effect (destoying an object makes it available for retrieval, which is how we could then collect and reuse the carts to continue our journey).</div>
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So these carts had to be collected and replaced on the track on the opposite side of the barrier as follows. You needed two carts. You put one on the redstone rail on the track. You put another on a rail mechanism above so that it would fall inside the first cart, so you have two carts nestled one inside the other. You then get into the cart and press a button on the barrier, and your cart shoots off to the east. Again, if you meet an obstacle, like a cart on the track, you hit it and ricochet back to where you came from, where you have to dismount, destroy your carts, collect them, run them back through the mechanism to reposition them properly, get inside, push the button, and head off again. </div>
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Getting 4 people to move down the tracks in this way was a complicated process (not unlike getting a team of players to overcome obstacles in moving a ball down a field). It was pure gamification. Rose had to explain to us what to do. We had to do it and deal with consequences of any departure from the only procedure that would ultimately work. Imagine doing this with foreign language learners. It required focus and perseverance. It was challenging and great fun.</div>
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Eventually we neared our final destination, which was the rail terminus back in our current EVOMC17 world. For a long time the rails had gone seemingly forever over water and now we were approaching the tiaga with its snow covered trees and layered terrain, like stacks of brownies with white icing on top. Near the end I hit a cart on the tracks and started going backwards. I was wondering if I should dismount in transit (would I fall in the ocean and drown?). Someone came running along the tracks and caught up with me. Snicker-snack the mine carts were all destroyed, including the one I was riding in. I was left standing on the tracks.</div>
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I started running to the east as the skies turned orange, signalling sunset. Better to arrive in daytime as monsters come out at night. Rose had mentioned we would be arriving at a dangerous place. so she had gone ahead as she was the most proficient with a sword. After a few minutes the tracks sloped steeply downwards and I saw my companions at the bottom, waiting for me. It was almost dusk. </div>
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Rose had told us in text that in real life she needed to get back to something, so we were in a hurry to continue the journey from the terminus to the safety of the world we had built and lit up. That was where our safe houses were, where we could get inside and close the doors behind us. But that world was also distant enough to prevent people exploring the new world from stumbling on the rail line leading to the old too easily. Rose had helped design this, so she knew the way back.</div>
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Rose led our small group of avatars up and over the tiaga. Spiders appeared which we set upon with swords, but Jane was eliminated and respawned back at her own house, no way to return to us since teleport wasn't working :-). </div>
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I tried to keep up with Mattie and Rose but was in the dim light I got caught in water and couldn't see how to get out of it. I tried heading forward and jumping simultaneously to extract myself and eventually did, but by then had lost the others. But Rose had come back for me, so we resumed our jumping up the icy terrain. Arrows suddenly appeared from nowhere. I never saw the skeleton that fired them but managed to elude it. But by now I had lost track of my friends and my direction of travel. Night time ain't no time to be out in the wilderness in Minecraft, and I was doomed. My screen reddened and I was informed that I had been taken down by a fire-eyed spider. I was invited to respawn. I accepted the invitation and found myself standing safely next to the last bed I had slept in.</div>
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From that position I was able to contact the others. Rose and Mattie were still making their way to their virtual home, in the dark, protected only by swords and by Rose's knowledge of where they were. I couldn't wait to see if they survived it. Two hours had gone by quickly, and I had to log off.</div>
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Back in my real world, I felt the urge to blog it; hence, what you have just finished reading.</div>
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Meanwhile, here's Jane Chien's perspective:</div>
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<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/109470953746627527721/posts/7TJvaqqvZ6k">https://plus.google.com/u/0/109470953746627527721/posts/7TJvaqqvZ6k</a> </div>
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The photo on the left shows the mechanism where you place mine cart #2 so it falls into #1 already on the tracks</div>
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-82899506992389615772016-04-19T14:59:00.001+00:002016-04-19T15:28:07.822+00:00Can a paradigm shift in conference business models reverse declining attendance at face to face conferencesI haven't thought this one through thoroughly (for example, <i>is </i>there declining attendance at face-to-face conferences; stats needed) but I have been involved in WUTR (webcasting under the radar) from recent TESOL conferences, as a service provided its members by CALL-IS in TESOL (see <a href="http://callis2016.pbworks.com/">http://callis2016.pbworks.com/</a>) but in many ways an extension of my Learning2gether initiative, which I have been conducting weekly since 2010, and now in its 329th episode at <a href="http://learning2gether.net/">http://learning2gether.net</a>.<br />
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I Googled the question and came on this<br />
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I recently filled out a survey for the TESOL 2016 conference in Baltimore, and the last question stimulated a brain-pffft. The question and my response were ...<br />
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<b>20. If you have any suggestions or comments regarding how we could improve the convention and/or English Language Expo, please enter them in the box below.</b><br />
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You could follow the IATEFL model of webcasting plenary addresses and certain sessions, and sponsor a series of interviews during the event via an online web site updated throughout the event; e.g. <a href="http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2016/live-schedule">http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2016/live-schedule</a>.<br />
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Going IATEFL one better, recordings should all go to a permanent online archive openly accessible to all, not just TESOL members. Counter-intuitively to some, this would not prevent members from attending or paying dues to any significant degree, but through the appreciation of those who could not attend, it would stimulate growth since it would create an aura of rock star English teachers and give non or lapsed members an incentive of great value this day and age to come and join in such a forward-thinking organization, and to attend conferences where they felt they 'knew' some of the people they would meet there thanks to their online presence, and would want to connect with them both online and personally.<br />
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According to TESOL member stats <a href="https://www.tesol.org/about-tesol/membership/membership-statistics">https://www.tesol.org/about-tesol/membership/membership-statistics</a> a quick glance shows a slight decline in membership over the past few years (13,000 down to 11,000 in Jan 2013 thru Jan this year). Perhaps a paradigm shift on the business model is in order.<br />
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By creating a conference archive and making it freely available as a gift to the profession, TESOL would benefit from the appreciation of potential members who would want to associate with an organization that was seen be uplifting the profession by sharing openly.<br />
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The book whose pages Google found for me is this one:<br />
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Cobb, Jeff. (2013). Leading the Learning Revolution: The Expert's Guide to Capitalizing on the Exploding Lifelong Education Market. AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn, Jan 15, 2013 - Business & Economics - 240 pages<br />
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Lifelong learning has become a multibillion-dollar business, with more than 60 million adults currently engaged in webinars, webcasts, in-house training, continuing education classes, and more. But it is also an industry in flux, as newcomers topple <b>old-guard organizations that can’t keep pace with the need for instant access to materials and flexible delivery methods, as well as demands for community and connection.</b> Leading the Learning Revolution is the first book to explain how to tap into this lucrative market, which rewards the most forward-thinking training firms, professional associations, continuing education programs, entrepreneurial speakers and consultants, and others. Filled with insights from the author’s vast experience, field-tested strategies, interviews, and anecdotes, the book explains how to: • Use technology to create high-impact learning opportunities • Develop content that is faster and better than the competition’s • <b>Convert prospects to customers by building connection</b> • Focus on the bottom-line results of lifelong learning Successful people and organizations never stop learning, and the people and <b>organizations that lead that learning will never stop growing!</b><br />
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<i>I have bolded the points relevant to my advice to TESOL above. I need to read this book, or others which similarly corroborate my own intuitions.</i><br />
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I hope to flesh this one out when I get more time. Meanwhile, any comments?<br />
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-10040972492755406872016-01-27T18:23:00.002+00:002016-02-13T03:51:50.378+00:00Networking, and playing the Big G Game of EVO Minecraft MOOC<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By <b>Vance Stevens</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">English Faculty, HCT / CERT / KBZAC, Al Ain UAE<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><b>Abstract</b>:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 18.4px;"><i><span style="color: #660000;">This post relates how #evomc16 co-moderators are using Minecraft to help teachers understand how gamification might work for them in their classrooms by giving all concerned the experience of interacting in the game.</span></i></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.4px;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.4px;"><i>But Minecraft turns out to be only a vehicle for understanding the wider concept of gamification. By building elements of gamification into EVO Minecraft MOOC, this session becomes a Big G game space where participants can meet other educators to learn how their students can benefit from gamified environments. So participants here (as well as moderators) are developing their understanding of gamification while enjoying playing in the little g game of Minecraft.</i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.4px;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.4px;"><i>Gamification is modeled in the Big G Game space through creation of a Google+ community "gameboard" and having participants figure out from there what they have to do to play the game. Eventually they end up in Minecraft in creative mode. They then graduate to coping with survival in the more challenging game environment, and through that experience learn that gamification is all about teamwork, mutual support, meeting challenges, and achieving goals, whatever they are, and however they themselves define them. </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 18.4px;"><i>The ‘aha’ moment occurs when the players succeed in both the upper and lowercase games and realize that, if what they were trying to teach were placed in such a context, it would not only become more engaging to the learners, but their students would be taking their own learning into their own hands. This can create a powerful learning environment, but educators need to experience it for themselves in order to understand it.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Electronic Village Online (EVO, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/" style="line-height: 115%;">http://evosessions.pbworks.com</a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">) takes place every year (since 2001) and this year runs from January
10 to February 13, 2016. EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC16) is now in its second year
as one of these sessions, </span><a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/103533067/2016_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/103533067/2016_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">There are 185 people enrolled in the </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Google+ community that serves as the base for
EVOMC16, </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, but far fewer actively engaged participants. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For this small coterie, it seems to be going well. They have found
in the </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Google+ community page the
link to the</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> syllabus, </span><a href="http://tinyurl.com/evomc16-syllabus"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">http://tinyurl.com/evomc16-syllabus</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> which points to a set of
missions here: </span><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/</span></a><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">. The missions are pretty straightforward --
or, they must be, as participants seem to be finding them and doing them
without asking too many questions, and when they do ask and the moderators
respond, the response seems to get them on task. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Gee (2008, p.24) distinguishes the
little ‘g’ game, the software comprising a game such as Minecraft, and the Big
‘G’ game or "social setting" that the little ‘g’ game helps to gamify. Going to the
Google+ community page and figuring out where the session components are and
what you are supposed to do with them is how you play the Big G Game of EVO
Minecraft MOOC. Completing the 10 missions (or a to-be determined number) leads
to the awarding of an EVOMC16 survivors badge. Evidence of completion of the
required missions is recorded in a Google spreadsheet which is in turn linked
from a click on the badge. The badge is awarded through Credly. The Credly
system validates awards through specification of criteria needed to earn a
badge. A link from the badge awarded directs anyone who clicks on your award to
an open document displaying verifiable evidence of what was accomplishment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img alt="2015-02-07_0521evominecraft_credly.png" height="241" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/A0YfZM0QZD3M7BOabjP5yd-bQL7EeeDpugwFZL5JYSItTC7EeZdKsp1JMsb-kOA_EbLxQ_OTK-BHPuGXvhiR-BdbuYv3dNt31IAMUfPO111qE-6A4uguF7nVFcvocYMzqNowpZta" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="273" /></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The
missions are, for weeks 1 and 2:</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ol start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Introduce
yourself on our Google+ Community </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Install and
enter our voice tool so we can communicate in VoIP while in-world</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Fill in the
Google Registration form </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Reflect on
your activities for Weeks 1-2 </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Join the
Missions Accomplished Google sheet </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Join us in Minecraft</span></li>
</ol>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">These missions have provided
our demographics for this session and shown us who we are likely to be working
with through to the end of the session. As things stand midway through the
session:</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Although we have 185 members
on our Google+ Community, this doesn’t give us much of an indication of
who is with us in 2016 because we are continuing a community that we
started last year. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">But from Mission 3, we
see that around 30 participants have filled in the Google form “enrolling”
them in the session. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Of these, 21 provided
Minecraft usernames, which are needed to whitelist them on the server. So
at this point in the session, we have around 21 participants with access
to our server, plus 7 active moderators, and a few others besides.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Our most rigorous test
of commitment is completion of Mission 5, where participants must request
access to our Google Sheet in order to track their ten missions
accomplished. Midway through the session, a little over half a dozen participants
had joined that document, but this number is likely to increase as the
session goes on, since completion of missions leads to awarding of badges.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">What our participants lack in
number they have been making up for in energy. Our server in creative mode has
been attracting some impressive builds. Here are a few who have posted their
achievements on our Google+ Community page. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ol start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Yvonne
Harrison has documented some incredible structures on her Flickr feed,
linked from here </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://yvonneh.edublogs.org/2016/01/26/evo_mooc-minecraft-server-5/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">http://yvonneh.edublogs.org/2016/01/26/evo_mooc-minecraft-server-5/</span></a></span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Thorsten
Gross has posted pictures of his builds here </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://paradigmagnus.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/minecraft-mooc-tumbling-down-the-world-of-cubes/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://paradigmagnus.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/minecraft-mooc-tumbling-down-the-world-of-cubes/</span></a></span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">, and of a project he was involved with
at </span><span style="background: #fefefe; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ricarda-Huch-Schule in
Dreieich, Germany, </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">here, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/QoNJNUKbwkG"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/QoNJNUKbwkG</span></a></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Kathleen
Kerney created a lovely garden, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG</span></a></span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Beth Evans is
prepping for survival, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://eslbeth.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/prepping-for-survival/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://eslbeth.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/prepping-for-survival/</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Beth O’Connell
has created a library house, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://booklady9.edublogs.org/2016/01/24/inworld-maps-in-minecraft/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">http://booklady9.edublogs.org/2016/01/24/inworld-maps-in-minecraft/</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ellen Clegg
made a good start on her house, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://mcecsite.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/finally-getting-to-play-around-woo-hoooo/"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://mcecsite.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/finally-getting-to-play-around-woo-hoooo/</span></a></span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Moderators
Jeff Kuhn and Aaron Schwartz have been busy creating whimsical structures
such as a towering Sargon’s castle, and a zombie pit where buttons summon
monsters (so participants can practice dispatching them) </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://plus.google.com/+AaronSchwartz_oh/posts/TUqjApWXHZ2">https://plus.google.com/+AaronSchwartz_oh/posts/TUqjApWXHZ2</a></span></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;">Micea
Patrascu has been making some phenomenal builds with secret mechanisms and
logic gates, and putting train tracks through tunnels around the server
connecting them. I made a video of one of the train rides: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #404040; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://youtu.be/nL02Sh-rmss"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">https://youtu.be/nL02Sh-rmss</span></a></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"> which
you can find embedded in my blog post at Stevens (2016).</span></li>
</ol>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nL02Sh-rmss/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="320" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nL02Sh-rmss?feature=player_embedded" width="580"></iframe><br /><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mircea Patrascu shows where this train ride ends up, at his subway stop, in his post here: </span></i></span><a href="https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/</span></i></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 17.12px;"><span style="color: #404040;">Mircea shows where this train ride ends up, at his subway stop, in his post here: </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 17.12px;"><a href="https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #404040; font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 17.12px;">https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/a-day-in-evo-minecraft-world/</a>. </span>Mircea's post to the EVO Minecraft MOOC Google+ Community gives his incredible video overview of the roller coaster at the train station end of the ride, which as you can see in the comments to that post, he created with his son:<br /><a href="https://plus.google.com/+MirceaPATRASCU/posts/hekx7koKFW6">https://plus.google.com/+MirceaPATRASCU/posts/hekx7koKFW6</a>.</span><br />
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In order to access the roller coaster, you have to answer three questions about Minecraft. When the switches with the answers are correctly set, a door opens, and you can push a button to set the train in motion. Enjoy this ride!</span><br />
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nJQhvLjtQn0/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="320" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nJQhvLjtQn0?feature=player_embedded" width="580"></iframe></div>
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It looks like the participants mentioned above
are well on their way to earning their badges, and there are only a few
missions left to accomplish. These are set in weeks 3 and 4 of the session,
with week 5 being set aside for consolidation, learning from one another,
helping others who might be inspired to catch up, and of course helping each
other stay alive in survival mode. The transition to survival mode is planned
for week 4, and will continue for as long as the server stays alive and
properly maintained in Aaron’s office at Ohio University.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The focus of Week 3 has been
Networking, finding out what’s available in the wider world of Minecraft. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For
week 3 the missions are to</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ol start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Explore other
networks in Minecraft </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Build
something in creative mode on our server</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ol>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">and
for week 4 to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ol start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Create
pictures or video of you in survival mode </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #404040; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Reflect on
your experiences in survival mode</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ol>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Each set of missions is described in a page at
our missions wiki; for example this one for week 3, on networking: </span><a href="http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/103905655/2016_Week3_Network"><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/103905655/2016_Week3_Network</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Apart from the several networks of educators
using Minecraft mentioned there, networking activities in our group included:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bron Stuckey’s online presentation in
Week 3 where she filled us in on how others were incorporating Minecraft
in promoting learning from among her extensive network of connected
educators, </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/24/bron-stuckey-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-projects-and-challenges-designing-and-building/"><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://learning2gether.net/2016/01/24/bron-stuckey-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-projects-and-challenges-designing-and-building/</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yvonne Harrison posted about what she is
learning about the wider Minecraft networks </span><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://plus.google.com/115571422706001108741/posts/9ram2vWXVo4"><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">https://plus.google.com/115571422706001108741/posts/9ram2vWXVo4</span></a></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">On Su</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">nday Jan
31 Thorsten <span style="background: #FEFEFE;">Groß has arranged for his students
at </span></span><span style="background: rgb(254 , 254 , 254); color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Ricarda-Huch-Schule
to show us around an elaborate build they created there, an instantiation of
Bron Stuckey's advice that Minecraft helps us turn learning over to the
students. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Thorsten and his students will conduct a tour
through the world of their school reconstructed in Minecraft, as shown in this
post,</span><span style="background: rgb(254 , 254 , 254); border: 1pt none; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; padding: 0in; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/6MuW3CP1Pmb" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="border: 1pt none; color: #114488; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; padding: 0in;">https://plus.google.com/113742735224806254960/posts/6MuW3CP1Pmb</span></a><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">.</span><span style="background: rgb(254 , 254 , 254); border: 1pt none; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; padding: 0in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><br />They started to do this at </span><span style="background: rgb(254 , 254 , 254); border: 1pt none; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%; padding: 0in; text-indent: -0.25in;">a BarCamp about games, where the idea of
reconstructing their whole school was planned and later on finished by students
themselves. This event is scheduled for January 31, 2016, and is one of several
events we hope to arrange to showcase the accomplishments of participants in
our own extended network.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The networking aspect is what we focus on in
this and other sessions like it. Most participants are starting to figure out
that effectively networking is the key to success in the Big G game. This
is modeled in the design of the EVO session, and in how the session is
conducted. Not only are participants learning a lot about about Minecraft but
they are starting to find their way about the EVO session itself. They're
figuring out that the session is itself set up itself like a game. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Why is it like a game? There are two answers to
the question. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo4; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first answer is that it was designed
that way. It was designed to inculcate for teachers what gamification
actually feels like. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; color: #333333; line-height: 115%; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo4; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The second answer to the question of why EVOMC16
is like a game is because it is. By that I mean, the Big G Game of
Minecraft MOOC has some rules with flexibility, goals and challenges, and
awards in the form of badges. It's also much like a game because
participants have to figure out these rules, it's designed to let them to
figure it out as a built-in part of the game, and as in any game, it it's
more fun if it doesn't play out the way anyone especially
anticipated. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This is normal for the app culture. When you go
to Facebook and Google+, you don't get clear instructions. You're thrown into
an interface and you see what's there and work out what you're supposed to do
and how it will benefit you. So for participants who want to play the Big G
game of EVOMC16, they go to our Google+ page where they find a sidebar with
links they can click on. One of the links is to a syllabus, an outline of what
they'll be doing each week during the session. The weeks are themed on
Cormier's (2010) well-known five phases of coping in MOOCs, i.e. orient,
declare, network, cluster, and focus (see Stevens, 2015, for elaborated
explanation).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The syllabus alludes to missions that must be
accomplished each week, and links point participants to the wiki where there is
more information about each of the missions. The missions have participants do
basic things like purchase Minecraft, get a username, introduce themselves to
the community, join us in-world in creative mode in order to practice for our
shift to survival, and fill in the Google sheet where participants will track
their missions accomplished in pursuit of the one badge on offer at the
moment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">As of now we have just completed Week 3 on
networks of educators using Minecraft. One aspect of networking is reaching out
to the community within.</span><span style="background: #fefefe; color: #404040; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> We
are hoping to arrange other tours with members of our community, such as the
one by Thorsten Gross mentioned above, as our participants are turning out to
be a rich source of modeling for all of us</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">I laid out our Big G goals in response to this
post to our Google+ community by Kathleen Kearney, </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG"><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">https://plus.google.com/109894618020189345959/posts/epWNDxXccVG</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 12pt;">
<div style="line-height: 115%;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">We are all learning about gamification here,
it's not so much about Minecraft. Minecraft is the little g game, the enabler
of our emerging knowledge of gamification. When you enter survival mode you'll
find that you are assisted by others in world. With their help you stay alive
and learn. So gamification turns out to be learning through teamwork and mutual
support and meeting challenges and achieving your goal, whatever it is. In this
game you set your own goals. By achieving your goals in the game light bulbs go
off in your head and light your way to some realization of how what you are
learning in EVOMC16 might work to meet your real world challenges. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">The 'aha' moment occurs when the players succeed and realize that if what they were trying to teach were placed in such a context, it would not only become more engaging to the learners, but their students would be taking their own learning into their own hands. This can create a powerful learning environment, and educators need to experience it for themselves in order to understand its implications.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"><br />
<b>References</b></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cormier, D. (2010). Success in a MOOC. <i>YouTube</i>.
Retrieved from </span><a href="http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Gee, J.P. (2008) “Learning
and games.” <i><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games,
and learning</span></i>. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press. (pp. 21-40). Available: </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/courses/readings/Gee_Learning_and_Games_2008.pdf">http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/courses/readings/Gee_Learning_and_Games_2008.pdf</a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Stevens, V. (2015). <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Dreams, inspiration, and challenge: Writing in voice to articulate a way forward for EVO Minecraft MOOC 2016. <i>AdVancEducation</i>. Available: </span></span><a href="http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html"><span style="color: #336699; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">Stevens, V. (2016).</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">Week 3 - Networking, and playing the Big G Game of EVO Minecraft MOOC</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">. </span><i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">AdVancEducation</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">. Available: </span><a href="http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2016/01/week-3-playing-big-g-game-of-evo.html</span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;">.</span></span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16.8667px;"><i>The above citation is for this post. This post was updated on Jan 31, 2016 and submitted to the Connecting Online 2016 (CO16) WizIQ blog. That post was rejected by the staff keeping the blog at WizIQ because it did not promote the session itself. However, I gave my presentation on this topic</i></span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"> at CO16</i><i style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"> on Feb 7, 2016 and blogged the archive of the recording here:</i><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"><i><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2016/02/07/vance-stevens-at-co16-evo-minecraft-mooc-and-gamification-of-teacher-professional-development/">http://learning2gether.net/2016/02/07/vance-stevens-at-co16-evo-minecraft-mooc-and-gamification-of-teacher-professional-development/</a></i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"><i style="line-height: 16.8667px;">I published the video of the recording on YouTube</i></span><br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-69439128846823207002015-12-24T19:20:00.000+00:002015-12-25T09:47:14.518+00:00Dreams, inspiration, and challenge: Writing in voice to articulate a way forward for EVO Minecraft MOOC 2016<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a night-before-Christmas brain spew of some ideas I’ve had going forward in the two weeks before my co-moderators and I start on a second rendition of EVO Minecraft MOOC.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">EVO stands for Electronic Village Online. EVO sessions have been held each year in January and February since 2001 (for more information, see </span><a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://evosessions.pbworks.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">).</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dreams</b></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What do you do when you're so passionate about something you can't sleep? You need to write about it but it's so complicated, you don't know where to begin. What do you do? </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In my professional work last year, I worked out techniques to utilize the potential of speaking into the computer as a way of brainstorming student writing and providing feedback on it (Stevens, 2015). I've just discovered an additional affordance for my own work flow. Now I can wake up from a dream and actually write it down (more correctly, dictate it into Google Docs). I'm talking about the kind of dream where you invent something, where you solve an impenetrable riddle, where there's something on your mind that's so profound that you just have to write it down. But by the time you find a pen and paper you're in a completely different modality from when you were dreaming, so of course the idea has passed long before you can write it down. However, if you can speak what’s on your mind, and record that, your modality is not so far removed, and you stand a chance of preserving your insight.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, harnessing my discoveries about writing by speaking into your computer, I woke from a dream this morning with synapses going off in all different directions wondering how I was going to get it down on paper … but actually we don't need paper these days, I can use silicon to get out of my head what I wanted to say, what I'd been thinking about. So I grabbed my iPad and started talking to it, and that's with this blog post is about.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What a great way to brainstorm, just speak to your computer, dictate to it. Here goes:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've been involved this past two months in rebooting EVO Minecraft MOOC for 2016, and a lot of my thought has been going into this. I have several collaborators in this effort, and one of the challenges is to get them as motivated as I am about the passion they already have for using Minecraft in their teaching situations, and to channel our collective passion into what will result in a great EVO session. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Last year when we ran the session, my co-moderators and I put together a kind of pilot project that turned out very well. The reason it turned out so well is that it became a game about what we were trying to inculcate, which was to engender a better understanding in teachers of the concept gamification. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've been giving talks lately about the virtues of cMOOCs versus xMOOCs, and this always stimulates reactions from colleagues because there are as many approaches to helping people learn as there are people. As Ken Robinson (2009) explains in his book about following your element of passion, there are 8 billion multiple intelligences in the world, i.e. 8 billion ways to skin a cat. As owner of one of these 8 billion multiple intelligences, the approach to learning that appeals to me is a connectivist one, and my teaching and explaining to others how to teach involves modeling for them through example some ways they might do just that. When I couch my explanations of how I see this process in the framework of cMOOCs, the discussion invariably butts up against my colleagues’ approaches </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">vis a vis</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> their particular contexts. And since we all have different approaches honed to some extent by our different contexts, it turns out there are 8 billion ways the discussion can go.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Actually it's probably fewer than 8 billion ways because people tend to have common approaches they apply to similar contexts, so you find people who share your approach and work with them. This is what happens in EVO sessions. People with ideas find partners and propose EVO sessions, and design them according to how they envisage their approach to teaching and learning in the context they have in mind. And so from those 8 billion possible ways an an online course could possibly evolve, and given the small fraction of those 8 billion people involved in EVO, you end up with just a dozen EVO sessions, but still each is quite different from the other.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've facilitated a few EVO sessions over the years. The first one was Webheads in Action in 2002 (</span><a href="http://webheads.info/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://webheads.info</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), which adhered to connectivist principles two years before George Siemens wrote his seminal article introducing the term connectivism (Siemens, 2004). By then I had started facilitating a series of courses on multiliteracies, one iteration of which was yet another EVO session. But I had come to believe that in the context of EVO, where you had multiliterate participants who were self motivating and able to articulate their learning objectives, and who each represented one of those 8 billion ways you could possibly learn, the cMOOC approach was the one that resonated best with how I chose to facilitate interaction with participants and co-moderators in EVO with whom this approach also resonated. That's what happened with Webheads in Action, resulting in a community that has lasted to this day. So I could see where you could seed an idea on how to approach a topic as complex as how to get a community together to explore a variety of alternate approaches to teaching by coming together along connectivist precepts and negotiating the knowledge-base underpinning the discussion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I applied this approach to my latest conundrum. This conundrum arose from a topic I had been following that I found very difficult to address.This topic derived from a bit of Kool-Aid I had been tasting through edtech podcasts and through my personal learning network. It was about Minecraft and it's impact on learners and on the learning environment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that for K-12 educators who work daily with young learners, young adults who are molding their approach to how they will be learning for the rest of their life, Minecraft has been a productive tool for forging critical thinking skills. But in my context, where the curriculum is more rigidly inflexible, I don’t find opportunities to learn how to play Minecraft and apply it to the contexts so closely managed top-down in which I was teaching. So though I had an interest in this topic, I had little opportunity to pursue it. And it wasn't just Minecraft, it was the whole concept of gamification, although it was easier in my teaching contexts to envisage how to gamify them as opposed to specifically introducing the particular game of Minecraft. So what I wanted to learn was how to adapt the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">concept </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of Minecraft to my context; that is to say, I was trying to learn about gamification, and had chosen Minecraft as one of the best means of realizing that. However, as with connectivism as we had explored it with Webheads in Action in 2002, this was not something you could write out in the syllabus and teach top down. Because the concepts involved are ineffable, they needed to be learned through experience firsthand.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in essence I had something that I wanted to learn, which was how to apply gamification in my context, and the vehicle I wanted to use to learn about that was Minecraft, which seemed from all I was reading and hearing, to be an effective and revolutionary approach to gamification in learning. However, I encountered two big problems. I didn't really know anything about Minecraft because I had no community with which to try it out. And secondly, I was not able to formulate a practical notion about gamification without truly experiencing it myself in my own learning.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The EVO Minecraft MOOC session was my solution to both of these problems. My role was to articulate the rationale for creating the session in the first place, and to assemble a group of colleague teachers with similar conundrums, perhaps not exactly the same as mine, but conundrums for which such a session might help them resolve the chaos in their own learning doubts, on the path to resolving that chaos.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Inspiration</b></span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So I started on this path in late 2014 by proposing a 2015 EVO Minecraft MOOC session to which I attracted other colleagues. My first inspiration was Marijana Smolčec, a teacher from Croatia whose 11 year-old son had learned fluent English through playing the game of Minecraft in his own community and developing videos and putting them on YouTube and interacting in English with other players of Minecraft worldwide. The development of his English skills through his involvement in this community was remarkable. This prompted us to write an article together where we researched what other teachers were doing with Minecraft (Smolčec and Smolčec, 2014) and through our research we met Jeff Kuhn and invited him to join Marijana and Filip and I in helping co-moderate an EVO session.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2015 we basically created an EVO session in the shape of a game, which is to say, we just started playing it. That is, Jeff set up a playing field in the form of a Minecraft server and we started kicking the ball around on that server. Through the mechanism of EVO where we could propose a session and have it accepted, and then after the call for participation work with whomever turns up, we found other players who seemed to enjoy meeting us on our playing field and learning whatever they could through playing the game. According to the name of our EVO session, you might think the purpose of the game was to learn Minecraft, but it was more than that. The purpose of the real game was to learn how to implement gamification in our own contexts, which we achieved through playing Minecraft with each other. Minecraft is a good vehicle for that as it is a well-developed and fun game to play, but it was not the real focus of our play any more than if we were meeting business colleagues on the golf course only to play golf. For some people, it’s not so much about golf as it is about business. So we met on the Minecraft playing field and there we conducted the business of learning how to apply gamification in our teaching situations.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This turned out to be so much fun that we decided to do it again in 2016, only by this time we had attracted a small community around what we were doing so we asked some of the more assiduous players in the first round to join us in co-moderating the second.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Challenge</b></span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now in designing the second round we have some additional challenges. We could play the game the way we did in 2015 and simply set up the playing field and play as we did before. This would work, but we've added to the mix now more people with more expertise in Minecraft, and also we original players have developed a little more expertise than we started out with last year. We want to help rank beginners to come up to our level, but at the same time we want to develop our own expertise and raise everybody into the level beyond that. So taking this set of moderators, and taking on board the awareness that we are on a virtual golf course – we're doing this in our spare time, it's something we like to do, but it's not work </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">per se</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> – the challenge is to get people to design aspects of the session that will accomplish that last goal, taking the game to a higher level of expertise. I guess this is any coach’s dilemma.</span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the first round of play in 2015, we tried to be minimalist in our choice of tools, which basically utilized a Google+ community at </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/113884091278414495934" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/113884091278414495934</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> where people could enroll and share expertise with one another through posting their experiences, photos, and discoveries in playing Minecraft, what they were reading about Minecraft in education, and so on, and augment this with a syllabus created in Google Docs. By definition, a syllabus is a document that explains what you're trying to do and how you're going to do it. This syllabus in a Google doc had a table of contents so that participants could conveniently move or navigate in the document from week to week, and here we laid out what people should do one week to the next, and why.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The 2016 version of our syllabus is here: </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x2EMf1QxfU1lrQxkpbEQLAR0Yl8d7a8diD8R9E9DAWc/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x2EMf1QxfU1lrQxkpbEQLAR0Yl8d7a8diD8R9E9DAWc/edit?usp=sharing</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This document explains how the course is organized on Dave Cormier's five stages of coping with MOOCs (Cormier, 2010). It was a five week course so it was convenient to theme each week on one of the stages. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Week 1 - Orientation</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first week or the first stage in Cormier's five stages of coping with MOOCs is orientation. This is what typically happens in any EVO online course, which this year starts officially on January 10. But what actually happens is it starts slowly on January 10. It's like a heavy train that starts rolling on January 10 and the passengers are jumping on board as it's lumbering through the station. It eventually picks up speed but passengers keep getting on at different stops and for this particular train those stops could be as late as the second or third week in the course, or even fourth. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since this is a course that accepts people who want to learn at any stage, passengers are welcome aboard the train at anytime. We facilitate their learning but we don't control it, and once there on the train they will meet other passengers there and figure out what's going on according to what they themselves want to learn. In fact we might have people on the 2016 train who joined us in at some point in 2015, and they would be simply resuming their learning journeys with us, and welcoming other passengers as they get on the train anywhere along the route. It doesn't matter to us, we are all in it for our own learning.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in our first week of orientation, expectations are not high, but these expectations are expressed in the form of nine missions; that is there are nine things to do from the outset, starting with enroll in the Google+ community and introduce yourself there, and then (it gets tricky) capture the link to your introduction (ok, not that tricky, a single screen shot shows how, </span><a href="http://screencast.com/t/6YLsvyWEB" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://screencast.com/t/6YLsvyWEB</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Then you fill in a Google form and in the Google form you write your name and where you're from and paste the link to your introduction. So if people get that far they've already accomplished the first three missions in the 2016 syllabus. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After that they have to buy the game, and what that means is, you buy a lifetime username and password for the game. The software itself is free and lets you log on to any game that's running, but only one unique user can play on any one computer at a time. The server software is also free so the company Mojang, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, churns out software for free and sells access to that software through usernames which once purchased can get you or students using those names onto a server to play whatever version of the game they have downloaded (there are versions for PC and for iPad and mobile devices). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can buy your user name here, </span><a href="https://help.mojang.com/customer/en/portal/articles/325947-where-can-i-buy-minecraft-" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://help.mojang.com/customer/en/portal/articles/325947-where-can-i-buy-minecraft-</span></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you enroll in the community and you buy the game and you register your username so that we can whitelist you our server and then you have to request to join a Google sheet. The reason you need to join the sheet is so that you can earn badges by writing in your missions accomplished there (i.e. the ones just listed). So for this first week, once you've got this far, you’ve accomplished most of the missions, but now you have to record them in the Google sheet. The Google sheet is made public by allowing anyone with its link to view it and that sheet becomes the evidence for the badge to be awarded. It is important to record evidence of achievement in an open space because a badge with no evidence is simply an image anyone can put on a web page or blog. But for a badge to have credibility, you have to be able to click on the badge and be taken to the clear evidence of how the badge was earned. We award badges through Credly, the criteria for earning the badges are clearly spelled out, and by clicking on the badge awarded you see evidence of what each person did to earn that badge.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, going for badges is optional. Anyone can participate in the course for whatever reason; for one’s own learning for example. But badges are an important aspect of gamification and are a strong motivator for some people. Those who want badges will have to provide evidence as requested. You can see what this looks like in the evidence from last year’s 2015 session here:</span></div>
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<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bIrwrRqYdTjFTXbX7ZUrjQhwi6GZgJvYCMmzsbm7DJ8/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bIrwrRqYdTjFTXbX7ZUrjQhwi6GZgJvYCMmzsbm7DJ8/edit?usp=sharing</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Week 2 - Declare</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In practice we might be doing this well into Week 2, which is the declaration stage in Cormier's conception of coping in MOOCs. In the first stage we oriented in the MOOC but now we start identifying who we are and why we are there and what our expectations are. One important component of this declaration is to specify a main journal or blog or e-portfolio (essentially a perhaps annotated list of links to where your postings are) tracking your learning journey in association with the course, however you wish to do it. One of the missions from Week 1 was to give us the online address or URL of this blog or journal so that anyone can see how each participant is responding to the curriculum.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course it's impractical and harks back to Web 1.0 to expect moderators, let alone 100 participants, to be checking each other's blogs to see if there's new content there, but fortunately we can use a Web 2.0 tagging system to be alerted to when posts are made. We accomplish this by establishing a hashtag at the outset of the course #evomc16 and asking people to tweet the permalinks of their posts using this hashtag to alert us to their updated content. Or they can post to our Google+ community using that same hashtag, or to Facebook or any number of places that allow hashtags (be sure to put the # sign at the front of the tag; this will make the hashtag appear bold). Then we employ a tool called Tagboard to aggregate all posts people have made with that tag so that we can see who's sharing knowledge about #evomc16 with us. Tagboard aggregates tags from Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps other social network sites as well (I’m unable to determine exactly where it draws its data from the Tagboard web site or various review sites). In other words, Tagboard makes it possible to do tag searches across several social network platforms in one search. Here is a Tagboard search on #evomc16: </span><a href="https://tagboard.com/evomc16/search" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://tagboard.com/evomc16/search</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The mission for this week will be to create a blog post or journal entry and tag it so that it shows up in our Tagboard. So there are two missions actually, to create an artifact and tag it #evomc16 and get it to appear on the Tagboard, which will serve as evidence for the mission accomplished for Week 2.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We expect that it will take a couple of weeks for people to come on board with this system, to orient and declare themselves in the MOOC, and tag posts in social network sites. But of course this is only part of what they'll be doing during these first weeks. By then we hope to have met in Minecraft a few times and also to have held some live sessions. We are already developing a schedule for the live sessions where each week one of our moderators hosts a topic on Minecraft. The schedule will appear in the syllabus and is incorporated into the Learning2gether calendar at </span><a href="http://tinyurl.com/learning2gether" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://tinyurl.com/learning2gether</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For our in-world meetings we use the scheduling tool Doodle (</span><a href="http://doodle.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://doodle.com/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) which helps us to arrange times when participants are most likely to be available to be in-world in Minecraft. When we go in-world we want to be able to talk to each other, so we use a VoIP tool to facilitate that. Last year in 2015 we used Skype, but we found that it was difficult to organize Skype group chats on the fly, although Skype group chats have the advantage of being text chats as well which carry-on asynchronously in between the live voice events. But the difficulty of organizing the sharing of Skype IDs and organizing live voice hook-ups at the time you need them has got us considering alternative tools we might use.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This year we are thinking to use Blackboard Collaborate as our voice tool because anyone can go there without having the password and speak in the same space at the same time without someone having to organize getting the Skype ids of newcomers and inviting them into the Skype voice chat. Blackboard have changed the installation procedure for Collaborate which has caused complications in practice, but once each user has correctly installed the new system it works fine after that. So we will try BbC this year and for a synchronous group dialogue in between live sessions we can start a text (also voice-enabled) Hangout through our Google+ community and keep that going for five weeks. In case you are wondering why not simply use Google as our VoIP, it’s because, as with Skype, participants have to be added to the call, which we can do only as they provide their Skype or Google accounts. With BbC anyone can get themselves into our chat space on providing a name as the only credential. We moderators tested this in November and it seemed that it would work (though one moderator who helped test this had difficulties; but he did not persist and likely we can resolve his problem).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Week 3 - Network</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Week 3 we start to focus on the wider world of Minecraft users. Last year we used a Coursera Minecraft MOOC as our Week 3 network event. This year there is no such course so I'm thinking to suggest the Minecraft in Education Google+ community in the third week, </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/113884091278414495934" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/113884091278414495934</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, because it has a thriving community of over 4000 members and its owner Colin Gallagher also produces a podcast called Minecraft Minechat which has over 30 episodes all video recorded in a YouTube playlist, </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minecraft+minechat" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minecraft+minechat</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Other communities we might explore are Bron Stuckey’s The Minecraft Experience, </span><a href="http://minecraftexperience.net/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://minecraftexperience.net/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and the Minecraft Edu Community, </span><a href="http://minecraftedu.com/community" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://minecraftedu.com/community</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One suggested mission for Week 3 is for participants to explore these communities and to create a blog post or journal entry reporting on any aspect of this exploration and tag it so that it shows up in our Tagboard. Again the appearance of the post on the Tagboard will serve as evidence for the mission accomplished for that week.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Week 4 - Cluster</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile participants will be meeting with us online and be playing the game and learning how to transition from creative to survival mode. Minecraft has two modes: creative and survival. We start out in the creative sandbox mode where all resources are available and no one dies. It's the best mode for beginners to learn where to find resources and how to craft with them and how all the parts go together that will help them survive when we switch the game to survival mode. We will probably do this in the third or certainly by the fourth week as we did last year. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At this stage the game will become challenging. Deaths will inevitably occur at the hands of zombies and creepers, followed by rejuvenation and renewed learning under stress, which makes the game fun and challenging and most importantly teaches the benefits of cooperation among gamers. I think that this is the main lesson to learn through playing the game, and what you can't understand without playing the game. And that is how useful it is to have other players around to help you to deal with the world in a way that you all survive in it by working together and supporting one another, and by modeling and mentoring for one another. This is where you really learn how gamification works in learning in practice.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So a suggested mission for this week is to create a blog post relating to that transition and again get it to appear on our Tagboard.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Week 5 - Focus</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our syllabus is written for where participants in the game introduce themselves, orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus.This is basically how the session ran in 2015 but now I’d like to focus on how we can improve it for 2016. In 2015 we learned that the foregoing plan works (even without much planned for Week 5, where participants need time for winding down, task completion, and reflection), and we could even run the session like that for this year. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But what I would like to see this year is for there to be more directed learning resulting in focus on badges for discrete aspects of that learning. We could be introducing these in any week, but certainly by Week 4, in the cluster phase of coping with MOOCs, meaning that participants with similar interests, if they haven’t done this already, might start clustering around aspects of the topic that interests them. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For example, one of our moderators had the idea to award a badge for Redstone. Redstone is a material you can mine that has energy that can be harnessed to engineer machines in Minecraft. So the badge might be awarded to someone who learned how to mine Redstone and then build a simple machine using it. Other moderators have expressed interest in helping players create videos in Minecraft, and so on.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To build badges into the system we have to be specific about what we want participants to do and what the learning outcomes are and then award badges based on evidence indicating that those awarded badges have carried out the steps. That evidence should be online so that the badge awarded through Credly is linked to that evidence when the badge is clicked on. I would like to see several badges created in this way; which is to say that we design criteria for earning the badge and ideally provide some training on how to accomplish the tasks which will allow participants to earn the badge.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>A way forward</b></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don't know what can be reasonably accomplished in the time we have before January 10 (just two weeks from now) but any game can be designed it so that there can be flexibility based on prior play and this leads us to another of Dave Cormier's concepts, the Community as Curriculum (Cormier, 2008). The idea here is that the responsibility of course facilitators is to set out the course of learning but then when you see what the community wants to learn you adapt the syllabus as you go along. So in this game it's perfectly permissible to be in Week 3 and see that some of your participants want to learn, for example, how to set up a beacon to identify a shelter when it's getting dark (not a good time to not be able to locate your shelter in MInecraft). So a badge could be created on the fly to meet the need that developed in the course of participants interacting in the session. In fact, the facilitator need not be the badge designer; or put another way, players in this game might occasionally take on some roles of facilitators, such as creating badges documenting learning things not originally envisaged in the syllabus. Others could then earn the badge by learning and accomplishing the same thing. In this instantiation of the community as curriculum approach, community members might articulate learning goals through designing badges that would allow individuals to learn what they wanted, teach each other in the course of playing the game, and finally generate their own awards in the form of badges which would have the same value as any proposed by moderators.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So how to organize this? One way might be to manage it through creating a third level of tools for our session. Right now I am creating a ground floor or zero level by articulating in a blog post what was on my mind when I woke up this morning, and spoke it into my iPad so that after a lot of revision at the keyboard I could produce an essay that others could read and see what I came up with in my sleep last night. That's the ground floor, just the overarching idea meant to provide cohesion to the other pieces of the puzzle we are using to play the game.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two levels of this scheme have already been put in place. The first level is the Google+ community where people enroll and come together and interact. The second level is the syllabus Google doc where we set up in prose format the overall structure of the course and how we document it's missions accomplished. The third level I'm now thinking about, the idea that I woke up this morning and decided to write down while it was still on my mind, is to create a bare-bones wiki with five pages, one for each week in our syllabus. The wiki refers back to the syllabus document but does not contain all the verbiage found there, or here for that matter. The wiki is a week-by-week checklist. In the wiki we specify what should be done in any given week and individual moderator or teams of moderators take charge of wiki pages they wish to develop. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope this will overcome a problem with the syllabus document, where everyone has been asked to look at the whole document and comment where they think they can add value. Few have contributed to the Google doc syllabus. A better approach I think is for those with ideas on how to improve certain aspects of the syllabus to focus just on that week, take ownership, and develop steps that will implement their ideas on their individual wiki pages.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in the time it takes for a normal person to read this ramble, I'll try to set up some wiki pages that will specify what people should do in each week. I think the first couple of weeks are well worked out, which would take us to January 24, but after that if we're going to improve on what we did in 2015 we would need specific content directed at earning badges. And I think if we break it down on a week-by-week basis like this it should be manageable for individual moderators to simply focus on where they want to introduce their ideas into the syllabus.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Coda</b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this morning – I actually did wake up with these ideas percolating in my head – I have tried to set out what I've been learning the last year not only about Minecraft, but about composing online using voice. This has been fun. It's allowed me in less than an hour to create a comprehensive articulation of where I think we should go from here and how we might get there (plus a few more hours to clean it up and clarify it, but that’s the writing process!). And incidentally it's the first time I've actually tried to brainstorm something of this nature using the voice tools on iPad in Google docs, something I've been encouraging my students and my colleagues to do with their students. It’s nice to be on holiday and have time to do this on the day before Christmas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">References</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Innovate,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(5). Reprinted </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with permission of the publisher and retrieved from</span></div>
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<a href="http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-a83d7fd3-d56a-d1d2-9a9c-f82812bbb810"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cormier, D. (2010). Success in a MOOC. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">YouTube</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Retrieved from </span><a href="http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-indent: -35pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Robinson, K. (2009). </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; text-indent: -35pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The element: How finding your passion changes everything</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-indent: -35pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. New York: Viking Penguin. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">elearnspace</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Was until recently available: </span><a href="http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Reproduced: <a href="http://www.ingedewaard.net/papers/connectivism/2005_siemens_ALearningTheoryForTheDigitalAge.pdf">http://www.ingedewaard.net/papers/connectivism/2005_siemens_ALearningTheoryForTheDigitalAge.pdf</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Smolčec, M. and Smolčec, F. (2014). Using Minecraft for Learning English, with an introduction by Vance Stevens. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">TESL-EJ 18</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 2:1-15.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Available: </span><a href="http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej70/int.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej70/int.pdf</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stevens, V. (2015). Finding Your Voice: Teaching Writing Using Tablets with Voice Capability. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">TESL-EJ 19</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 3 (pp.1-11). Available: </span><a href="http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. HTML version,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume19/ej75/ej75int/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume19/ej75/ej75int/</span></a></div>
<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-34863428745713894032015-02-23T12:51:00.002+00:002015-02-28T12:59:45.732+00:00EVO Minecraft mOOC: How it came about<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started this post not at this blog but on a Google Doc I was editing for a piece Jeff Kuhn was writing for the February 2015 issue of TESL-EJ, the On the Internet column which I edit. I'll link to Jeff's article here (it will be online by the end of the month). But what Jeff wrote there prompted this stream of consciousness, which I appended as a reaction to his article, not only as a response, but as a suggestion to where Jeff might then go from where he had got in his thinking at that point.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Jeff continued to write after I had left comments in his piece, he quoted parts of what I had written. I had by then moved those remarks to my blog as an unpublished draft.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am publishing now almost "as is" in order to give Jeff a reference link for citing me in the article we were working on, him as author, me as trying-to-be-helpful editor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I begin here I'm responding to Jeff's conceptions from Gee and Ito. The former is games being use not only as games in class but in a larger context (big G) Game. Jeff was using our experience in co-moderating Minecraft mOOC this past 5 weeks as an example of a Game where teachers were trying to 'learn Minecraft' by using Minecraft as the game whose affordances give us insights into and bring us closer to our learning goals and end Game. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ito's framework is messing around, hanging out, and geeking out. Jeff had explained these phases of coming to grips with games when I added my comments. He then went on to use me as an example of messing around with Minecraft (my longtime dabbling with the concept), then forming a community of learners and "hanging out" with them in order to see what they did and follow their lead, and eventually geeking out to the point of almost organizing an expedition to resupply Jeff with sticks when he had run short of wood in the bowels of the server he had set up for us (he alludes to this in his article). </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So here it is, my off the top of my head reactions to the first half of Jeff's article, blogged here in order to provide a linkable reference to Jeff's quoting me in his article. It's all in the Game :-)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to use games in my classroom. There’s this neat game Minecraft that I've been learning a lot about - for the past several years actually -- but don’t know how to crack it (my problem was no access to a server and community. I think I was having trouble ‘getting’ it when I was playing alone </span><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - the nature of the game changed for me once we got a community into the mix </span><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">).</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-e9140b3a-a81c-7f8f-635a-50f1dec8e320" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, I thought, why not start an EVO session? My take on Webheads and most other things I tackle is "let’s get it going!" like throwing a party, and invite as many people as you can, and if it’s a good concept and there are enough people, it’ll be a great party :-) It’s a little off the wall, but if you’re going to use games in class, this is what you want to do. Hey guys, there’s this great game here, a lot of you already play it. I don’t know much about it myself (how could you possibly know as much as your students about Minecraft?) but I think we can make it fly as a substrate for our learning, so let’s give it a go and see what happens.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As with Jeff's session on Zombies, he’d have been thinking ... I want you to write about crisis management (students start getting a bit bleary eyed) but wait, we’re going to do it by experiencing a crisis. Here I’ll show you (students move to edge of their seats).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So if you expect students to get into your crazy ideas and trust you and those ideas to help facilitate their learning, why not do the same with an EVO session. Take teachers whom you expect are going to stand up in class and introduce a game they know less about than the students, show them what it feels like - no, let them experience what it feels like to be in this learning situation and then (as with crisis management and zomibies, see Kuhn 2014) RESOLVE it, feel it getting better, feel their expertise grow, as Ito says, go from messing around, like I was doing for too long with MC, to hanging out with a bunch of people there, and see what it’s like to get geeky, and what happens after that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this in my concept, following from Gee, starting to see the potential of Gamification (Big G fit there?) as opposed to playing the occasional game in class (little g) and feeling the difference when the game starts to kick in to guide and facilitate the learning.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And how does that happen in PD? Experientially and ineffably. I like Jeff's idea that MC is a toy, that learning grows from how we configure and use that toy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2008, as they were planning their first MOOC, and the attention it was getting was attracting participants into 4 digits, and it was obvious none of them, Stephen, George, or Dave, had anticipated the scale of what they were setting in motion, Stephen Downes was asked by a colleague in a live podcast WHY he was essentially flogging his back with this endeavor, and he replied simply, “because I’ll learn from it.” That is the answer to many questions of why we do what we do, and the justification for it, and the mindset we must inculcate in our students and other teachers we train.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And what was learned in the first MOOC was how to scale learning for thousands of participants in an academic endeavor, all of whom had as many reasons for being there, and as many take-aways in store for them as their headcount, while making the process manageable for the facilitators of the course.</span></div>
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<a href="http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2015/01/evo-minecraft-mooc-orient-declare.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2015/01/evo-minecraft-mooc-orient-declare.html</span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and what I’m getting into here is the follow on to that post, a reflection on what happened, and how I see why it happened.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 22.0799999237061px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.38;">I think we accomplished a lot in this EVO Minecraft mOOC #evomc15 experience, or at least I did, in coming to grips with the toy and learning to appreciate how it might impact our learning and that of our students.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="line-height: 22.0799999237061px;"><i>(As a curious footnote on the idea of big G little g; big M little m - I've been calling our MOOC a mOOC to acknowlege the fact that it is a miniscule Open Online Course, not a Massive one. There has been some question as to how massive a course has to be before it can qualify as Massive. Some have put that number around 100 at minimum, and at the time I started diminunizing the m in our mOOC we had around 30 some odd participants. We ended the course with 67 (the last two acquired on almost the last day) so we might need to look for a font that will represent something between a small m and a Massive one).</i></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">References</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kuhn, J. (2014). The world is not enough: The need for game design. IATEFL LT SIG &
TESOL CALL-IS Web Conference on Gaming and Gamification – a Win-Win for Language Learning. Recording <a href="http://iatefl.adobeconnect.com/p4zf1evoz43/">http://iatefl.adobeconnect.com/p4zf1evoz43/</a>. </span><br />
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-7064005292417188182015-01-27T23:24:00.001+00:002015-01-29T02:09:24.980+00:00EVO Minecraft mOOC: Orient, declare, network<span style="font-family: inherit;">EVO Minecraft mOOC has just entered its 3rd week as I write this. There are just two or three dozen participants, so it's not a massive open online course exactly. I call it a mOOC, or minuscule open online course.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In EVO we're not supposed to call them courses. I</span>n return for nominal TESOL sponsorship, t<span style="font-family: inherit;">hey are called sessions in order to avoid confusion with paid courses provided online by TESOL.INC. So even the course part is debatable, which is to say that despite this, it is still a course, The notion that it's not is simply Newspeak.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">EVO is Electronic Village Online, </span><a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/" style="font-family: inherit;">http://evosessions.pbworks.com</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. I have moderated many EVO sessions and this one breaks several EVO rules. First, it covers a game that is not free, and in that sense departs from traditional EVO policy and the open part of MOOC (though everything we do in this session around this game is </span>indisputably<span style="font-family: inherit;"> open). Also, the course was proposed, but not really developed, until after the acceptance deadline. This is because it turns on its head yet another norm for EVO, that sessions are moderated by experts and meticulously prepared beforehand and readied for display and critique (by EVO coordinators) by the time of their acceptance at the end of November.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Whereas most EVO sessions are developed with great care by people with expertise they wish to share, this one takes a flipped approach. It was evolved over the month of December and readied just in time for the start of sessions in January, 2015. It was conceived of as a game about learning to game. The moderators would not necessarily be experts but would be gamers knowledgable about the potential of MC in language learning seeking to learn how to play and game the game for that purpose. What they are learning is how to approach a game not as an expert with global knowledge but as a co-learner with students they might introduce it to in turn. As I did with the original <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm" target="_blank">Webheads in Action EVO session in 2002</a>, the moderators would model this means of learning and engage participants in sharing the responsibility for that learning. We would peer-teach, scaffold if you will, each other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I came up with the idea for this one when I read that there would be a <a href="https://learn.canvas.net/courses/433" target="_blank">Canvas MOOC, Minecraft for Educators</a>, starting in Week 3 of the EVO 2015 sessions, and I registered that idea in a tweet last August. In a sense the tweet was the proposal, and what followed was window dressing to gain acceptance for inclusion in the EVO 2015 listing of sessions.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">I accepted Marijana and Filip's offer and we went on from there</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The proposal at </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/90096824/2015_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC">http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/90096824/2015_EVO_Minecraft_MOOC</a> starts a little facetiously; to wit:</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"This session will invite interested teachers to join us in playing Minecraft, learning all we can about playing alone and together, and how Minecraft is being used effectively in language learning. We'll learn by doing and from one another. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">We'll start here: </span><span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/" style="border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Target audience:</span></strong><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Teachers with a gaming problem / gamers with a teaching problem / teachers of gamers with a learning problem.</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Session objectives:</span></strong><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By the end of the session, participants will have:</span></strong></span></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">explored and played with Minecraft</span></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">shared their discoveries with other participants</span></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">created spaces in Minecraft where desired learning outcomes can be promoted</span></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">shared what they have accomplished in MC</span></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">curated resources related to MC</span></span></li>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Session participants will learn about Minecraft in the same way they would expect students to figure it out and adapt it to their own learning goals; that is, we will learn by playing and sharing what we discover. We will learn, as Joel Levin puts it, how to 'limit' the game; that is how to create spaces there where we can promote desired learning outcomes. We will point each other to resources (there are thousands of them, so we'll have to curate for one another). We can create YouTube channels for our work and create videos showing what we accomplish in MC and how we might use the worlds we create with our students. Kids do it, so someone in our group might set up a server we can all play on (if not, we'll get a kid to set one up for us - there are YouTube videos to show us how)."</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The starting point noted above is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Using Minecraft for Learning English, in <i>TESL-EJ </i>August 2014–Volume 18, Number 2, by Marijana and Filip Smolčec with an introduction by Vance Stevens, </span><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/" style="background-color: transparent; color: #444444; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej70/ej70int/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #444444; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In this article, 11 year-old Filip writes and dictates to his mom Marijana as they share their perceptions of how MC helps kids learn near-native levels of English. In the introduction I drew on the work not only of Seth Levin, mentioned above, but also on recorded presentations by Dave Dodgeson and Jeff Kuhn. Eventually we brought the latter two in as co-</span></span><span style="line-height: 19.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">moderators</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 19.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 19.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I take a cat-herding approach to marshaling volunteers in efforts such as EVOMC15, so it is not uncommon for people I moderate with to step to the plate when they are good and ready, but the moderators who are contributing solidly at the moment are Marijana and Filip, my wife Bobbi, and Jeff Kuhn. Jeff has been particularly forthcoming, offering a video intro to Minecraft, and setting up a server for us where our most productive interaction has been taking place.</span></div>
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Jeff is our resident adult expert among out co-moderators, but another way EVOMC15 departs from the norm is in attracting young people like Filip to join us and tutor the adult learners. Here again we model an effective approach to the student-teacher dichotomy by obliterating the notion of age as a means of categorizing one or the other. This is how it should be in our classes. If we are hired as teachers, one effective way of doing our jobs is to let our students learn by teaching us. One salient affordance of MC is that it provides an engaging crucible for experimenting with exactly that. Filip came aboard with his mom as co-moderator, but we have also been joined by 12-year old Carlos from Spain and teenager Ian Hill from UAE. All three have contributed builds to our MC sandbox, and Filip provides us with a constant stream of pointers, and spawns rabbits and other creatures for us to cope with in amusement.<br />
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As I like to do with my writing, I like to get it out there and develop it as we go. I will go ahead and publish this and return later with more information. I need to develop this into a slide show to assist a presentation Jeff and I will give on Sunday Feb 8, and also adapt it to a presentation proposal I need to make in the next few days.<br />
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I will develop this with more information about how the course is organized on Dave Cormier's 5 stages for success in a MOOC, and explain how the third step, Networking, brings us into the Canvas MOOC on Minecraft for Educators, which is associated with MinecraftEDU, of which Seth Levin (there's that name again :-) is a founding contributor.<br />
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Also I need to explain why we have minimized spaces for interaction for this mOOC. Instead of opening several spaces, each with a different purpose, we have chosen to focus on just one, a Google+ Community at <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671</a>.<br />
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This post, or a future one, will discuss how that has been working out.Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-13876296970791864352014-10-08T00:31:00.001+00:002014-10-10T19:54:26.464+00:00What we learn from MOOCs about Professional Development and Flipping Classrooms - GLoCALL Ahmedabad 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This post aims at sketching out a plenary address to be given Oct 11 at the 2014 GLoCALL conference in Ahmedabad <a href="http://glocall.org/" style="background-color: white; font-size: small; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">http://glocall.org</a>. It will be webcast on WizIQ and will be billed as a Learning2gether event, as shown below. I'll be working on this blog post between now and then.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There have been many talks at the conference on flipped classrooms, but so far, no flipped presentations (except for mine). My slides for my workshop on Oct 9 were posted in advance of the event, and I posted my blog URL in the discussion forum at the WizIQ link below the day before the event, and am about to post my slides as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Meanwhile, this is still a WORK IN PROGRESS</b></span></div>
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LEARNING2GETHER Sat Oct 11 0800 GMT Plenary Session #4: Vance Stevens</h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">You will find the following abstract for my talk </span>at <a href="http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/2186507-plenary-session-4" style="border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/2186507-plenary-session-4</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="border: 0px; color: #281f18; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong>Chaos and Learning: What we learn from MOOCs about Professional Development and Flipping Classrooms </strong></span><span style="border: 0px; color: #281f18; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #281f18; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The first MOOC was conceived in 2008 as a model of connectivist learning theory. Its proponents George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier almost inadvertently seeded a revolution in re-thinking how we conceive learning in a highly networked digital age. Since then, MOOCs have tended to fall between two extremes which have come to be known as cMOOCs and xMOOCs. These are differentiated in part in the way they approach their subject matter; i.e. the degree to which they expose participants to the chaos they are likely to encounter in the real world, and the degree to which they engage learners in resolving that chaos. This talk examines what MOOCs can teach us about the role of chaos in our own learning, and suggests how we can apply MOOC models to our contexts of facilitating our students’ learning, and in learning from one another in our ongoing professional development.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong>Time</strong>:</span></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong><a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Learning2gether+with+Vance+Stevens+at+GLoCALL+Ahmedabad&iso=20141011T08&ah=1" style="border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Where you are</a></strong> </span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong><a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?p0=1440&iso=20141011T08&msg=Learning2gether%20with%20Vance%20Stevens%20at%20GLoCALL%20Ahmedabad" style="border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Countdown</a></strong> </span></li>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Parsing the abstract</span></b></span></h2>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What is all this about? I should start my plenary with a poll,</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0UqDwuhBY_I/VDT0EhEGShI/AAAAAAAABjQ/1PWLz6IA9D0/s1600/2014-10-08_1214pollQ1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0UqDwuhBY_I/VDT0EhEGShI/AAAAAAAABjQ/1PWLz6IA9D0/s1600/2014-10-08_1214pollQ1.png" height="213" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">When the poll is pushed, you can participate by going here</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="https://www.polleverywhere.com/vancestevens602">https://www.polleverywhere.com/vancestevens602</a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">If we can pull off this brief poll, this will help me pitch my introduction of the concept of MOOC and outline a brief history starting in 2008 when George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier famously invented the concept, and coined the acronym Massive Open Online Course. You can bone up on your basic MOOC lore at any of these links:</span></div>
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<li><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Wiki view:<br /><a href="http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/1.+History+of+MOOC's">http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/1.+History+of+MOOC's</a></span></li>
<li>Wikipedia:<br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course</a></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Starting with the pre-history of MOOCs:<br /><a href="http://moocnewsandreviews.com/a-short-history-of-moocs-and-distance-learning/">http://moocnewsandreviews.com/a-short-history-of-moocs-and-distance-learning/</a></span></li>
<li>Nova Southeastern University library<br /><a href="http://nova.campusguides.com/c.php?g=112312&p=725994">http://nova.campusguides.com/c.php?g=112312&p=725994</a></li>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6Bhs-p_X1e8/VDTrxWu3HII/AAAAAAAABi4/4M6W8rYl8Oc/s1600/2014-10-08_1141history.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6Bhs-p_X1e8/VDTrxWu3HII/AAAAAAAABi4/4M6W8rYl8Oc/s1600/2014-10-08_1141history.png" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That of course was a "c" or connectivist, MOOC. George Siemens wrote perhaps</span> <a href="http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm" target="_blank">the seminal article on connectivism (2004)</a>, <span style="font-family: inherit;">which can be summed up in the metaphor of the pipes being more important than the content within the pipes, or as Stephen Downes has often expressed it, knowledge in a network is theoretically available to any one in the network, as long as that any one can access that knowledge on a just-in-time basis via tools available on the network.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">George Siemens has articulated how a cMOOC works to counter the irrelevance of modern educational systems, which teach on a just-in-case basis, a sort of a one-size knowledge-base fits all. Siemens points out that he has no idea why a given individual is taking his classes or what that person needs to know to improve his life, prompting him to say,</span></span> at min 1:13 in this video recording<br />
<u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqL_lsogeNU&feature=youtu.be">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqL_lsogeNU&feature=youtu.be</a></u><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pT29l99rre4/VDUIqmN1JUI/AAAAAAAABlc/lVLQiNXvzzE/s1600/2014-10-08_1349irrelevant.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pT29l99rre4/VDUIqmN1JUI/AAAAAAAABlc/lVLQiNXvzzE/s1600/2014-10-08_1349irrelevant.png" height="213" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">In his view an instructor who marks out the learning path too carefully for his students 'eviscerates' the learning experience. He thinks learning best takes place when learners are faced with doubt and chaos.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BwIsfBKUSgI/VDT9K-GTsnI/AAAAAAAABkE/hSCH3F3fAuc/s1600/2014-10-08_1259seimens_rheinhart.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BwIsfBKUSgI/VDT9K-GTsnI/AAAAAAAABkE/hSCH3F3fAuc/s1600/2014-10-08_1259seimens_rheinhart.png" height="328" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">"I’m not aware of any research actually that says linear structure produces better outcomes than more chaotic meandering structure ... the experience of learning, making sense of that chaos, is actually the heart of the learning experience, but if an instructor makes sense of that chaos for you and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then you are eviscerating the learner’s experience because now you’ve made sense of them and all you’ve told them is walk the path that I’ve formed. When it comes to complexity I’m a great fan of letting learner’s hack their way through that path and getting the value of that learning experience and that sense-making process.” </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">From Howard Reingold interviews George Siemens: </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMfipxhT_Co&feature=related" style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMfipxhT_Co&feature=related</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Chaos, incidentally, is what Downes says is what we see all around us, all the time, everywhere we look (get used to it :-).</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ob713cESfx0/VDUCAbjIS8I/AAAAAAAABk4/2s6DbVNFKK4/s1600/2014-10-08_1319downes_chaos.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ob713cESfx0/VDUCAbjIS8I/AAAAAAAABk4/2s6DbVNFKK4/s1600/2014-10-08_1319downes_chaos.png" height="178" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://youtu.be/wyaeTvGQDsA">http://youtu.be/wyaeTvGQDsA</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Dave Snowden is working on a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin" target="_blank">Cynefin model</a> that shows how problems can be obvious, complicated, complex, or chaotic, and what strategies are needed to address the range of problematicity. He points to the cliff where, if you try to go from a training regime preparing you solve simple problems, you risk a heavy fall when confronted with chaotic ones.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kpwB_oMDWSE/VDUCpNgKoHI/AAAAAAAABlA/yC_vzdH9OJ4/s1600/2014-10-08_1323cynefin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kpwB_oMDWSE/VDUCpNgKoHI/AAAAAAAABlA/yC_vzdH9OJ4/s1600/2014-10-08_1323cynefin.png" height="218" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://youtu.be/N7oz366X0-8"><span style="font-family: inherit;">http://youtu.be/N7oz366X0-8</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">I refer to my own experience as a PADI dive instructor to show that my teaching people to dive amounts to training. The knowledge and skills required can be trained and exercised in a way that works predictably from one student to the next. Language learning can be trained only in the way you would train a parrot. We can get students to pass tests in memorized verb conjugations but in reality, what one needs to know to become fluent quickly becomes chaotic. And what one needs to know varies markedly from one person to the next.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xYtDTWmWYjQ/VDT_k3iRo3I/AAAAAAAABkk/afctSIHb8Jk/s1600/2014-10-08_1309training.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xYtDTWmWYjQ/VDT_k3iRo3I/AAAAAAAABkk/afctSIHb8Jk/s1600/2014-10-08_1309training.png" height="198" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://tesl-ej.org/ej28/int.html"><span style="font-family: inherit;">http://tesl-ej.org/ej28/int.html</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">In such situations, where the problem to be resolved tends toward chaotic, a connectivist approach might be appropriate. Connectivism leverages the fact that knowledge required to address the problem exists online in the form of web pages and tutorials but more importantly in the form of people who can either help by sharing expertise, or who are willing to accompany you on your learning journey. </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sOJSO32TGOU/VDUA5SZTNzI/AAAAAAAABks/H3I67C1Q5yw/s1600/2014-10-08_1315cormier.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sOJSO32TGOU/VDUA5SZTNzI/AAAAAAAABks/H3I67C1Q5yw/s1600/2014-10-08_1315cormier.png" height="232" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2013/01/20/dave-cormier-discusses-cmooc-and-multimooc-co/">http://learning2gether.net/2013/01/20/dave-cormier-discusses-cmooc-and-multimooc-co/</a></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"> </span><br />
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More thoughts on Chaos in learning, and resolving that chaos through networking<br />
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances/chaos-in-learning">http://www.slideshare.net/vances/chaos-in-learning</a></div>
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So, what are MOOCs?</h2>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Whether cMOOC or xMOOC, MOOCs share the following characterisitics:</span></span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Course - this is an easy one. A MOOC is a course. It starts and it ends. When it ends the instructor or moderators can switch off the lights, but the community may remain, and often does.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Online - another easy one, it's online. People can access it on the Internet. Some people might enroll in a course at a university for credit that also operates as a MOOC, but the interaction is mainly online, and with a wider community of virtual interactants. Online also sets the MOOC in a world of abundance, whereas other options are more impacted by scarcity.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Open - this is a more problematic concept (for some). Open means anyone can access the course materials, artifacts, and archives without having to log in or provide credentials. Nothing is forever but open implies that the archive will be available to anyone for some time to come, ideally, in perpetuity. It can be argued that a course that disappears shortly after running, or that is available only to logged in participants, is not truly open (though it might have been free, as in beer).</span></span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Massive - this follows from open. A massive course is available to anyone, so thousands might sign up. Of these, hundreds might actively participate throughout the course. Despite what you may have heard about high attrition rates in MOOCs, they commonly matriculate many times more than would be expected in a traditional course running at a brick-and-mortar institute of higher education</span><span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">.</span></span></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Stephen Downes 2012; posted in Alan Levine:
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<a href="http://cogdogblog.com/2012/09/21/just-ds106/">http</a><a href="http://cogdogblog.com/2012/09/21/just-ds106/">://cogdogblog.com/2012/09/21/just-ds106</a><a href="http://cogdogblog.com/2012/09/21/just-ds106/">/</a></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Massive requires a different approach to educational design than heretofore. For one thing courses have to be designed so that they scale. Algorithms might be necessary to augment some aspects of course management. For example, if anyone can "participate" with no login, who are your participants? Stephen Downes has a tool called gRSShopper that allows people on a MOOC to register their blogs with the course, and the script finds their posts relevant to the course when they tag them with the course tag. This allows thousands of participants to have at their fingertips the hundreds of blog posts and comments that might derive from the MOOC on a given day.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LBGCccBnWIE/VDUSpoYkX8I/AAAAAAAABmM/v6CcQ7gNlvw/s1600/2014-10-08_1431grsshopper.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LBGCccBnWIE/VDUSpoYkX8I/AAAAAAAABmM/v6CcQ7gNlvw/s1600/2014-10-08_1431grsshopper.png" height="160" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://grsshopper.downes.ca/about.htm">http://grsshopper.downes.ca/about.htm</a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Here's an example from a MOOC where a participant engineered similar aggregation capability and shared it with participants in the MOOC. Notice how word spreads in a MOOC, node to node throughout the network.</span></span><br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-U9nGePQtid4/VDUVoE0A3nI/AAAAAAAABmY/fHEzjG88Sps/s1600/2014-10-08_1424aggregation.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-U9nGePQtid4/VDUVoE0A3nI/AAAAAAAABmY/fHEzjG88Sps/s1600/2014-10-08_1424aggregation.png" height="235" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Of course having access to content "at your fingertips" is like having a TV -- it doesn't mean you can actually know what is happening every moment on every channel, or that you might even care. With TV our real-life filter mechanisms are such that we don't worry about what we're missing each second, never mind the articles appearing in newspapers and magazines, the radio shows, the tweets, the Facebook posts</span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">we're missing</span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. In this world of pervasive media, the best-adjusted work with what we pull toward us, not what is pushed at us.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MDmo2MfLM1Y/VDUOXczM0SI/AAAAAAAABls/vBvZwFfVDCU/s1600/2014-10-08_1412cormier5steps.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MDmo2MfLM1Y/VDUOXczM0SI/AAAAAAAABls/vBvZwFfVDCU/s1600/2014-10-08_1412cormier5steps.png" height="285" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0">http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Dave Cormier has suggested five stages of succeeding in a MOOC. First ORIENT in the MOOC, figure out what is there, and at some point, DECLARE who you are and how you think you fit in. Now you are in position to NETWORK with others declaring interests similar to yours, and if you hit it off with certain people in the MOOC you might form a CLUSTER. This might even lead to collaboration, in the FOCUS stage, where you get out of the MOOC what you want, not what someone thinks you should learn. </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">But keep in mind we are talking about cMOOCs.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">cMOOCs are a connectivist solution to chaotic problems, but understanding how they work is ineffable. Despite the fact that you really have to be there in order to understand how learning takes place in a MOOC, here are two more examples. In the first, I had noticed that a participant in Rhizomatic Learning had created a tool that would map who was using the MOOC tag, in this case #Rhizo14</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O3DQA9U_rOs/VDUWi0Zd4KI/AAAAAAAABmg/SjkJEj1aY5w/s1600/2014-10-08_1423hawksey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O3DQA9U_rOs/VDUWi0Zd4KI/AAAAAAAABmg/SjkJEj1aY5w/s1600/2014-10-08_1423hawksey.jpg" height="193" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><a href="http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tDHgQeSbHR3fcvN81EHnxQQ&sheet=oaw">http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tDHgQeSbHR3fcvN81EHnxQQ&sheet=oaw</a></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 18pt;"> </span></div>
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This seemed to be an interesting tool for tracking who is engaged in your tag, so I wanted to have this for an EVO session I was moderating, but getting it to work was not an obvious or simple problem. I reached out to the network, whose participants helped me generate the tag map of users of my tag #evomlit:<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qcIYd9gH05Q/VDUWi01j0TI/AAAAAAAABmk/yLgzEbnNhhA/s1600/2014-10-08_1421serendipitous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qcIYd9gH05Q/VDUWi01j0TI/AAAAAAAABmk/yLgzEbnNhhA/s1600/2014-10-08_1421serendipitous.jpg" height="218" width="400" /></a><br />
More explanation of what is happening in the above graphic can be found here:<br />
<a href="http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/revisiting-the-question-of-tagging/">http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/revisiting-the-question-of-tagging/</a><br />
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And finally, as evidence that MOOC learning persists after the MOOC has ended, I just the other day noticed a post on "Learnification" and clicked on it to see what such a clever and enigmatic term could possibly be about.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TBcNP4o0p-M/VDUcbsHulKI/AAAAAAAABm8/fLBuNKojXzc/s1600/2014-10-08_1111learnification.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TBcNP4o0p-M/VDUcbsHulKI/AAAAAAAABm8/fLBuNKojXzc/s1600/2014-10-08_1111learnification.png" height="335" width="400" /></a></div>
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Seen here: <a href="http://www.elearninglearning.com/edition/weekly-version-benefits-2014-09-27/">http://www.elearninglearning.com/edition/weekly-version-benefits-2014-09-27/</a></div>
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Not surprisingly, the writer was reflecting on something stimulated by a colleague "<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.5px;">whom I met virtually via a mooc, and from whom I continue to draw insights on things related to education." It is not at all unusual for countless such relationships to form in the network and cluster phases of succeeding in a MOOC, but it's not every day I manage to capture such an exchange and use it to make a point in my own blog post.</span></div>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UAFLmaGWCjk/VDUcbvw9OHI/AAAAAAAABm4/iRYiJOp9ZNQ/s1600/2014-10-08_1108evidence_mooclearning.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UAFLmaGWCjk/VDUcbvw9OHI/AAAAAAAABm4/iRYiJOp9ZNQ/s1600/2014-10-08_1108evidence_mooclearning.png" height="227" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/the-learnification-of-education/">http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/the-learnification-of-education/</a><br />
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So this so far has been an attempt to convey a sense of what goes on among interactants in MOOCs, and what many nurtured on the early MOOCs, consider to be the great strength of MOOCs. That is, they are not only a means to learn something concrete, but they model a means to learn along the connectivist ideals of the creators of the concept. However, many who are being exposed to MOOCs now are not necessarily aware of that early history and theoretical underpinning.<br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">There are also xMOOCs</span></h2>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7rAijqXk7Mc/VDT26vZGAxI/AAAAAAAABjg/IacC1NHY6Go/s1600/2014-10-08_1232XvsC.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7rAijqXk7Mc/VDT26vZGAxI/AAAAAAAABjg/IacC1NHY6Go/s1600/2014-10-08_1232XvsC.png" height="346" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/">http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/</a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OhWN4rP2HgY/VDJr5f5LZsI/AAAAAAAABhc/Pqoc1MmWYr0/s1600/2014-10-06_1413artificialx2011.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OhWN4rP2HgY/VDJr5f5LZsI/AAAAAAAABhc/Pqoc1MmWYr0/s1600/2014-10-06_1413artificialx2011.png" height="327" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #375362;"><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://moocnewsandreviews.com/ultimate-guide-to-xmoocs-and-cmoocso/">http://moocnewsandreviews.com/ultimate-guide-to-xmoocs-and-cmoocso/</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The first xMOOC was the brain-child of Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvik, who took the Downes-Siemens-Cormier notion of "build a MOOC, they will come", and in 2011 opened a course on artificial intelligence </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">at Stanford</span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">to just anyone, for free. As can be seen in the article above, it attracted 160 million participants. But this was not a connectivist MOOC in the Siemens-Downes-Cormier sense. It presented a course of training that would enable anyone who wanted to follow it to earn credit at Stanford. Amazon provided the online testing infrastructure to ascertain that students were covering the material. The concept was so successful that shortly thereafter Thrun left his tenured position at Stanford to start a company called Udacity that was the first of the so-called xMOOCs. Coursera formed soon after, followed by EdX, whose name Siemens co-opted in making the distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">As Siemens characterizes it in the </span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.1520004272461px;">2012 post where he coined the term xMOOC ("xMOOC?" </span><span style="line-height: 19.1520004272461px;"><a href="http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/">http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/</a>)</span><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">"</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.1520004272461px;">Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication." </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 19.1520004272461px;">Flipped Classes</span></h2>
Flipped classroom techniques, where educators record in advance and enhance with media what they would want to present in a lecture on their topic, have a history dating back to the late 90's according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom</a>, but may have been first used in MOOC-style courses by Salman Kahn, founder of the Kahn Academy, in 2004<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z_53CYo_kKI/VDU0imeaB8I/AAAAAAAABnM/h71g23j7SxU/s1600/2014-10-08_1644khanacademyflip.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z_53CYo_kKI/VDU0imeaB8I/AAAAAAAABnM/h71g23j7SxU/s1600/2014-10-08_1644khanacademyflip.png" height="78" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">As can be seen below, Thrun and Norvig are preparing tutorial videos to in effect "flip" the teaching in their MOOC, so that students can access the content in didactic mode away from the main focus of interaction and when interacting with professors or with one another, discuss the content in a way that helps them to understand it, after presentation.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aLDl9MvrUfw/VDJpU3MXsuI/AAAAAAAABhQ/cPc_sOpp2jI/s1600/2014-10-06_1403thru_norvig.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aLDl9MvrUfw/VDJpU3MXsuI/AAAAAAAABhQ/cPc_sOpp2jI/s1600/2014-10-06_1403thru_norvig.png" height="521" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/">http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Flipped classroom techniques are characteristic of all kinds of online and blended learning environments, not just MOOCs. However, the ability to flip effectively with media verges on another literacy skill, one called Digital Storytelling. I would like to focus now on how these developments have impacted how we are coming to interact with each other as teaching professionals in a connected / connectivist world, and how this should be informing our teaching.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Connected Courses 2014 and DS106</span></b></span></h2>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AzVmSkA_-C4/VDOlECk75tI/AAAAAAAABiA/qrkxPKdGZ3I/s1600/2014-09-05_1053connectedcourses.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AzVmSkA_-C4/VDOlECk75tI/AAAAAAAABiA/qrkxPKdGZ3I/s1600/2014-09-05_1053connectedcourses.png" height="289" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a MOOC going on right now that encapsulates much of what I have to say this morning. First of all, it's run by three people who are very well known in the world of connected educators. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Howard Rheingold is an eccentric Stanford professor who has written several books on net litereracies. His language is as colorful as his shirts; for example one digital literacy skill mentioned in Netsmart is crap detection.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8_B_3GfsK1c/VDOsQBnlcMI/AAAAAAAABiU/DI0PDmOfqK8/s1600/2014-10-07_1300rheingold.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8_B_3GfsK1c/VDOsQBnlcMI/AAAAAAAABiU/DI0PDmOfqK8/s1600/2014-10-07_1300rheingold.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://rheingold.com/">http://rheingold.com/</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Jim Groom is a professor at Mary Washington University and is famous for at least three significant initiaties. One, he is the poster boy of EduPunk, a mindset of improving quality in education by disrupting it. Two, he preaches a domain-of-one's-own and has managed to implement the concept where he teaches by getting his college to empower all incoming freshpersons to maintain e-portfolios under their own domains and on their own servers. And three, he teaches DS 106, or </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Digital Storytelling 106</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Alan Levine, who blogs on the name CogDog (featuring his favorite pet saluki). One of his best-known posts is 50 ways to tell a digital story, so for obvious reasons he has worked closely with Jim Groom on DS106.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LEm9jGLzsE0/VDOngbdiJ7I/AAAAAAAABiI/3VY3IYj-qpc/s1600/2014-10-07_1238-50ways.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LEm9jGLzsE0/VDOngbdiJ7I/AAAAAAAABiI/3VY3IYj-qpc/s1600/2014-10-07_1238-50ways.png" height="128" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://50ways.wikispaces.com/">http://50ways.wikispaces.com/</a></div>
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Why stories?</h2>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Connected courses teaches what you need to know to create a domain of your own and tell your own digital stories and connect your digital stories to those of others. As indicated in our cultures' rich heritage of mythology, storytelling is how we make sense of chaos. According to Jim Groom, digital storytelling is a narrative of your thinking. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">So this MOOC has it all. It's a free course you can choose to take and learn from three of my digital heros (at other times you can take MOOCs put on by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier, so heroes abound in the world of MOOCs). You can join it any time, its teachers have flipped the classroom and put tutorials </span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">online</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">to walk you through what you need to know to get the most out of the courses. It's a cMOOC, so you can connect with others in the course and learn from and with them. You connect by reflecting on what you are exposed to and blogging a narrative of your thinking. Thus #ccourse14 addresses that critical element in learning as opposed to training, the chaos factor. It presents a world as it is and a way to find a path through that world. This path draws on strategies such as connecting with others and sharing stories.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wdOAsno5BtY/VDU5-xlE83I/AAAAAAAABnc/2zCXzt7vYrU/s1600/2014-10-08_1359teach_model_practice_reflect.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wdOAsno5BtY/VDU5-xlE83I/AAAAAAAABnc/2zCXzt7vYrU/s1600/2014-10-08_1359teach_model_practice_reflect.png" height="298" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Stephen Downes famously said (first time perhaps at a <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/personal-learning-the-web-20-way" style="color: #375362;" target="_blank">WiAOC conference in 2007</a><span style="color: #375362;">)</span> that students practice and reflect, while teachers model and demonstrate. So I would like to wind up this plenary in sharing stories with you, and model how this helps us make some sense of chaotic issues, and also to model, in part by sharing this plenary online via WizIQ, how connecting with other educators as a habit in our daily lives, can help make us better teachers to students where we work.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Carrying MOOCs, flipped classes, and digital storytelling into the classroom</span></h2>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">We are running out of time for a 50 min plenary address. However we can draw meaningful conclusions from our examination of MOOCs and how they impact the efforts of practitioners in their quest for effective professional development. Teachers who change their notions of how best to conduct their PD efforts through interaction with other teachers online will think of ways to effect similar changes in the way they approach their students.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">One way that I effect change is by carrying on week after week, since 1998, so for 16 years now, is through Learning2gether. You can find more about L2g at <a href="http://learrning2gether.net/about">http://learrning2gether.net/about</a>. As mentioned earlier, this plenary is being webcast as a L2g event on WizIQ - </span></span></span><a href="http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/2186507-plenary-session-4" style="border: 0px; color: #114488; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 19.5px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/2186507-plenary-session-4</a></div>
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<span style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Online and face-to-face professional development opportunities to help teachers keep their batteries charged</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Some of the Hangouts archived at ELT Live <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/100450969416086025861">https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/100450969416086025861</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Regarding my personal stories, a convenient starting focus is something that happened online on Tue Sep 30. Learning2gether was in a Hangout on Air that day courtesy of Jeff Lebow and ELT Live#5. The topic was close to the heart of anyone who would take the time to participate in such an event, how doing what we were doing together online, and carrying over into face-to-face encounters with other educators in online venues, excites and inspires us to become even better educators.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://youtu.be/GWd6efkjMv8">http://youtu.be/GWd6efkjMv8</a><img alt="" src="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/f/1411737015/2014-09-26_1657tue30.jpg" id="pbImage739346" style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; height: auto; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; margin-top: 0.5em; max-width: 100%;" /></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Event page<br /><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c5nnenn0r0viuh6109i5067pvks" style="border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c5nnenn0r0viuh6109i5067pvks</a></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Archived at <a href="http://koreabridge.net/live" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s linear; border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://koreabridge.net/live</a> and <a href="http://englishbridges.net/live" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s linear; border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://englishbridges.net/live</a></span></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://plus.google.com/+JeffLebow/posts/Yovnm67fdqK" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s linear; border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s linear; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">https://plus.google.com/+JeffLebow/posts/Yovnm67fdqK</a></li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://eltlive.com/show/elt-live5-professional-development-online-and-off" style="border: 0px; color: #00a6cc; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://eltlive.com/show/elt-live5-professional-development-online-and-off</a></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The hard part is how to characterize</span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> those beams of energy that are drawn from disparate corners of the edusphere, ranging the breadth of my PLN and that of countless others. These worlds converge in the online and f2f spaces we co-inhabit and collide in a burst of energy once critical mass is reached. This is happening all the time in my world, and it is this energy that re-charges my batteries and those of colleagues I work with in these mutual spaces.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">On Oct 9 I demonstrated Hangouts at a workshop here in Ahmedabad and this led to a story I'd like to tell as a means of winding up my plenary talk. The story follows from the one above and is here at the moment </span><br />
<span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#ThuOct90715GMTatGloCALLAhmedabadVanceStevenslivestreamedworkshoponHangoutonAir">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#ThuOct90715GMTatGloCALLAhmedabadVanceStevenslivestreamedworkshoponHangoutonAir</a></span><br />
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I'll write it up properly here before my talk tomorrow and post a link to the slideshare.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Backstories</span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Perhaps we can begin by telling the story of the five people at the online event, one of many I have engaged in weekly for the past 15 years, whom I have known the longest. I met them all online years ago, and I have met two of them personally at conferences in the USA. Let's start with them, as these associations will help me recount some of the stories that brought me here today.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">We'll start with Rita Zeinstejer, an English teacher and teacher-trainer in Argentina who joined Webheads in Action near to the time I started it in 2001-2002. Webheads in Action is one of my most persistent endeavors, a significant turning point in my career and in the lives of many others. It actually started in 1998 as a community of language learners and teachers interested in understanding the emerging online / blended learning environment, but 2002 was the year that I moderated an EVO session (Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) to model what I had been doing with students for a group of teachers who to this day still call themselves Webheads. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">One of these Webheads, Buth from Kuwait, turned up in Cairo at a conference where I was giving another plenary talk, and because of this connection we hung out, and as she was often with me, she was invited to social events arranged for invited speakers. When introductions were made at these formal events, esteemed professors were introduced by their name and affiliation. I was introduced as one of the speakers at the conference, and Buth was introduced as "a Webhead." After that had happened a couple of times she remarked that "Webhead" was apparently perceived as carrying a status on par with other professional titles. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm">http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">It is a title with some substance. In 2003 Webheads participated in one of John Hibbs's Global Learn Day events. GLD was a 24-hour webinar that circled the globe region by region. I had a arranged to hold our part of the event in an auditorium at the Petroleum Institute where I worked at the time and I invited my colleagues there to attend. Webheads co-founder Michael Coghlan flew from Australia to Abu Dhabi for the occasion, and Buth flew down from Kuwait. So when our time came to engage the global audience, we had three of us physically present on stage and 62 people in the online virtual audience. In the spacious auditorium at PI we had a handful of people, 5 at the most, who stopped in for some part of the proceedings. So Webheads had the gravitas to pull in colleagues from around the world for this event, but had little appeal locally, which is in a nutshell the story of my professional life, but also the reason I am in Ahmedabad Oct 11, 2014.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">So getting back to Rita, she was one of the first people to join Webheads in 2002, and one of many who have worked closely together ever since. I met her in person at two TESOL conferences in the USA, but our most significant work has been online. Our most successful project was Writingmatrix, a term coined by Nelba Quintana, another Webhead from Argentina, when we decided to test an idea I thought might work<span style="color: #375362;"> </span><a href="http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/" style="color: #375362;">http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/</a></span><span style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Will Richardson had explained quite clearly how tags in blog posts could be aggregated through RSS feed readers in such a way that a teacher could follow blogs maintained by students in a class, and tease from those blogs posts meant for the class. He called RSS the 'next killer-app for education' </span><span style="color: #375362;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://weblogg-ed.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/RSSFAQ4.pdf">http://weblogg-ed.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/RSSFAQ4.pdf</a></span></span><span style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">My idea was to see if we could expand the classroom to include classes from around the world. Apart from Rita and Nelba in Rosario and La Plata in Argentina, we also enlisted Doris in Venezuela and Sasha in Slovenia to get their students keep blogs for the course and tag their posts 'writingmatrix'. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://youtu.be/NHjlCY0BCNo">http://youtu.be/NHjlCY0BCNo</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">At the time there was a tool, Technorati, that would troll the blogosphere and return to us hits on any blog containing that tag. </span><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">We had researched our tag beforehand to find that before we started the project we had zero hits, and once the project got under way we found that no matter where we were in the world, we could find blog posts from Argentina, Venezuela, and Slovenia written by students in participating classrooms, and from that these students were encouraged to read each other's posts and comment to one another in English in a cultural exchange. All teachers involved reported positive attitude shifts toward language learning in their students. Rita said her students were not at all interested at first, but they soon got into it, and produced some charming videos, where one decidedly cool students says, for example, "Wanna know where it's at? (pause) ... Tagging, man!"</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">After the project was under way, Carla Arena and Ronaldo Lima joined it from Brasilia. They did so by simply having their students tag blog posts 'writingmatrix' and those posts started turning up in our Technorati searches. Thus we had found a way for students to join an international exchange project without having to formally pre-arrange with other teachers. Students anywhere in the world could self-select, if they wanted, to join the writing exchange. </span><span style="color: #375362;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html">http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html</a></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">In this respect we had presaged one cornerstone of MOOCs -- we had come on a means of a theoretically massive, scalable at any rate, number of people joining a project to interact with other student writers, and cluster in such a way that they would pick and chose what they wanted to learn and from whom, and how much time they wanted to devote to the effort. Besides being scalably Massive, it was Open and Online, and for the teachers mentioned and their students, a part of their Course.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Technorati no longer works the way it once did. It has become more a tool for the establishment blogosphere and no longer returns results on blogs with no credibility (i.e. typical student blogs). However, as I am making these remarks in India, a land with a recognized wealth of clever minds working on developing technology, I suggest that the next killer-app for education will be something that does what Technorati once did in the way I describe it here. This has never since been replicated. It has been approached, as with Stephen Downes's gRSShopper, but his script requires that bloggers register their blog with the script. This works in MOOCs where participants register their blogs and tag some of their posts with the MOOC tag, and the script searches in registered blogs for posts with that tag and aggregates its output in a way that others in the MOOC can track what one another are doing. I have spoken with Stephen about a script that would simply find the tag wherever it happened to be in taggable posts (besides blogs:Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) but he said that such a tag would quickly be picked up by spammers; hence, the need for registration to filter out unwanted posts. However, writingmatrix was never spammed, and an app that would recover that simple functionality would be a real Killer App for Education.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Enough about Rita, let's talk about Jeff. I met Jeff once or twice in New York but he is living in Pusan Korea at the moment. Jeff has a long history going back through Tibetan activism, but his world collided with Webheads in 2005 when he started webcasting through Worldbridges<span style="color: #375362;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume10/ej37/ej37int/" style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume10/ej37/ej37int/</a><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: #375362;"> </span>in a quantum burst of convergent energy that produced a series of three free online wordwide 3-day conferences called Webheads in Action Online Convergences </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm" style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm</a><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: #375362;">.</span> Jeff's work also verges on MOOC, as when he organized a Webcast Academy<span style="color: #375362;"> </span></span><a href="http://webcastacademy.net/portfolio/jeff-lebow" style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">http://webcastacademy.net/portfolio/jeff-lebow</a><span style="color: #375362; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">designed to teach educators how to simulcast events and then have them pay forward by training others in a phenomenal example of crowd-sourcing learning. Jeff's more recent efforts include a series of ELT live webcast Hangouts, of which the story-starter on this page was number 5.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Where is this headed?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #375362; font-family: Verdana, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">I'm getting off topic and running out of time. I am pursuing the storytelling route because stories are a way to make learning occur from chaos. We should pass this through Connected Courses MOOC. As Jim Groom says, a digital story is a narrative of thinking; so my plenary grapples with chaotic ideas by constructing a narrative of thinking about them.</span><br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-1353651133786244172014-04-22T13:31:00.001+00:002014-04-22T14:12:49.476+00:00Some SMALL thoughts on CALL expertiseI've just been asked to fill out a questionnaire directed at my definition of and attitudes toward expertise in CALL. This drew out my thoughts on the topic and I decided to blog them. I've been thinking lately that the notion of CALL is becoming anachronistic because there is almost nothing in modern life in the developed world that is not computer-assisted. And what we regard as "computers" has changed as well. I have several computers on my desk right now.<br />
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The one I used to think of as a computer, a desktop PC on the floor next to my desk, is almost a dinosaur now and not actually in use just now. I have a couple of laptops and a netbook which is more convenient for travel than the laptops. One of the laptops is my work computer (we don't have desktop computers at work). The EdTech Crew let slip in a recent podcast that if they wanted to get any "real work" done they used PC's but of course there are a lot of tablet and mobile devices which they train teachers to use in schools, and which I've also got around my house, the iPad and iPhone pictured here. Since I was picking up computers I grabbed my dive computers as well though I don't know how they would be used for language learning. But the point is, the notion of CALL is changing with the technology, and as we start to integrate our computers with items as mundane as telephones, the whole notion of 'computer-assisted" starts to blend in with the woodwork.<br />
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This is why I have been talking about SMALL lately, or social media assisted language learning, and have more recently modified that to social media assisted lifelong learning. When I've bounced the idea of SMALL off colleagues I get all sorts of alternate suggestions in return, such as TALL or TELL (technology assisted or enhanced) which is to say that my acronym might not be the one that sticks, but teachers are in the main coming off the idea of 'computer-assisted' as defining what we are doing.<br />
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This is why I fudged my definition of CALL experts as people who have some experience in the use of microprocessor-based devices in the implementation of language learning. They have conducted research in the field or have published or blogged widely on the topic and / or have been involved in numerous on-site or online efforts in sharing their expertise toward helping others to understand proper implementation of use of computers, tablets, or mobile devices in language learning. They are master learners; which is to say they model and demonstrate what they know, and they reflect through social media about what they learn and practice in order to learn more.<br />
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They have unique skills, the main one being not related so much to technology, but having accredited knowledge of how people learn. In accordance with SMALL and with one of its theoretical frameworks, they need a working knowledge of networking and social media. Of course they should have a demonstrated track record of implementation of CALL projects and presentation of methods and findings at conferences and online venues frequented by language teaching practitioners.<br />
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CALL experts are inherently trouble-shooters who struggle with new media-based devices to overcome difficulties in understanding their use, and who develop means to leverage their affordances in ways that will help others to use these devices creatively and critically. They open people's eyes to sometimes obvious but often novel uses of technology in learning. A CALL expert needs to be able to help competent teachers enhance their teaching capabilities through the use of technology, and to understand what the affordances of these technologies are and how these affordances can be utilized in enabling students to learn what the language teacher already understands to be the most effective means of learning languages. If the purpose of language learning is understood to be learning to communicate through writing, listening, reading, and speaking in a foreign or second language, then CALL experts should be able to demonstrate convincingly and in simple terms how CALL can help with real communication, asynchronously and in real-time, not only in terms of finding audiovisual and reading materials online, but in speaking to and writing for audiences composed of native interlocutants and peers in language learning, and interacting with them meaningfully in the communities that form around their communications (which for the language learner, may come to be perceived more as an exercise in meeting people online and exchanging ideas and culture, than as "language learning" in the traditional sense).<br />
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Obviously experts in any field have to have strategies for keeping up to date with what is happening in the field. In my case, I blog instinctively, as I am doing here. I write articles and book chapters, and I write regularly for professional journals and serve on their editorial boards (<a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers">http://vancestevens.com/papers</a>). I meet people regularly online (at least once or twice a week) for presentations and conversations on topics pertinent to the field (<a href="http://learning2gether.net/">http://learning2gether.net</a>). I participate in and coordinate communities of practice online (<a href="http://webheads.info/">http://webheads.info</a>). I present at and attend many online and face-to-face conferences annually. I interact with colleagues at work and sometimes more intently with colleagues worldwide after my official working hours. I keep connected professionally through several social media services (listed in the sidebar to the right of this blog post).<br />
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As George Couros said recently, where there is Internet, isolation of teaching professionals is now a choice, not a condition to be taken for granted. I advise teachers wishing to enhance their technology skills, and learn how to aim them effectively at pedagogy, to get connected and find out what others are doing in CALL. Interact with other teachers in MOOCs and take advantage of the many and constantly happening online professional development opportunities to learn how to learn through the affordances of modern technologies. Develop your PLN or personal learning network, and ask them whatever questions come to mind. Share what you know and what you create with your PLN. Try out things with your students, learn from them and with them, make it clear that you can help them find answers since now no one can be expected to know all the answers in a world where new things are discovered and invented constantly. Encourage them to experiment with you. Don't give up, learn something new every day, and write it down somewhere and share it with those you work with and with your PLN online.<br />
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-68956571464450301302014-02-18T17:30:00.001+00:002014-02-28T06:58:17.388+00:00The Abundance of Big DataThe other day I was facing a long drive with nothing to read, so I went onto Audiobooks and grabbed the first thing that came up, <i>Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think</i> (2013) by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston and New York.<br />
<a href="http://books.google.ae/books?id=uy4lh-WEhhIC&pg=PR3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false">http://books.google.ae/books?id=uy4lh-WEhhIC&pg=PR3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false</a><br />
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I learned in the book about the algorithm by which Amazon is able to "recommend books to users based on their individual shopping
preferences ...Amazon analyst Greg Linden saw a new way of doing things
... What if the site could make associations between products
themselves rather than compare the preferences of people with other
people? In 1998 Linden and his colleagues applied for a patent on
‘item-to-item’ collaborative filtering and the shift in approach made a
big difference – a big data difference."<br />
<i>Quoted from the book in this blog post</i>:<br />
<a href="http://brandlogik.com/of-mice-and-men-your-big-data-big-brand-moment/">http://brandlogik.com/of-mice-and-men-your-big-data-big-brand-moment/</a><br />
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Linden is himself quoted in the book as saying the ideal algorithm would not show you dozens of recommended books but only the very book you were next going to buy. This is exactly what happened when I went onto the site, saw the first book offered, recalled having heard about it on <a href="http://democracynow.org/">http://democracynow.org</a>, possibly in connection with Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, and in a click dealt Audiobooks another data point. The fact that Audiobooks would be able to pinpoint my interests so accurately suggests that NSA is not the only entity interested in my data. The fact that we collectively take this and all Facebook knows about us in stride (and Amazon, Google, Wallmart, and any given phone provider etc.) shows how much we accept this as normal behavior, and the book <i>Big Data</i> details how pervasive and normal this is. In fact, most of us accept websites tracking us as a fair trade, our data for their free services. We are only slightly annoyed when we find that corporations are doing this extensively, as when Apple was found to be tracking user movements via the GPS on their newly purchased iPads <i>without their knowledge</i> (as reported in the book).<br />
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Transparency is in fact the issue here.The problem with NSA spying, as Michael Geist points out, is that the government conceals and dissimulates about what they are doing with their harvest of big data. Writing in the Canadian context, he reports where a Canadian 'official' "remarked that in the wake of the Snowden revelations the political risk
did not lie with surveillance itself, since most Canadians basically
trusted their government and intelligence agencies to avoid misuse. Rather, the real concern was with being
caught lying about the surveillance activities. This person was of the
view that Canadians would accept surveillance, but they would not accept
lying about surveillance programs."<br />
<a href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/7062/125/" target="_blank">http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/7062/125/ </a><br />
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Canada's neighbor to the south has not instilled confidence in its government's integrity lately, but that aside, the book <i>Big Data</i> is mind opening in explaining how that government's approach to data mining is not at all unusual, is in fact the norm for use of the abundance of data available in our era, and is certainly what we can expect more of in the future.<br />
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The book explains the shift in statistical analysis that big data has evoked. In the past, when data were tediously collected and analyzed, the empirical approach was to form a hypothesis and attempt to then support that hypothesis by constructing an experiment to establish causality from one variable to the next through random sampling, and extrapolate that out over larger populations. Random sampling was shown to be reasonably reliable, where N size was large enough, to make predictions accurate for the population at large.<br />
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However, where the availability of data approaches infinity, and N equals "all" (all available data can be aggregated and analyzed through computer algorithms) then it turns out the approach to research is not to form a hypothesis at all, but to examine correlations in the data and see what patterns emerge. Thus the emergent approach to research in education, to take the instance that is the topic of this blog, is not toward replicating and inventing new experiments with inevitable shortcomings in data collection methods, where extrapolability to wider populations is always in doubt, but toward harvesting as much data as possible and seeing what pops out, as practiced with "learning analytics".<br />
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Where the number of data points is massive, and the amount of data is almost limitless, the results produced this way are exceedingly predictive, to the point where real-time pictures of happening phenomena (like the spread of flu outbreaks) can be inferred through correlating data points, and to where it is getting impossible to compete in markets without having the edge over rivals on data aggregation, storage, and algorithms for analysis.<br />
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<i>Big Data</i> takes pains to point out that correlation does not imply causality (it is what it is; when this and that are present then something else tends to happen as well, and the data show where this has historically been true, though they do not tell us why or how). However, it is possible to arrive at hypotheses to explain observed trends and then continue to observe that subsequent data support that hypothesis. For example, Ray Kurzweil has collected copious data to support the contention that technology improves on an exponential curve which on closer examination is seen to be comprised of repeated S movements as paradigm boundaries are crossed. This prediction is akin to Moore's Law which stated (in 1965) that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, and this has proven to be the case ever since. Kurzweil postulates that from such data computers should move beyond human comprehension at a point called Singularity, which is predicted as early as 2030, or by Kutzweil's reckoning, 2045 (more information on Wikipedia and at <a href="http://www.singularity.com/">http://www.singularity.com/</a>, and in Kurzweil's words in a TED Talk, below).<br />
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However, lines can be crossed. The point is made more than once early in the book <i>Big Data</i>, and elaborated on in a later chapter, that such analysis can help authorities predict who will commit crimes before they happen. If arrests (or assassinations) are carried out on the basis of such models, is this itself a crime, a violation of supreme law of the land? On reading this book, it seems more in context now why governments venture toward this grey area in an era where all sides are seeking to leverage big data, or risk being one-upped (though some matters of conscience and justice remain unchanged, or should, and therein lies the conundrum). In its last chapters, <i>Big Data</i> explores the risks and implications for individual freedom and privacy.Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-91718089006538238232014-01-24T13:43:00.000+00:002014-01-24T17:35:45.665+00:00Learning2gether with EverybodyDo you ever feel you are verging on giving more time to your online endeavors than you feel you can use productively in your face-to-face ones? Whether or not that's actually the case (I haven't undertaken a systematic time analysis) I sometimes feel that way. That problem prompted one of my connections, frustrated in doing it himself, to run out of time and send me a notice to be posted on his behalf to one of my networks, and I responded with help for him to troubleshoot the problem. The time it took for that was probably more than if I had simply posted his notice, but posting on behalf of others as community leader could imply endorsement, and it's best if everyone in the community is enabled to work independently. But mainly, as I explained in my reply, I encourage independence because we all only get so many keystrokes in a day.<br />
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The above has been an aside by way of introduction, but I have been thinking to document one aspect of online community steerage that consumes a lot of those keystrokes; i.e. making announcement on social media sites. Intelligent use of tagging, and exploiting scripts and connections between social media sites might help to attenuate the problem, but writing it out might help me to see where there is potential for that, or potentially of even more value, maybe someone will comment with a useful solution to the problem.<br />
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One problem is that the social media landscape changes so often. I became aware a couple of years ago that social media specialists and consultants were being hired by entities seeking to manage their social presence (not only in getting out the message but also the quality of their footprint) but it is only recently that the abundance of social spaces that people inhabit has got to the point, for me at any rate, where it is running up against that finite number of key presses you get in a given day. Those consultants must earn their pay, if only in compensation for carpal tunnel.<br />
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Let's take for example the next Learning2gether event which is coming up in a few days, and I need to get the word out. Learning2gether is organized through a wiki, which means that a community can contribute key strokes to entering the events, but in practice those keystrokes are mostly mine. So most of what you see at <a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com</a> is my own input, though occasionally that of others (and much appreciated!).<br />
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So the events themselves are shaped at that wiki, and when it's time to announce them, I scoop out the text and copy it into a Notepad on my PC, from where I can fashion versions to be sent out to various social networking sites. If we are planning to use HoA (Hangout on Air) I then set up <a href="http://webheadsinaction.org/live">http://webheadsinaction.org/live</a> with an announcement of the upcoming event. I use that page to keep our connection with the <a href="http://worldbridges.net/">http://worldbridges.net/</a> and <a href="http://edtechtalk.com/">http://edtechtalk.com/</a> communities current.<br />
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One place I post it is here: <a href="http://fourc.ca/calendar/">http://fourc.ca/calendar/</a>. Tyson Seburn has worked with Learning2gether in the past - on Monday, May 6, 2013, we helped him host TESL Toronto presents: Aga Palalas – mobile apps for language learning, <a href="http://learning2gether.net/2013/05/06/tesl-toronto-presents-aga-palalas-mobile-apps-for-language-learning/">http://learning2gether.net/2013/05/06/tesl-toronto-presents-aga-palalas-mobile-apps-for-language-learning/</a>. His calendar is not the ultimate solution to the world's educators' pooling in one place a comprehensive listing of all online and f2f professional events of interest to them (such a feature would be a script that goes into the wild and harvests all such notices tagged with the tag it is looking for; spam could be prevented by people posting such notices registering with the script, as with Stephen Downes's gRSShopper: <a href="http://grsshopper.downes.ca/index.html">http://grsshopper.downes.ca/index.html</a>) but <a href="http://fourc.ca/calendar/">http://fourc.ca/calendar/</a> is at least easy to use manually, and events posted end up on the calendar. I learned about it from Graham Stanley's posting here:<br />
<a href="http://blog-efl.blogspot.ae/2014/01/tracking-conferences-and-connecting.html">http://blog-efl.blogspot.ae/2014/01/tracking-conferences-and-connecting.html</a><br />
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Then I'll post to relevant Nings. I don't use Ning much any more (here's why: <a href="http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/thanks-pearson-and-ning-but-it-just-doesnt-work/">http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/thanks-pearson-and-ning-but-it-just-doesnt-work/</a>) but if the event is related to a Ning that is worthwhile and is supported by an institution that will pay for it, I post to that one. For example I post all L2g events at the TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG page at <a href="http://taedtech.ning.com/">http://taedtech.ning.com/</a>.<br />
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Next I'll post an event on the relevant Google+ Community. This pushes it out to all subscribers at that community, and it can be shared (as an event) with <i>one </i>other community. I don't understand why just one, though it's possible to initiate the event elsewhere and share that with another community, thus getting your event out to 4, or to 6 or 8, but this cuts into our daily ration of keystrokes. I can understand the implications for flooding communities with events, but as a responsible user, I would prefer to make that decision (and let Google decide for all the irresponsible users :-). Ok, we've enjoyed my painting myself into a corner, and since I don't like to overdo the events, I simply copy and paste the descriptions of the event into "Share what's new" in a number of other Google+ Communities.<br />
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Here are some of my own communities:<br />
<ul>
<li>MultiMOOC - <a href="http://gplus.to/multimooc">http://gplus.to/multimooc</a></li>
<li>Learning2gether - <a href="http://gplus.to/learning2gether">http://gplus.to/learning2gether</a></li>
<li>EdTech Mojo - <a href="http://gplus.to/edtechmojo">http://gplus.to/edtechmojo</a></li>
<li>Webheadsinaction - <a href="http://gplus.to/webheadsinaction">http://gplus.to/webheadsinaction</a></li>
</ul>
Next comes Facebook. I post announcements on the relevant FB groups, and here, as with G+C's I'm careful to include the relevant #tags. The posting itself is relatively easy; normally I just copy and paste what I put into my G+C's to each group.<br />
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Again, some of my communities<br />
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<ul>
<li>Multiliteracies - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomlit/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomlit/</a></li>
<li>Learning2gether - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/learning2gether/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/learning2gether/</a></li>
<li>Webheads - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/</a></li>
<li>TESOL Arabia EdTech SIG - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/TAEdTech/">https://www.facebook.com/groups/TAEdTech/</a></li>
</ul>
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Indeed, reading this, I can see that I need a script that posts from one place into FB (not to my main page, but to the groups I specify) and same for G+ Communities I specify. Many social networks allow you to post on Twitter and to your wall at FB at the time you make a post on that network. I notice that a lot of my colleagues do this. Perhaps someone will remind me of the killer app that will do just what I want it to, directed at just the communities and groups I think will appreciate the information (or offer to help me code one).<br />
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Finally, I post to the Yahoo! Groups that have held their communities together for a long time and whose community members often support Learning2gether. The two that I maintain are:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Webheads in Action - <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/">http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/</a> </li>
<li>Multilit - <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/multilit/">http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/multilit/</a></li>
</ul>
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Personally I feel that Twitter is most effective nearer the time of the event so I don't usually post to Twitter until the event is nigh, though after the event I'll move its archive to <a href="http://learning2gether.net/">http://learning2gether.net/</a> and erase it from <a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded</a>. Once it's archived I'll Scoop.it here: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/t/learning2gether">http://www.scoop.it/t/learning2gether</a>, and let that one send a tweet, or to FB if it was my presentation.<br />
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-18289890802387653142014-01-05T06:05:00.000+00:002014-01-14T13:40:03.307+00:00Why you can never recall your dreamsOne of life's more interesting phenomenons is waking up from a dream in which you have just unravelled one of life's great mysteries, created the most amazing invention, or imagined the poem you always meant to write. You jump out of bed and rush to your writing desk. Pen in hand, you sit poised, and ... gone! Where did it go?<br />
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I got a possible answer from Stephen Pinker's <i>The Language Instinct</i>. To explain it, he starts by trashing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That hypothesis was based on bogus data from indigenous North American Indian languages, regarding the influence <i>from </i>language on the world view of the speaker of that language. For example, American Indian languages had such an arcane verb tense and aspect system that their concept of time must be much different from ours. Eskimos had so many words for snow that their visualization of that substance could not possibly be the same for a non-Eskimo. Terms for color in different world languages cause speakers of different languages to fail to distinguish blue from green, for example, ignoring the fact that wavelength of light and rods and cones in human eyes are constant, so as humans we see the same independently of language. The language date used to support these hypotheses was incorrect. Whorf for example relied on interpretations of his study of Apache grammar but didn't actually have informants to present him with material he could use to support his claims in much the way that Margaret Mead idealized the society of Samoans whom she visited and subsequently misconstrued to form the basis of her work.<br />
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Having shown that the data underpinning the work of Sapir and Whorf was fatally flawed, Pinker starts putting together an image comprised of puzzle pieces from George Orwell's Newspeak, a simple syllogism and a Turing machine. Newspeak was a language devised by Big Brother which would be devoid of words for certain concepts which its speakers would henceforth be unable to think. This notion forms the outer shell of the following reasoning. The syllogism is that Socrates is a human, all humans are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal. He introduces the Turing machine to show that this machine can be programmed to reach the same conclusion. If language worked like a Turing Machine then it could be programmed to reach conclusions in a predictable manner, and the machine could be made to work in any construct that repeated the same pattern. For example, if your language works right to left, or left to right, or top to bottom, or puts propositions first or last in utterances, the meaning of a syllogism or any utterance can be understood by speakers of your language, as long at the correct pattern is maintained.<br />
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However, the human mind does something more than a machine does. It can infer from context. So when Chomsky tells us that visiting relatives can be fun, we can understand from context who visited whom (Pinker has collected several newspaper headlines whose ambiguities are funny -- e.g. a child's stool is good for the garden -- but which can be unambiguously understood given the context of the news story, or even once we understand that the ambiguous line comes from a newspaper headline ... ah, so that's what it's supposed to mean!). Pinker points out the fact that a given word can have more than one meaning in different contexts is itself evidence that language is something other than coding. Also, there is interesting data from deaf people who have grown up without language, who are highly intelligent, who can function in society, and even mime narratives to one another.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a great Radio Lab program on the research Pinker cites, fascinating stuff about the Nicaraguan deaf man Susan Schaller met who had never learned to sign, and a glimpse inside the head of Jill Bolte Taylor after she suffered a stroke that robbed her for some time of language (<a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/">http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/</a>; and also </span>Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads: <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/93554-voices-in-your-head">http://www.radiolab.org/story/93554-voices-in-your-head</a>/). Pinker<span style="font-family: inherit;"> also gives examples of great visual thinkers, such as Einstein, for whom ideas were conceived in thought experiments that were only later rendered into mathematical symbols and other forms of spoken and written language. Coming back through to the outer shell, Pinker concludes that Newspeak would never work. The children of its first speakers would creolize it, and Big Brother would find itself with a fifth column on its hands.</span><br />
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What we glean from Pinker and Radio Lab is clear evidence that thought works independently of language, that is is possible to reach conclusions without having to codify them in any symbol system that can be expressed outside the brain in which the conclusions were reached. You can see that yourself the next time you try to write down or explain to someone the narrative revealed to you in dreams. You might be able to capture some of it if you can move the memory quickly enough into some more permanent location in your brain, but personally, I have never been able to work out how I arrived at the point where I can remember myself flying, for example, or what great insights this gave me that evaporated with the light of dawn. Except that after reading Pinker, I realize now that the dream was a glimpse into thought apart from language.<br />
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Stephen Downes covers this post in his Daily for Jan 8, 2014, using it to recall something he had written 25 years ago and extrapolating from that recollection through this post to "the basis for both connectionism, as a philosophy of mind, and connectivism, as a philosophy of education". In his words on that date<br />
(<a href="http://www.downes.ca/archive/14/01_08_news_OLDaily.htm">http://www.downes.ca/archive/14/01_08_news_OLDaily.htm</a>):<br />
<blockquote>
My career as a published academic began in 1987-1988 with a couple of papers entitled 'Why Equi Fails' and 'Conditional Variability', both of which suggest that meaning is determined from context, and not merely content. That's the lesson drawn, Vance Stevens writes, "when Chomsky tells us that visiting relatives can be fun, we can understand from context who visited whom." What this told me is that thought is subsymbolic. "Thought works independently of language, that is is possible to reach conclusions without having to codify them in any symbol system that can be expressed outside the brain in which the conclusions were reached." The brain is not a computer. It doesn't encode'data' and it doesn't use rules or procedures process that encoded data. That - to me - is the basis for both connectionism, as a philosophy of mind, and connectivism, as a philosophy of education.</blockquote>
<i>Downes, S. Conditional Variability. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics Number 13 1-13. . November 1, 1988. Authors: Stephen Downes. NRC . A - Publications in Refereed Journals </i><br />
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<br />Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-16566806531551267342013-09-29T06:02:00.001+00:002013-10-30T03:30:28.806+00:00From teacher networked learning to transformation in your classroomI have used this space to develop my presentation at the Reform Symposium 2013 (RSCON4) and to link to here from my presentation URL at the RSCON portal at Future of Learning:<br />
<a href="http://www.futureofeducation.com/forum/topics/from-teacher-networked-learning-to-transformation-in-your" style="font-family: inherit;">http://www.futureofeducation.com/forum/topics/from-teacher-networked-learning-to-transformation-in-your</a><br />
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<strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/vances/rscon4-27141110" target="_blank" title="From teacher networked learning to transformation in your classroom">From teacher networked learning to transformation in your classroom</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances" target="_blank">Vance Stevens</a></strong> </div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This presentation was scheduled at the regular Learning2gether time of 1400 GMT Sunday Oct 13 and was placed in the Learning2gether archives here</span><br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.net/2013/10/15/vance-stevens-representing-learning2gether-at-rscon4-from-teacher-networked-learning-to-transformation-in-your-classroom/">http://learning2gether.net/2013/10/15/vance-stevens-representing-learning2gether-at-rscon4-from-teacher-networked-learning-to-transformation-in-your-classroom/</a><br />
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<i>I have developed this material as a book chapter I submitted to APACALL. </i><i>You can find the draft here:</i><br />
<span id="docs-internal-guid-533aeee9-0758-1c49-1b75-d73aa12656ae"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/134VghXCMmsX5Dqm7JB3NVKd5UH1d5QrXSUPNQU8BOCk/edit?usp=sharing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-size: x-small; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://docs.google.com/document/d/134VghXCMmsX5Dqm7JB3NVKd5UH1d5QrXSUPNQU8BOCk/edit?usp=sharing</span></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Abstract</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>The essence of my presentation is that those of us who learn from one another in online spaces are uniquely in position to inculcate similar learning strategies in their students. Students are already connecting and learning from one another online, but they may not be learning what their teachers think they should be (e.g. they are learning to collaborate, socialize, and create online, but not necessarily on what's in the syllabus). Teachers need to understand how to set up blended learning environments, as they do for one another, that encourage the kind of learning they know from their experience as master learners that their students need. Only by experiencing such learning themselves, as we are doing at RSCON and each week at Learning2gether, can teachers be in position to guide their students' collaboration and creation online into sensible learning outcomes.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This presentation draws on present circumstances to inform how we might rethink our role as educators, or perhaps more importantly, encourage others to follow our example. The presenter has been involved in coordinating two virtual communities that have been interacting and learning from one another daily for the past decade. These communities are Webheads in Action and EVO, Electronic Village Online, both of which have converged in an online space called Learning2gether, where weekly seminars are organized by participants for helping each other learn throughout their wider networks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This presentation will show through representative examples how participants in these networks acquire the tools for re-thinking how they engage their students. Networked learning is ineffable in that it must be experienced to be understood, and those without that experience have difficulty grasping a full range of its affordances. As the behavior of participants in online networked learning changes, so their teaching styles change, and the better they are able to model for their students characteristics of what they find most effectively leads to their learning what they want to know in an increasingly interconnected world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This presentation will be developed as one of those examples, as a model for community-based learning, with participants at the session being cases in point. In helping us reflect on our WOW or aha! moments that brought us here to RSCON, we can consider how we might help colleagues transform their world of learning, and how they can help their students acquire equally productive learning strategies.</span><br />
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<b>Isolation in the read-only century</b><br />
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The presentation began with a digital story. "Once upon a time ... " teachers were isolated. This was a theme that arose in Sean Wilden's (2013) presentation at the TESOL CALL-IS and IATEFL LTSIG Technology in Teaching conference. <span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;"> </span>It was a theme that I addressed in m<span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;">y first ever plenary address (Stevens, 2001),</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;"> which dealt with teacher burnout and how the Internet was rescuing us from that by helping us overcome our "firewalls of the mind" (the plenary was delivered in Nicosia, a city with a dividing wall, and 'wall in the mind' was the condition East Berliners found themselves in once their wall disappeared but they found it took longer to overcome the mindset that the wall had engendered). </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;">But back in the read-only century, teachers, while not exactly monks working alone in cloisters, were quite isolated compared to as they are today. </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;"><span style="color: #3f3939;">This was right at the turn of the century, a time we now know we went from what Lawrence Lessig (2004) has characterized as the read-only century and headlong into the read-write century. </span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;"><span style="color: #3f3939;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">At the time, teacher burnout could lead aging Saudi hands to suicide and certainly contributed to their difficulty finding work if they stayed too long in the Kingdom</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">. They stayed for the money, but in the bargain lost their competitive edge, due to the isolation. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">Is isolation really dangerous? Candy Pauchnick said as much in an interview with Kevin Honeycutt on </span><i style="color: #3f3939;">Driving Questions in Education </i><span style="color: #3f3939;">(Honeycutt and Pauchnick, 2008). Candy made the point in the context of explaining her efforts to connect her class in San Diego with a partner class in Liuzhou, China, through ePals</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">. Whatever the threat level, t</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">he Internet came along in the nick of time for teachers like me, Candy Pauchnick, Yaodong Chen, and Kevin Honeycutt. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">And nowadays, as George Couros </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">(2013)</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> has said in a recent blog post, isolation has become a "choice educators make". In most cases, it's no longer a predicament which they can do nothing about.</span></div>
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Sugata Mitra (2013) included a slide in his keynote address at the recent Reform Symposium where he pointed out that "We know ... teachers can be 'beamed' to other places using the Internet." This is indeed common knowledge, but we have to be careful with what exactly is being beamed. We have to be careful that when we are transported we are also transformed into a kind of teacher who is also a master learner, who continually percolates the teacher roles of modeling and demonstrating with learner ones of practicing and reflecting, and have all those elements working together to continually adapt what is being taught to the way in which learners are continually adapting the way they learn.</div>
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<i style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">From Sugata Mitra's RSCON4 keynote Oct 11, 2013</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;">Will Richardson (2012) discusses this new kind of teacher who can most appropriately cope with the abundance of connectivity that Mitra implies in an era where scarcity is the norm in many brick and mortar educational settings. </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;">Richardson argues that the answer to coping with scarcity is not to try to perform in the old way better (that is, using 'smarter' technologies to leverage retread methodologies), but to perform differently. Yet educators whose experience with school is rooted in an era of scarcity are poorly equipped to grasp the concept of 'different' in a world of abundance. To paraphrase Herbert Gerjoy’s definition of illiterate, it's not that they cannot read or write, but that they struggle with the ability to ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ Accordingly Richardson articulates six steps to help teachers relearn their trade. These are</span></span><br />
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<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Share everything (or at least something)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Discover, don’t deliver, the curriculum<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Talk to strangers (filter and interact with others in your personal learning network)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Be a master learner</b><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Do, and have students do, real work, for real audiences<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Transfer the power (over who drives curriculum</span></li>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">To elaborate on what is a master learner, I first heard the roles of teachers and learners characterized as being "to model and to demonstrate" vs. "to practice and reflect" in Stephen Downes's (2007) keynote presentation for the Webheads in Action Online Convergence. </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">To me, that is a succinct characterization of what teachers and learners do, and I have often made the point in presentations since that master learners do all of these things in an iterative manner. That is, by doing these four things as a matter or course in one's workflow, master learners are constantly learning in order to teach, and teaching to learn, of course. In several of my presentations, I have often borrowed Stephen's slide copied from his WiAOC keynote presentation, (such as in this one:<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference">http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference</a> - Stephen shares his slides via creative commons license, of course).</span></div>
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Recently I came upon this version image of the quote:</div>
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The trouble was, I couldn't remember where I had seen it. I Googled it but could not locate the source. I was almost at a loss but then I remembered I had seen it on Facebook, but where? It's almost impossible to search Facebook for such things. But then I remembered further, I had shared it. Now I was able to find it easily in my profile, among objects I had shared:</div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">So thanks, Doris Molero for sharing this with me. But the point is, we are so far from isolation now that we take this kind of sharing for granted. Sharing introduces serendipity into our workflow. It puts us in touch with people who can help us improve our practice. It helps us expresses ourselves in ways that appeal to multiple modalities and enhance our transliteracies. We have reached the antithesis of isolation. We are co-habitating a staff room in the sky.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;"><b>Student isolation</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">Students too were isolated in the read-only century. CALL (computer-assisted language learning) had been around for some time before the Internet came into play shortly before the end of that century, but before then the crucial element of real interaction with other people was largely missing in language learning, whether or not technology-based. In a book I co-edited with Martha Pennington (1992) I contributed a chapter on humanism in CALL, at a time when it was debatable whether computers were inherently behavioristic or humanistic. Bernie Mohan had a chapter in the same book on communicative CALL, a study of student-student interaction while running CALL software. It was hard at the time to conceive how computers could be either humanistic or communicative, but now we know they can greatly facilitate human-human communication.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">CALL software at that time came mostly shrink-wrapped, and the first Web pages tended to be unidirectional static communicators, good ways for people to get messages out, but with no way to get messages back in. Gradually wikis were developed as tools for getting feedback at URL addresses, and in a few short years the Web 2.0 emerged to usher us fully into the read-write century with a whole plethora of social media sites and tools allowing us to not only interact with one another but automate the process of finding what we needed to know quickly on the Web. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">I moved from Oman to California in 1995 to take on my first job without students in 20 years. I missed them, I felt I had gone cold turkey, but it turned out that teachers of ESOL were among the first cadre of educators who were adapting the affordances of the connected Web to the circumstances of their hitherto isolated students. Many of us had experienced trying to learn languages from static and often contrived objects when we understood that what we needed was authentic language and real language input. The problem was that up to then, it was hard to expose students not already in a country where their target language was spoken, to the dynamic interaction they needed to</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> </span><i style="color: #3f3939;">constantly </i><span style="color: #3f3939;">form and test hypotheses about how that language worked.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit;">Shortly after my arrival in California,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;"> I came upon a site called Study.com, </span><a href="http://study.com/" style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit;">http://study.com</a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">, which had been set up by a teacher at Berkeley named David Winet who was using the tools at hand for getting students interacting with teachers and one another online. In the read-only century, his site</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #3f3939;"> was used only to advertise and hyperlink his services, and classes were convened by email. Amazingly, 17 years later, the site still looks, and works, much as it did then. But Dave's work helped us to answer one of the most important questions in e-learning of our time.</span></div>
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<b>Why do people study online?</b><br />
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Jay Cross (2003) has a chapter in his book <i>Informal Learning</i> entitled "People love to learn but hate to be taught." This is exactly what we discovered when we started teaching people via email study groups in our <span style="color: #3f3939;">Study.com</span> classes at the end of last century. These cl<span style="color: #3f3939;">asses tended to last through a round or two, or three, of introductory emails which tapered off quickly as the work envisaged by the teacher did not meet the <i>social </i>expectations of the students. It was these expectations that had enticed them to try out online spaces to begin with (not the learning<i> per se</i>, but rather social learning as conceptualized by Vygotsky). We didn't fully understand this at the time, but as it happened, one of my students (from Italy) was a Web designer, and he set up a Web site for my course with a half dozen pages. The power of hyperlinked text was so obviously the correct way to conduct an online class, it didn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. This was my aha moment, but I could not rely on a student in my course to think as pedagogically as I did. I quickly taught myself HTML and prepared myself for the coming of the read-write century.</span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span><span style="color: #3f3939;">Meanwhile at Study.com, Dave had connected with someone working with a start-up company called Coterie who was experimenting with online spaces such as Active Worlds, and who ran a Palace<i> </i>server where she had set up a Virtual Schoolhouse for </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">Study.com</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">. Dave </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">was steering students who expressed an interest in</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> "3D learning" to classes organized by teachers who were hanging out in these spaces. By now I had moved to UAE and taken my formerly email-driven 'writing and grammar' class to the Palace. My classes ran temporally adjacent to another </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">Study.com</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> class facilitated by </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">Maggie Doty and Michael Coghlan. Inevitably we overlapped, and eventually we merged. Our students took the merger in stride, and didn't seem particular about what teacher they found when they came to the Palace or what had been planned for them there. In fact we came to realize that what they wanted was not a course with a beginning and an end but a chance to socialize and interact with native speakers and each other. In other words, they were seeking a community, and we teachers were interested in taking the opportunity to work with the students who could help us learn how to facilitate that. The match was sustainable and grew into Writing for Webheads, </span><a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm">http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gm2m9a1vgvE/UmT_XVzBabI/AAAAAAAABDI/0rmWpjqHIwM/s1600/2013-10-21_1136wfw.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gm2m9a1vgvE/UmT_XVzBabI/AAAAAAAABDI/0rmWpjqHIwM/s1600/2013-10-21_1136wfw.png" height="255" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">Putting my HTML skills into play I created a Web site to make a space where our students could display their writing. It was writeable only by me, but we had other online spaces, such as our eGroup (later, YahooGroups), where students could post their writing, and I could transfer their writing and any responses to the Web site. Eventually students started sending their photos to be posted online, and their recorded voices, and all kinds of objects that revealed their personalities, and before long we had a community of over 100 users. It became possible at that time for us to download a plugin to embed into our web site that would allow us to speak to one another in real time (for free, amazing!). This was quite unique at the time and started attracting teachers to our online sessions. </span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #3f3939;">One of these teachers in fact came to us as an English language learner from China, albeit one with an excellent command of English. This was the Yaodong Chen whom Candy Pauchnick had partnered her class with when she was interviewed by Kevin Honeycutt, when she pointed out the dangers of isolation in the classroom. And closer examination of the Study.com website reveals also that Yaodong is currently conducting classes in Chinese, 12 years after he started interacting with Writing for Webheads in 2001.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oC-pu-_dkTg/UmT_Xq-u-RI/AAAAAAAABDQ/lhFlJ-xSolI/s1600/2013-10-21_1137yaodong.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oC-pu-_dkTg/UmT_Xq-u-RI/AAAAAAAABDQ/lhFlJ-xSolI/s1600/2013-10-21_1137yaodong.png" height="242" width="400" /></a><span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span><br />
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<a href="http://study.com/">http://study.com</a> and <a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/yaodong.htm">http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/yaodong.htm</a></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">Yaodong was so conspicuously interactive across our learning communities that I wrote an article about him as my first contribution to the On the Internet column of TESL-EJ when I took over as editor of OTI in 2002 (Stevens, 2002).</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7kasMTmbzls/UmT_XVLGnlI/AAAAAAAABDM/CLgl9RR1Gek/s1600/2013-10-21_1137tesl-ej.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7kasMTmbzls/UmT_XVLGnlI/AAAAAAAABDM/CLgl9RR1Gek/s1600/2013-10-21_1137tesl-ej.png" height="227" width="320" /></a></div>
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In 2004 I went to visit Yaodong in Liuzhou China. <span style="color: #3f3939;">One of the highlights was a foot massage that Yaodong treated me to at a parlor run by one of his </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">ex-</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">students. More recently, while searching on the Internet for more information about Yaodong's online activities, I found that someone else had enjoyed the same treatment four years after I did: </span><br />
<a href="http://www.storyofmylife.com/User/user_story_view.aspx?storyId=2688&ChapterId=3952&UserId=3512">http://www.storyofmylife.com/User/user_story_view.aspx?storyId=2688&ChapterId=3952&UserId=3512</a><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7sedq5JQOqQ/UmT_YtNN79I/AAAAAAAABDk/WR6C4Ghkf6M/s1600/2013-10-21_1138stallong.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7sedq5JQOqQ/UmT_YtNN79I/AAAAAAAABDk/WR6C4Ghkf6M/s1600/2013-10-21_1138stallong.png" height="252" width="400" /></a><br />
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There are many interesting aspects of how Yaodong and the other participants in Webheads were engaging with one another for the social interaction which only incidentally led to language learning. One such social language learning experience was reported in Stevens and Altun (2002) after Yaodong's class connected with Arif Altun's in Bolu, Turkey in 2001. There are photos and a comprehensive record of the event at:<br />
<a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/chat2001/wfw011031.htm">http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/chat2001/wfw011031.htm</a><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9vb5RMoBip0/UmT_Yn7CcjI/AAAAAAAABDg/G58TyABNuw0/s1600/2013-10-21_1139webheads2001.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9vb5RMoBip0/UmT_Yn7CcjI/AAAAAAAABDg/G58TyABNuw0/s1600/2013-10-21_1139webheads2001.png" height="212" width="400" /></a></div>
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One of the participants in that event was another Writing for Webheads member from Taiwan, working as a naval architect in Japan, named Sue (pictured above, in the red circle). Although we knew her only online Sue planned post-graduate studies in Texas, and wrote us for recommendation letters, and also got us to help her arrange her mother's visit visa to the USA (by attesting to the likelihood that her mother would not attempt to remain in USA). In 2002 when I was visiting my parents in Houston, Sue decided to drive down from nearby Bryan, and meet my family.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WDAVg1kq5Ew/UmT_Y9xhpTI/AAAAAAAABDo/cwdBJAsCf3Y/s1600/2013-10-21_1140sue.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WDAVg1kq5Ew/UmT_Y9xhpTI/AAAAAAAABDo/cwdBJAsCf3Y/s1600/2013-10-21_1140sue.png" height="258" width="400" /></a><br />
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That visit is archived here: <a href="http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/sue_houston.htm">http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/sue_houston.htm</a>. One interesting aspect of the visit was when Sue told me that her friends thought she was wasting her time with the Webheads community, because, they said, it wasn't 'real'. Her friends were courting isolation in their online learning experiences, Sue was not.<br />
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In <span style="text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">Writing for Webheads, we were learning all the time about how </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">to structure
learning to meet social expectations. We were learning </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.38in;">from the students who interacted with us </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">how </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">to construct communities that would
promote language learning </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">through </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">greater
opportunities to socialize in spaces with very low affective filters where the target language was used
throughout. This knowledge was applied in </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.38in;">Webheads </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.38in;">in
Action, where we taught </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.38in;">one another </span><span style="text-indent: -0.38in;">experientially<span style="font-family: inherit;">, as </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.38in;">we continued learning</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;"> community </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">building
</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.31in;">techniques </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">in
</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">spaces
where technology </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">was </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">being used online to promote </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">greater
</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">awareness
of how it might </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">facilitate </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">language
</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">learning.</span><br />
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<b>Webheads in Action</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;">At the turn of the century we had almost as many teachers in our Writing for Webheads group as we did students, and the native speakers of English began to suppress the NNS, who became quieter as the natives grew more interactive. Meanwhile, in 2001 the TESOL CALL IS (Teachers of English to Teachers of Other Languages, CALL Interest Section) had taken its annual Electronic Village, which had become a fixture at annual on-site TESOL conventions, online in what was called EVO, Electronic Village Online. Realizing that Webheads needed to be two groups, one for students and the other for teachers, I proposed an EVO session for 2002 whereby I would show teachers how to form communities online by managing our session as just such a group. I called the session Webheads in Action</span></span><span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">. </span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UKa6BOU4a2A/UmT_aQdutVI/AAAAAAAABD8/SG9koBTQJk4/s1600/2013-10-21_1141wia.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UKa6BOU4a2A/UmT_aQdutVI/AAAAAAAABD8/SG9koBTQJk4/s1600/2013-10-21_1141wia.png" height="258" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">Webheads in Action came along at the right time. It attracted cutting edge participants who were looking for others who could discuss with them and help them with issues around educational technology applied to language learning. The group burgeoned from a few dozen original participants to over 1000 in the YahooGroup now, but literally countless others in many overlapping networks. The most definitive </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">WiA portal page is here: </span><a href="http://www.webheads.info/">http://www.webheads.info/</a>. T<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">he original WiA group website is still online here: </span><a href="http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm" style="font-family: inherit;">http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm</a>. As with the student group, WiA participants enjoyed sending their photos to be placed on the front page of the website (this was six months before Moodle debued in August 2002 and started associating faces in profiles with postings. Facebook came later, in 2004). The photo montage of WiA participants was unique at the time and has served as wallpaper in at least two different images captured from Second Life builds; e.g. <a href="http://callcolloq-tesol09.wikispaces.com/18.+The+Future+-+Research+&+Practice" style="font-family: Calibri;">http://callcolloq-tesol09.wikispaces.com/18.+The+Future+-+Research+&+Practice</a> (above) and <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/94794165@N00/410359410/">http://flickr.com/photos/94794165@N00/410359410/</a></span><span style="color: #3f3939; text-align: center;"> (below).</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EHw9_jPAf7k/UmT_aXtiFCI/AAAAAAAABEA/XYlkHAtRoKs/s1600/2013-10-21_1142wia_sl.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EHw9_jPAf7k/UmT_aXtiFCI/AAAAAAAABEA/XYlkHAtRoKs/s1600/2013-10-21_1142wia_sl.png" height="245" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>The staff room in the sky</b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hXJNd79wIJM/UmT_bhe2i_I/AAAAAAAABEc/FDB2oQwBjxg/s1600/2013-10-21_1145staffroom_cloud.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hXJNd79wIJM/UmT_bhe2i_I/AAAAAAAABEc/FDB2oQwBjxg/s1600/2013-10-21_1145staffroom_cloud.png" height="250" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I made the screen shot above, I was at work in a staff room full of silent teachers each doing his/her own thing in his/her own PC. The atmosphere is good in our staff room, we interact from time to time of course, and sometimes call meetings outside the staff room for that purpose, which puts whatever learning takes place there in the area of 'formal' learning, where there are high stakes connected to one's employment. The staff room on the other hand is informal, and it's often a good place to interact with colleagues in griping or laughing, and even over professional issues that arise. But at the moment it's silent, each of half a dozen teachers there buried in the laptop at his or her desk. There is nothing wrong or unusual about this. I am one of the silent teachers in this staff room.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I'm in an online staff room as well, each teacher in his/her own PC somewhere in the world but not at all silent, as we can see from this screenshot of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the RSCON4 Ning virtual chat space, where teachers from all over the world were engaged in fruitful chatter in the staff room in the sky. In this shot I am multitasking while doing school work, getting immediate help from Peggy George on something I didn't understand about my RSCON presentation, and helping someone else who wondered how to get an mp3 of the presentation recordings. It is evident from what goes on in such chat spaces that a lot of learning as well as socializing takes place. In the real staff room, interaction is largely social. People don't like to intrude on others who are seemingly busy, so they wait for an opening, which might come at a time when they have nothing weighty to say. But like sending a txt msg as opposed to a phone call, an online msg allows the other person the chance to put off the encounter for a few moments while putting last touches on work about to be deferred. Also as with txt msgs people mostly send them when they need information, not just for chatter. So interactions in online spaces tend to be more to the point than in face-to-face ones. When they are used, work tends to get done there. They are always on, yet can be rendered unobtrusive. They are not necessarily 'better' than f2f interactions, but the affordances mentioned suggest they can be used productively in ways not common in f2f encounters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is another example of staff room back chatter resulting in serendipitous learning. We are at Gavin Dudeney's presentation at </span>the TESOL CALL-IS and IATEFL LTSIG Technology in Teaching conference Oct 12, 2013. Someone in the room wants to know if she can have a copy of the last slide. Gavin is presenting and doesn't notice the question, so I <span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;">made a quick screen capture of Gavin's slide </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;">using Jing and saved the capture to the cloud so that it was given a URL. I then passed on the URL of the captured slide to my fellow participant at the session. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kq7QsKOa0X4/UmT_b6QpbeI/AAAAAAAABEg/zeuJ9tFMrZQ/s1600/2013-10-21_1146staffroom_cloud_jing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kq7QsKOa0X4/UmT_b6QpbeI/AAAAAAAABEg/zeuJ9tFMrZQ/s1600/2013-10-21_1146staffroom_cloud_jing.png" height="256" width="400" /></a><br />
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That participant was not familiar enough with the technique to have thought of it or didn't have such a handy capture tool (though there are at least two that come with Windows, prt scrn pasted to Paint and the relatively new Snip tool; and something similar with Macs). But the realization that a slide can be captured and does not need to be requested is one that has possibly prompted this participant to try it out when next needing a capture. Thus participation in online events with other educators helping one another contributes to one's overall familiarity with technology and this will inevitably trickle down to students, when they find themselves in a situation which the teacher can resolve by pulling a screen capture tool from his quiver of tricks.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<b>RSCON4</b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Reform Symposium Conference where this presentation was made is but one of a myriad of events taking place almost constantly now where teachers have opportunities for meeting in online spaces and sharing information and expertise with one another. Conference organizers such as Steve Hargadon and Shelly Terrell are two of many involved in a firehose of events that have been taking place with increasing frequency, in their case sometimes only days apart. The MOOC concept, whether xMOOC or cMOOC, provides steady often overlapping opportunities for deeper, more prolonged engagement not only with niche topics, but more importantly with others interested in those niches. Google Hangouts on Air now make it possible for anyone to simulcast an event, and many do, extending invitations to colleagues in a mushroom field of communities. It seems there is something of this nature going on every minute, and social media is working virally to spread the word of such gatherings among educators (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are but a few social spaces with frequent announcements of online events and Hangouts).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Stepping back to a wider perspective on this phenomenon, what is going on every minute is networked, connectivist learning. Every minute!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Open education, driven by learners connecting with other learners, is taking place around the clock, around the globe, in countless free spaces, bound only by the amount of time participants can make to engage and absorb the knowledge inherent in their networks. The possibilities this unleashes are only starting to be realized by the brick and mortar establishment. Not that we should quit our daytime jobs any time soon, but we should certainly rethink them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<b>Modeling and demonstrating</b><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Qq275wvWzk4/UmT_bWWHMDI/AAAAAAAABEU/eKb1depgVc0/s1600/2013-10-21_1145harmer.png" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Qq275wvWzk4/UmT_bWWHMDI/AAAAAAAABEU/eKb1depgVc0/s1600/2013-10-21_1145harmer.png" height="257" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Here's an example of a productive strategy for modeling affective learning at RSCON</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We've skipped over a bit of history between the turn of the century and almost a decade later, but several highly significant things have happened in the course of those years. I'll list some of them:</span><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Open has gained acceptance with connected educators; as Curt Bonk says, the world is Open</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are tending toward disappearance of isolation among teachers, especially the ones who are present at this conference. Mindsets for some have remained static, but such people are dwindling as well.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a reduction in the isolation of learners as teachers apply what they learn through social networking to collaborations and interactions among students</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are experiencing an expansion of educational opportunities for all, in particular with MOOCs</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">We've gone from CALL to SMALL</span></li>
</ol>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LxbedpWcbkI/UmT_iEXaMUI/AAAAAAAABGk/bFRUSxd6_W0/s1600/2013-10-21_1203small.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LxbedpWcbkI/UmT_iEXaMUI/AAAAAAAABGk/bFRUSxd6_W0/s1600/2013-10-21_1203small.png" height="201" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What has really changed noticeably is the exponential increase in the number of opportunities for interaction among colleagues. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Teachers nowadays are continually modeling and demonstrating to one another. I guess I should qualify that somewhat: SOME teachers nowadays are doing that continually. Some are not, but an increasing number are participating in a plethora of almost constant online events and workshops, free ones, and most often recorded. Taking a virtual screencast of what was playing across my screen the weekend of the RSCON conference, where I gave the presentation I am writing up now, here are some of the things I was following to one degree or another:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>Nellie Deutsche is running Moodle MOOC 2. This free online course follows Moodle MOOC 1 and precedes Moodle MOOC 3 which is just now getting organized. It's a space where people can not only sign up for tutorials on using Moodle, but also tune in to presenters such as Brian Alexander, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, and Michael Wesch (and replay the recordings on YouTube). They can also see modeled for them one way to conduct an effective online course using WiZiQ as a platform in conjunction with Moodle.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FEsWiTvUR9s/UmT_dFbS4-I/AAAAAAAABFA/egOHCe4NXWg/s1600/2013-10-21_1151moodlemooc2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FEsWiTvUR9s/UmT_dFbS4-I/AAAAAAAABFA/egOHCe4NXWg/s1600/2013-10-21_1151moodlemooc2.png" height="268" width="400" /></a></div>
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SCoPE <a href="http://scope.bccampus.ca/">http://scope.bccampus.ca/</a> is a forum that hosts topics putting participants in direct touch with people whose writings and blogs they might be familiar with. It's a friendly and informative professional space.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mykTA423KUU/UmT_dPBcF5I/AAAAAAAABE8/eLdEkRSbvYQ/s1600/2013-10-21_1151SCoPE.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mykTA423KUU/UmT_dPBcF5I/AAAAAAAABE8/eLdEkRSbvYQ/s1600/2013-10-21_1151SCoPE.png" height="257" width="400" /></a></div>
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#eltchat was presented by Marisa Constantinides at RSCON. It's a Twitter hash tag followed by many in the field of ELT. This is also a space for concise interaction with peers as well as well-known leaders in ELT.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tXTxHC4RmrY/UmT_d9uFY1I/AAAAAAAABFY/F_0FATviZQs/s1600/2013-10-21_1152eltchat.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tXTxHC4RmrY/UmT_d9uFY1I/AAAAAAAABFY/F_0FATviZQs/s1600/2013-10-21_1152eltchat.png" height="247" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
Steve Hargadon is indefatigable. In October (each year) he interviews online heros five evenings a week for CEM, Connected Educator Month. This is only one of Steve's ventures producing a library of recordings (Howard Reingold, Larry Ferlazzo, Jim Groom, Karl Fisch, to name but a few). Keep up with his activities at Classroom 2.0 and <a href="http://futureoflearning.org/">http://futureoflearning.org</a><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rYsxIlswS6c/UmT_eC-BqQI/AAAAAAAABFU/xdKr_r9xfDk/s1600/2013-10-21_1154cem.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rYsxIlswS6c/UmT_eC-BqQI/AAAAAAAABFU/xdKr_r9xfDk/s1600/2013-10-21_1154cem.png" height="230" width="400" /></a><br />
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RSCON4 Oct 11-12 is the Future of Education symposium of which this presentation was a part. It had three straight days of presentations.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7NFdJ5hRgx4/UmT_faFv15I/AAAAAAAABFw/u6R2Czo9oH0/s1600/2013-10-21_1155rscon4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7NFdJ5hRgx4/UmT_faFv15I/AAAAAAAABFw/u6R2Czo9oH0/s1600/2013-10-21_1155rscon4.png" height="260" width="400" /></a></div>
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On Oct 12, there was an all day seminar for TESOL CALL-IS and IATEFL LTSIG. IATEFL SIGs have frequent webinars, all recorded, though recordings tend to be restricted to SIG members.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DBKpLnQ5doo/UmT_eMlpTcI/AAAAAAAABFQ/fIJ1v6zPVU8/s1600/2013-10-21_1153callis_ltsig.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DBKpLnQ5doo/UmT_eMlpTcI/AAAAAAAABFQ/fIJ1v6zPVU8/s1600/2013-10-21_1153callis_ltsig.png" height="272" width="400" /></a></div>
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EVO (Electronic Village Online) is an annual set of 5-week sessions, each January at <a href="http://evosessions.pbworks.com/">http://evosessions.pbworks.com</a>. Moderators are trained by EVO coordinators and their sessions are screened after training to ensure they meet minimum viability benchmarks. Thanks to this approach they are rarely a waste of anyone's time, and might even be the best collection of free edtech workshops with language learning focus on the planet.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-brhhQhUNH8s/UmT_e064msI/AAAAAAAABFo/oTU7C287mrI/s1600/2013-10-21_1154evo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-brhhQhUNH8s/UmT_e064msI/AAAAAAAABFo/oTU7C287mrI/s1600/2013-10-21_1154evo.png" height="245" width="400" /></a></div>
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There are numerous listings of online events at<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded">http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded</a>.<br />
This site is a wiki where colleagues can self-select to present but most often they are invited or otherwise cajoled (by me) to share their expertise with a growing number of followers. L2g sessions are usually at around noon to 1500 GMT each Sunday (or Monday), but other sessions of interest to followers are listed. All those we follow are archived and when possible podcast at <a href="http://learning2gether.net/">http://learning2gether.net</a>. The archives for the sessions mentioned in this post are here:<br />
<a href="http://learning2gether.net/2013/10/12/learning2gether-with-rscon4-and-much-else-october-11-13/">http://learning2gether.net/2013/10/12/learning2gether-with-rscon4-and-much-else-october-11-13/</a><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yi1-iapDGiU/UmT_gQJZrTI/AAAAAAAABGA/VruHIMXYxAY/s1600/2013-10-21_1157L2g.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yi1-iapDGiU/UmT_gQJZrTI/AAAAAAAABGA/VruHIMXYxAY/s1600/2013-10-21_1157L2g.png" height="256" width="400" /></a></div>
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Coincidentally KOTESOL was taking place this weekend in Seoul and Jeff Lebow was there with his bag of tricks to set up and stream Hangout interviews from <a href="http://koreabridge.net/kotesolic2013.html">http://koreabridge.net/kotesolic2013.html</a>. Jeff Lebow is a pioneer of educational use of Webcasting and using streamed hangouts in teacher professional development. He is the founder of Worldbridges and Edtech Talk (the latter with Dave Cormier)<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HJXnVotiVeU/UmT_cygBY5I/AAAAAAAABE4/eWCeSG2hoo4/s1600/2013-10-21_1150lebow.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HJXnVotiVeU/UmT_cygBY5I/AAAAAAAABE4/eWCeSG2hoo4/s1600/2013-10-21_1150lebow.png" height="256" width="400" /></a><br />
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For something so significantly important to the direction of education in our connectivist read-write century, there is a lot of confusion over how MOOCs started, what they are, and what their future is. In a nutshell, they were started by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2008, with the help of Dave Cormier. Dave and Brian Alexander jointly coined the term MOOC in the course of a conversation (and neither currently claims to be the originator). The first MOOCs were connectivist, or cMOOCs, but eventually big names in education made successful proof of concept ventures on mainstream college courses and even Bigger Name companies were formed which started cranking out courses for the masses, called xMOOCs. This muddied the waters around the origins of MOOCs and you now have educators who should know better stating at conferences and in print that the first MOOCs were xMOOCs. Obviously the concept has grown too big too fast but is set to grow bigger as educational institutions grapple with how to leverage what's abundant (knowledge and bandwidth) against what's scarce (bricks and mortar, and money).</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0gXHqOmZud0/UmT_fWxqaGI/AAAAAAAABFs/k2R84JabyvA/s1600/2013-10-21_1156heremooc.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0gXHqOmZud0/UmT_fWxqaGI/AAAAAAAABFs/k2R84JabyvA/s1600/2013-10-21_1156heremooc.png" height="255" width="400" /></a></div>
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Possibly the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge on the topic is Stephen Downes’s definitive archive of postings on MOOCs (currently 587 annotated references) at <a href="http://www.downes.ca/mooc_posts.htm">http://www.downes.ca/mooc_posts.htm</a>. Sadly the last reference is from June 20, 2013, and it seems the great compilation may remain a listing of 587 annotated references from 2008 to then.</div>
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">MOOC learning
informs teacher professional development</b><br />
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<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">This chapter describes
a course in teacher professional development run on a MOOC model. MOOCs (massive
open online courses) enable learners to discover and apply underlying structure
to their perspective on a course according to their own experience and notions
of learning, as opposed to following a path pre-ordained by a prescriptive
facilitator. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;">Participants utilize
networks to find pathways leading to collaboration around shared learning
goals. This differentiates master-learners from novice-learners. When learners
must adapt to jobs that haven’t been invented yet, teachers must help them
become master learners in preparation for unanticipated future challenges.</span><span style="color: #222222;"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">MOOCs deal with
learning <i>why</i>, applying critical thinking, applying one’s own schemata, and
reaching the higher echelons of Bloom’s digital taxonomy. Focus is not so much
on training <i>how </i>to do particular things, but in developing approaches to
learning as might be appropriate to the students’ future contexts.</span><span style="color: #222222;"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: #3f3939;">Teachers trained in
MOOC techniques (meaning they participate in MOOCs and therefore have modeled and demonstrated to them those techniques) might apply similar methods in their teaching, thus introducing
their students to networked learning methods that will help them in future
endeavors.</span><span style="color: #222222;"> </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">This suggests that those with experience in
MOOCs are uniquely able to utilize appropriate affordances of MOOCs to their
teaching situations, and thus widen the learning horizons of their students.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;"></span>
<span style="color: #3f3939;">The WiA EVO session achieved its aims through adherence to two rich principles inherent in successful community formation online. First there was an existing example in Writing for Webheads and a facilitator who was able to model techniques that had worked in forming that group for the participants in the new group. </span></span><span style="color: #3f3939;">The second principle is that the mode of teaching was through experience and experimentation. Learning via social media is ineffable; it has to be experienced in order to be understood. It is difficult to explain how it works, like trying to explain how a plane flies to someone who has never seen one. Until you see or experience it, you can't 'know' it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #3f3939;">There are other principles that have been developed and exercised through groups, communities, and networks that have formed from the seeds planted at the turn of the read-write century. One is that communities, like a good party, require a critical mass to boost them into higher quanta. There is a tendency for people who create online classes to restart their communities with clean slates, to assume that the community will come together better if the newcomers to the community work only within their cohort and bond without interference from previous group members. </span></span><span style="color: #3f3939;">This might work, and relief from clutter might even be more comfortable for some moderators and participants, but something is also lost by not actively including previous group members in your new venture. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;">Thus it is common in EVO, for example, for session moderators to start up new YahooGroups or keep old ones but delete forums and comments from previous sessions. This is indeed the model most of us have been educated in, where we walk into a classroom where the work of all previous students has disappeared from the walls and bulletin boards and for all intents and purposes, the course is designed for us, and we are the only group that has ever taken it.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sowxt1X1Rn0/UmT_gym6XqI/AAAAAAAABGE/Vf51cwEaboY/s1600/2013-10-21_1159anovember.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sowxt1X1Rn0/UmT_gym6XqI/AAAAAAAABGE/Vf51cwEaboY/s1600/2013-10-21_1159anovember.png" height="263" width="400" /></a><br />
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">See Slides 6-7 here:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #3f3939;"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances/learning2gether-to-develop-personal-learning-networks-to-model-collaborative-learning-for-teachers-to-use-with-students">http://www.slideshare.net/vances/learning2gether-to-develop-personal-learning-networks-to-model-collaborative-learning-for-teachers-to-use-with-students</a> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939;">Alan November was talking with Tony Richards and Darrell Branson of the EdTech Crew after his keynote at a conference in Melbourne, when he said, "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">C</span>an you
imagine giving every kid a laptop and not changing the audience? But changing the device? How do you
reconcile that?</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">” H</span><span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">e pointed out that classrooms can and should be communities where the work of previous students serves to model and set standards for subsequent students to emulate and improve on. At the very least, students consider that work they produce will be seen by students in following years, and the effect can be enhanced if the audience for their work when they are producing it extends beyond the classroom.</span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">When students are creating digital portfolios, it becomes easier to share their work with peers worldwide and with current and later students. We can experiment with this notion in the online communities we set up for one another. For example, the YahooGroup we set up for Webheads in Action is still going strong ten years later, and when I started teaching a course I called Multilteracies as part of TESOL's Principles and Practices in Online Teaching program, I proposed it as an EVO session and set it up so that I could bring the community from EVO back into the TESOL course the next time I ran that one, and so on, so there was always enough of a critical mass to stimulate the TESOL participants even though there might only be a dozen of them. With few participants it's difficult to get them interacting with each other in ways that are not teacher-prompted. But when there are previous participants in the mix, there is more participant-to-participant interaction, and everyone learns how this works as and when it works. </span><span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">Here we can state these principles, but teachers are convinced only when they experience them in action.</span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="color: #3f3939;">George Siemens has just written to members of his Change MOOC Google Group to tell them he's going to roll the same group over into a new Research MOOC discusson. His intent was clearly to preserve the community that had formed there, while giving due notice that there might be an increase in list traffic on a topic different from the one he had started the group to address, in case any list members might want to withdraw to prevent their inboxes filling with posts on an unsolicited subject. Those who responded appear happy to stay, but what if this was the way all classes worked, where students who wanted to could opt in to continue interacting with teachers and peers, and subsequent students, whom they might help in ways that foregoing students helped them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #3f3939;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #3f3939;">It should be normal that we continue our community sites from one topic to the next, from one cohort to the next. Doing it this way might be disconcerting to some who don't like clutter, but if we accept that learning is messy, if we embrace and exploit chaos and exploit chaos resolution as an opportunity for deep learning, then we tap into one of many benefits to working individually but within a wider community.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H5H1KgEojfE/UmT_cPhUWdI/AAAAAAAABEo/XxgL73rhStc/s1600/2013-10-21_1147siemens.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H5H1KgEojfE/UmT_cPhUWdI/AAAAAAAABEo/XxgL73rhStc/s1600/2013-10-21_1147siemens.png" height="242" width="400" /></a><br />
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<span style="color: #3f3939;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #3f3939;">Chaos resolution underpins George Siemens's teaching style, which he deliberately embraced when he with Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier started the first MOOC in 2008, and this concept has to some extent already turned</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> </span><span style="color: #3f3939;">on its head</span><span style="color: #3f3939;"> the notion of how we carry out and allocate resources to education. MOOCs are powered on the affordances inherent in interaction of a critical mass of participants. Survival in MOOCs requires enabling strategies in both facilitators and participants to cope with the massive scale of participants. Filtering skills must be employed for participants to gain meaning from instructional material that cannot possibly be directed at the individual. Individuals must in this case derive meaning from their experience with that material as percolated through the community of other participants, an only limited number of whom they might interact with during the course of the MOOC. </span><br />
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<b style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">MOOC learning reaches students through teacher professional development</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most importantly, there is transfer of much of this into our classes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I read an article once in the early days of CALL where a teacher was asked if she used technology with her students. Her initial response was no, but on examination it was found she was using all kinds of technology to prepare and deliver her lessons, from Word and PowerPoint to the data show projector in her classroom, not to mention the photocopier, Google to find materials, and so on. So there is a lot of technology that is taken for granted, and not really factored into the equation, especially as it becomes 'normalized'.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The question now is to what extent this interaction among teachers finds its way back into our classrooms. I would say to an increasing extent. As in the case above our classrooms will change when our practice has changed but it's become so second nature we don't notice it. What if we asked teachers if they adhered to the six things that Richardson says they need to do in order to relearn their practice?</span><br />
<ul>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">Did you share something today with a wider community of educators?</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">What have YOU and your students discovered about the curriculum recently?</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">When did you last interact with others in your personal learning network?</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">What filters do you use to help you moderate the abundance of information you must deal with constantly?</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">How many functions of a master learner learner did you perform today? model / demonstrate / reflect / practice?</li>
<li style="font-family: inherit;">What work have you assigned your students for real audiences?</li>
<li>Who has power to drive curriculum where you practice?</li>
</ul>
All of these actions are modeled, demonstrated, reflected on and practiced in learning with cMOOCs, where learning is by definition connectivist. Answers to these questions can tell us how likely a teacher is to be modeling these actions with students, and to be encouraging learners to be learning in the same way he or she does. <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">Our </span><span style="text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">mindsets must change </span><span style="text-indent: -36.47999954223633px;">so that students can be inculcated in the same way we are learning to learn. T</span></span>ransformation will have occurred when it is no longer meaningful to answer such questions, when everyone does these things as a matter of course.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our students are already connecting with one another, and if the devices are in place, as Alan November said, and teachers are still expecting them to produce for the old audience of one, there could be serious disconnects. Take for example the recent iPad rollout in Los Angeles Unified School System. The students used their devices in the most engaging ways they could imagine, but these were not connected in any obvious way to the syllabus. They got around the Internet filters by simply deleting their profiles from their new devices.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvTNdbBwi7k/UmUMdvItkYI/AAAAAAAABHE/MbF8HuhgYuI/s1600/2013-10-21_1513lax.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvTNdbBwi7k/UmUMdvItkYI/AAAAAAAABHE/MbF8HuhgYuI/s1600/2013-10-21_1513lax.png" height="298" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -29.760000228881836px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another famous case is that of Tom Wood in Australia, who managed to hack the national school Internet filter in only half an hour. According to these news articles he was treated as a hero to those who thought the filter was a waste of money, and turned thinking in that country into avenues of control over use of technology to ones more inclusive to all stakeholders into the dialog.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G98uqCtNrm4/UmT_g8zAcwI/AAAAAAAABGM/eJgUfBvwpZI/s1600/2013-10-21_1158tomwood.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G98uqCtNrm4/UmT_g8zAcwI/AAAAAAAABGM/eJgUfBvwpZI/s1600/2013-10-21_1158tomwood.png" height="303" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>In his pre-conference keynote at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference, David Warlick (2007) David Warlick said that networking was the boundary of the digital divide. He gave the example of his son and how he learned and played with friends online, how he didn't need to say goodbye to his friends when he went to college, and how kids obtain power from their networks. He speaks passionately about how wrong it is to cut kids off from their networks when they go to school. "We want our children to be the students we want to teach rather than teaching the children who they are, and this is an insult to our children"</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-30R8amD-614/UmT_hDX9P-I/AAAAAAAABGU/f5xPasADou0/s1600/2013-10-21_1200warlick.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-30R8amD-614/UmT_hDX9P-I/AAAAAAAABGU/f5xPasADou0/s1600/2013-10-21_1200warlick.png" height="260" width="400" /></a><br />
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This is the audio segment where Warlick articulates that quote.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzkWoeQDvYIJsB_j-Mz6eEPK25IKsBDJ3wPQb-5tWHdZcXJtsghq3_R_Ar-IKHphR5xro4iy7qFjud55rzWnA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br />
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How then can we break down the firewalls and give our students access to learning networks in our classrooms. In his RSCON presentation, Chuck Sandy talked about, one classroom, one teacher, design for change <a href="http://www.dfcworld.com/">http://www.dfcworld.com/</a>. In this project, students design projects (e.g. public works, school beautification), carry them out, document them, and share them.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSXqC0EW1Vg/UmT_hjQ77JI/AAAAAAAABGs/zMWDOF2pFvk/s1600/2013-10-21_1201dfc.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZSXqC0EW1Vg/UmT_hjQ77JI/AAAAAAAABGs/zMWDOF2pFvk/s1600/2013-10-21_1201dfc.png" height="262" width="400" /></a></div>
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Another example is the ePals project that Candy Pauchnick and Yaodong Chen were a part of: <a href="http://www.epals.com/#!/global-community/">http://www.epals.com/#!/global-community/</a></div>
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<i>I'm afraid I've bumped against sleep deprivation here but I've got most of what I want to say down on silicon. I need to cut it back of course and fine tune the references, but the essence is here.</i><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DcHMxQg_21w/UmT_h3GFLmI/AAAAAAAABGc/YNhfZyuetbc/s1600/2013-10-21_1202mooclearning.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DcHMxQg_21w/UmT_h3GFLmI/AAAAAAAABGc/YNhfZyuetbc/s1600/2013-10-21_1202mooclearning.png" height="243" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances/how-mooc-learning-reaches-students-through-tpd">http://www.slideshare.net/vances/how-mooc-learning-reaches-students-through-tpd</a><br />
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<strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/vances/how-mooc-learning-reaches-students-through-tpd" target="_blank" title="How MOOC learning reaches students through TPD">How MOOC learning reaches students through TPD</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/vances" target="_blank">Vance Stevens</a></strong> <br />
<span style="background-color: #e8e6ca;">Stevens, V. (2013). What's with the MOOCs? TESL-EJ, Volume 16, Number 4, pp. 1-14: </span><a href="http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej64/int.pdf" style="background-color: #e8e6ca;">http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej64/int.pdf</a><span style="background-color: #e8e6ca;">. Also available at: </span><a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej64/ej64int/" style="background-color: #e8e6ca;">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej64/ej64int/</a><br />
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<b>Learning2gether</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile I had a conversation on the topic with my PLN on Sunday, Sept 22, 2013 entitled <b>Electronic Village Online – Where teacher networking impacts student learning</b>. Here I was able to express the ideas I hope to get across in my talk, so going from my proposal, I'll say more or less what you hear me saying here:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://learning2gether.net/2013/09/22/electronic-village-online-where-teacher-networking-impacts-student-learning/">http://learning2gether.net/2013/09/22/electronic-village-online-where-teacher-networking-impacts-student-learning/</a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The video here is two hours long, but if you listen up to a little past the point where I use the word "erudite" you'll hear what I mean to get across.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/M00d3NOEiWU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">You can download the first hour of the audio file here. At the end of the first-hour audio I'm able to wrap up the discussion in support of my thesis. You can download that audio here:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://learning2getherdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/evo_impactstudentlearningpart2.mp3">http://learning2getherdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/evo_impactstudentlearningpart2.mp3</a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #3f3939;">As Bax's predictions have come to pass and the microprocessor has been normalized into most appliances we own, the notion of computer-assisted language learning becomes almost meaningless. Except to the most extreme Dogme purist or educators in contexts where not even electricity can be taken for granted, the notion of CALL is more meaningfully expressed, in my view, as SMALL, or social-media assisted language learning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">References:</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Couros, G. (2013). </span>Isolation is now a choice educators make. <i>The Principal of Change: Stories of learning and leading</i>. <span style="font-family: inherit;">Available: </span><a href="http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4156" style="background-color: white; text-align: center;">http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4156</a>.<br />
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Cross, J. (2003). <i>Informal Learning – the other 80%</i> (draft). Internet Time Group. Available: <a href="http://www.internettime.com/Learning/The%20Other%2080%25.htm">http://www.internettime.com/Learning/The%20Other%2080%25.htm</a>.<br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2c13f357-e016-9ac6-fc8d-475fdfdbaa7a"><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Downes, S. (2007) Personal Learning the Web 2.0 Way. Presentation given at WiAOC 2007. Retrieved September 25, 2009 from the World Wide Web: Slides, </span><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/personal-learning-the-web-20-way" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/personal-learning-the-web-20-way</span></a><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Audio Part 1: </span><a href="http://streamarchives.net/node/84" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://streamarchives.net/node/84</span></a><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and Audio Part 2: </span><a href="http://streamarchives.net/node/83" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://streamarchives.net/node/83</span></a><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span><br />
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Honeycutt, K. and Pauchnick, C. (2008). Epal Connection - From Liuzhou,China to San Diego,USA. <i>Driving Questions in Education</i>. Available: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Urj27gqIQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Urj27gqIQ</a>; more information, <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/conversations/topics/19526">http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evonline2002_webheads/conversations/topics/19526</a>.<br />
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Lessig, L. (2004). <i>Freeculture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. </i>The Penguin Press, 348 pages. Available: <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/">http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/</a>.<br />
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Mitra, S. (2013). The future of learning. Opening plenary at the <i>Reform Symposium </i>RSCON4, <a href="http://www.futureofeducation.com/page/plenarysugatamitra">http://www.futureofeducation.com/page/plenarysugatamitra</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;">Richardson, W. (2012). Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere. Ted Conferences and Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 51 pages (estimated).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00998J5YQ/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail" style="background-color: white; color: #336699; line-height: 16.890625px;">http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B00998J5YQ/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_eos_detail</a><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 16.890625px;">.</span></span></span><br />
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Stevens, V. (2002). A day in the life of an online language educator. <i>TESL-EJ 6, </i>3. Available <a href="http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume6/ej23/ej23int/">http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume6/ej23/ej23int/</a>.<br />
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Stevens, Vance. 1992. Humanism and CALL: A coming of age. In Pennington, Martha, and Vance Stevens (Eds.). Computers in applied linguistics: An international perspective. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, pp. 11-38.<br />
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Stevens, V. and Altun, A. (2002). The Webheads community of language learners online. In Syed, Z. (Ed.). <i>The process of language learning: An EFL perspective</i>. Abu Dhabi: The Military Language Institute. pp. 285-318. Available: <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2001mli_stevens-altun2mb.pdf">http://vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2001mli_stevens-altun2mb.pdf</a>.<br />
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Stevens, V. (2001). Implementing Expectations: The Firewall in the Mind. Plenary address given at the IATEFL and Cyprus Teachers of English Association Conference, Implementing Call in EFL: Living up to Expectations, at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, May 5th - 6th, 2001 <http: cyprus="" www.nll.co.uk="">. Slides available <a href="http://vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/plenary/index.html">http://vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/plenary/index.html</a>.</http:><br />
<http: cyprus="" www.nll.co.uk=""><br /></http:>
<http: cyprus="" www.nll.co.uk="">Warlick, D. (2007). Inventing the New Boundaries. Pre-conference keynote at 2007 K-12 Online Conference. <a href="http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144">http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144</a>.</http:><br />
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Wilden, S. (2013). The role of online tools in teacher development. TESOL CALL-IS and IATEFL LTSIG Technology in Teaching conference, Oct.12, 2013 <<a href="http://ltsig.org.uk/events/13-future-events/318-121013-special-event-using-technology-in-teaching-principles-in-practice.html">http://ltsig.org.uk/events/13-future-events/318-121013-special-event-using-technology-in-teaching-principles-in-practice.html</a>>;. Recording available: <a href="http://iatefl.adobeconnect.com/p7y3qn6nulj/">http://iatefl.adobeconnect.com/p7y3qn6nulj/</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Notes</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;">From </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;"> </span><a href="http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=2322">http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=2322</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;"> (2006): </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;">Lawrence Lessig, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 16.890625px;">Stanford Law School, Stanford, CA & Founder of Creative Commons has said “The 20th century was the only read-only century in human history, totalitarian, centralizing, controlling. The 21st is the return to read-write.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">From <a href="http://www.communitywiki.org/cw/ReadOnly">http://www.communitywiki.org/cw/ReadOnly</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">LawrenceLessig points out in <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/" target="_blank">FreeCulture</a> (2004)</span></div>
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<dd style="margin-bottom: 0.5ex; margin-left: 2em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express." It is to enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."</span></dd></dl>
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<i>My apologies, but this page is a work in progress </i><br />
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So, to take us back to what Rozencrantz and Gildenstern were doing while this was all playing out on the grand stage,</div>
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<span style="color: #3f3939; font-family: inherit;">The proposed book chapter refers to a session I've been facilitating for EVO, Electronic Village Online in one form or another since 2002. The session that year was called Webheads in Action, but Webheads went back even further than that, at least as far back as 1998, which is as far back as we have preserved online artifacts from an ESOL course I called Writing for Webheads. And WfW goes back to 1995 when I left a ten-yeared position as a lecturer of EFL at Sultan Qaboos University and took up a job working for a company in California that designed educational software and got to designate myself Director of ESL Software Design, which is how I perceived my role in the company.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><i>What follows is a work in progress and you can stop reading now unless you would just like to explore how the process of moving from prose to presentation works for someone who fiddles with the latter right up until the last minute (come back soon :-)</i><br />
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Recap, and main points of this presentation and subsequent writeup<br />
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In 1997-8<br />
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<li>Dave Winet offered classes for students</li>
<li>Teachers instinctively prepared syllbuses</li>
<li>students were not coming online to take language courses, they were coming online to socialize</li>
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Writing for Webheads<br />
So we learned from the students who interacted with us how to construct communities that would promote language learning through greater opportunities to socialize in spaces where the target language was used throughout<br />
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Webheads in Action<br />
We then taught that this to teachers experientially, so that they learned by trying out the community building techniques themselves on one another in spaces where technology was being used online to promote a greater awareness of how it might faciitate language learning.<br />
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This was relatively easy and worked well because the teachers were self selected, the choir<br />
as are RSCON participants<br />
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The problem is when we go beyond to others who have not experienced this, they don't know what we mean<br />
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To know what we mean you must experience online learning2gether<br />
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there are now burgeoning opportunities for that<br />
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this is how mindsets will change so that students can be inculcated in the same way<br />
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but students are already learning in this way, LA unified school district problem</div>
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Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2946886066785461410.post-21475593118061718812013-05-06T12:38:00.001+00:002013-10-28T06:26:32.650+00:00Learning scales, teaching doesn't<br />
I grabbed a quick Audiobook download for my commute this morning, Douglas Thomas and John Sealey Brown on <i>A New Culture of Learning</i>. One chapter starts with an adage from Heraclitus that a man cannot step into a river twice, for it is not the same river, and it is not the same man. This is a good reminder of an inconvenient aspect of research into how people learn with or without technology, not to mention the difficulty of projecting how a given population (in space and time) will respond to a particular technology (dependent on platform, programming, media, etc.). It might be possible to gather fairly reliable data on say an increase in heartbeat across a range of subjects when on stepping into a river a certain portion of their body was suddenly immersed in temperatures ranging over so many degrees. However it might be difficult to extrapolate given fluctuations in more complex aspects of the river (as Sidhartha noted, always changing yet always the same) vs the many contexts in which the man might approach the river. These contexts might change widely over time, and change is in fact an accelerating variable in education, especially with constant developments in educational technology. <br />
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Which brings us to the next adage mentioned in the chapter, that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for day; teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Not so fast say Brown and Thomas, this assumes both a constant supply of fish stocks, and an assumption that the techniques used to catch them today will maintain in the future. However, in our modern world, neither are given. Change in what we need to know now vs. what we need to know tomorrow is happening at an accelerating pace. Many degree programs today didn't exist ten years ago, and we must assume that teachers are preparing students today for jobs that no one can predict will exist.<br />
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It is this certainty of accelerating change that a culture of learning must address. Brown and Thomas introduce the concept of the collective in conjunction with their observation that teaching doesn't scale. This is exactly the problem that Siemens has addressed in his theory of connectivism (connectivism, meet collectivism?) and hence that MOOCs are experimental solutions to. It is understood that two forms of MOOC are emerging. One kind, the cMOOC, is where learning occurs through interaction within the collective, and the other kind, xMOOC, is developing as a means of offering viable courses to thousands at a time. Both are attempts to scale access to learning when traditional "teaching" fails under the sheer weight of numbers.<br />
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And then the final insight on my drive this morning: regarding the problem with corporate and other institutional training programs. They are attempts to teach participants in these programs to fish in an era where the tools of fishing are evolving rapidly, perhaps so fast that fishing will be supplanted by something else in the near future. For example, the benefits of training in educational institutions in the use of particular branded technologies may be growing less appropriate as change becomes more likely in a rapidly approaching future. In other words, such training doesn't scale. It becomes less efficient the more rapidly evolutionary change approaches. Training should focus instead on the wider issues of finding a range of tools available to address desired pedagogical tools.<br />
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The answer is learning, not teaching. Learning scales. This is what MOOCs are about. They are experiments for scaling learning. The xMOOCs do this in a sense by finding ways to scale the teaching, but insofar as the learners have a lot of flexibility in choice of MOOCs and other options for open learning, they are also part of the scaled-learning solution. <br />
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Brown and Thomas were discussing gamification as another tack in the quest for scalable solutions to learning, but I was pulling up to work by then, so we'll get to that in another post, or in an extension to this one.<br />
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Reference<br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-533aeee9-fdbd-397a-c0f4-b25cb22e116c"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thomas, D. and Seely Brown, J. (2011). </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A new culture of learning</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. CreateSpace. 140 pages.</span></span>Vance Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02294855844850896487noreply@blogger.com4