Is DOGME for adVancEducation?

According to its YahooGroup members listing (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme/), I joined Dogme on March 8, 2002 .  I started following the group after James Farmer put Webheads on to it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/121 (in the 121st msg posted to the group), but as my interests gravitated toward edtech, I eventually lost interest and lost track.  Since then there have been about 20 messages mentioning dogme in the almost 25,000 posted to the Webheads list, but only recently have there been overt recommendations for Webheads to pay closer attention to what was going on there; e.g., Graham Stanley early in 2009: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/21479.

The founder of the concept for teaching (drawing on the film genre) is Scott Thornbury, and its minimalist essence is captured in the front page of this website: http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm (with links to a longer article on "teaching unplugged").  There's a Wikipedia entry on Dogme here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching, where it states succinctly that "Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching and encourages teaching without published textbooks and instead focusing on conversational communication among the learners and the teacher."

Now, what got me started on this posting was Karen Sylvester's tweet, here:
http://twitter.com/kalinagoenglish/status/7784038613

So, I bit. I popped over to http://eisensei.blogspot.com/2010/01/dogme-el-what-t.html and left a comment; to wit:

"Ok, here's Dogme from the perspective of teaching some other language as a foreign language. I wrote an article here Stevens, Vance. 2006. Learner strategies at the interface: Computer-assisted language learning meets computer-mediated communication. In Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century, Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England (Eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., a pre-publication version of which I put online here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/cairo2004/hbalt-gvs05sep.htm At that URL, scroll to just above and below the section "A syllabus for language learning". I think that's Dogme."

I'd like to reproduce here what I said in that article, regarding my experiences in learning Arabic unplugged.  The teacher referred to below as "Salem" is in fact the best Arabic teacher I ever had, Haridi Salim, and is still in touch with me from time to time from Cairo:

"...  students made no elaborate preparations but spontaneously brought realia to the class. Simply put, the only operative rule was "No English, Only Arabic." We formed classes of students who would follow this rule. Salem, whose other classes were conducted in more traditional vein, often remarked about how much he was learning about language teaching through the experience of working with us. We were all learning that authentic materials were more motivating than traditional ones and that communicative approaches allowed us to use what Pinker (1994) called our "language instinct' to efficiently learn the language. This efficiency was also improved by focusing our concentration on Arabic, allowing us to actually think in that language, and cutting out the factor of code switching that constantly throws students off in bilingual language classes. We were learning what we needed to know about creating materials once the technology caught up with our need to find and present authentic language learning materials in Arabic.

A syllabus for language learning

This section elaborates on the idealized syllabus for learning a language such as Arabic and how it can be augmented with technology. The syllabus accrues from experiences with "'Salem"' described above and can be minimalistically characterised as finding teachers who will use only Arabic in class (spoken and written) and putting them before students who agree to read, speak, and write the same. I have had the opportunity to replicate this configuration in two learning situations since that time and in both instances, the technique was markedly effective with small groups of students who self-selected to learn on these principles.

However, creating such a pure and facilitative learning environment in an Arabic class is not easy in practice. I have faced problems with Arabic teachers who are not convinced teaching with only discourse in their target language is possible. They feel that students' first- language support is necessary and they tend to over-use it, thus suppressing opportunities for students to internalize patterns discernible from rich target language input. I have known Arabic teachers who refuse to teach Arabic script in the belief that this would be too great a leap for their students. However, the converse is true: using student-language emulations of target language features often disguises the patterns inherent in the target language and can actually hinder the learning of the language through elucidation of it's otherwise predictable features.

Resistance also comes from students who don't realize the possibility of learning Arabic using only discourse in the target language. They feel that first-language support is necessary and tend to ask questions in their native language, thus suppressing opportunities for internalizing patterns discernible from rich target language usage and input (when the response is made in the target language rather than the student's native). Oddly, some students in this group are themselves language teachers who teach classes using the target language only yet still persist in relying on support in their native language in their own Arabic classes rather than persevering in the target.

Once all concerned agree to learn and work in Arabic only and settle on a time to meet regularly, finding things to do in the class has never been a problem when the students are encouraged to raise topics for class discussion. They have the essential ingredients for good language learning; namely, an informant, a commitment on the part of students to digest the material, and materials proposed by and therefore relevant to the students themselves. The classes I've experienced have all gone well ala munasib (according to the occasion) but both students and teachers must seed discussion and activities."

Ironically that article is about teaching "plugged", not "unplugged".  The latter term I know means (in music) without relying on electronic enhancements, but the article itself is about how technology can enhance the dogme approach.  As I say in its conclusion, it shows:

"...how instructional technology supports current trends in language teaching methodology by allowing students to engage in meaningful, authentic, and truly communicative activities that enhance their ability to learn languages such as Arabic through the use of the Internet.. Computers have allowed the achievement of constructivist outcomes by facilitating the establishment of learning environments which have moved:

• from making behaviorist teaching paradigms such as tutorials and drill and practice more efficient;
• through more cognitive approaches such as simulations and better use and analysis of corpora and multimedia;
• to comprehensive access of a world of authentic target-language documents via the Internet; and
• most recently, to all of the above plus genuine communication and empathy with native and non-native speakers of Arabic through the formation of communities of practice online and in blended learning situations."

Graham Stanley, Dennis Newson and Gavin Dudeney are all vocal protagonists of dogme, and enthusiastic teachers, learners, and builders in Second Life, so I'm sure there are no real implication in the term "unplugged" that teachers should eschew educational technology (after all, unplugged musicians use microphones and sound systems that project what they do onstage to the far corners of concert halls; or in cinematic terms, even the most purist dogme director would still use hi-tech cameras), but I wish here to drive home the point nevertheless, that technology is capable of enhancing what Thornbury declares is the thrust of dogme: "to restore teaching to its pre-method 'state of grace' - when all there was was a room with a few chairs, a blackboard, a teacher and some students, and where learning was jointly constructed out of the talk that evolved in that simplest, and most prototypical of situations." Why not, then, a few rezzed furniture objects embedded in a holodeck in Second Life, that do marvelous things when clicked on, giving learners that much more to wonder at and talk about?

Thornbury, S.  (2002) A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues 153, Feb/March 2000. http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Dogma%20article.htm.

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. Harper Perennial (Harper/Collins Publishers): New York, NY.


TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/100118advanced

Celebrating 25 years of CALL: Forging new pathways

This posting regards my thoughts toward a session I am taking part in at the TESOL conference coming up in Denver. In this session I will be sharing a segment in a program with Roger Kenner and Deborah Healey, as indicated in the TESOL Advanced Program book http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/convention2009/docs/advanceprogram.pdf and here: http://colloqtesol09.pbwiki.com/.

Deborah and Roger are focusing on certain areas of paradigm shift tangential to ones I envisage. I have lately characterized how I see the shift over the past 25 years in ten aspects, shown on slide 33 here

http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences

These are spelled out more clearly near the top of this document http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddkc6v4f_163dkxh36d6

Here I suggest that educators must make at least these ten mind-shifts in order to be able to adapt to change in the 21st century

1. Pedagogy - from didactic TO constructivist
2. Networking - from isolated TO connectivist models; e.g. CoPs and distributed learning networks
3. Sharing - from copyright TO creative commons
4. Literacy – from print dominance TO communication that tends toward multiliteracies
5. Heuristics - from client/server TO peer to peer
6. Formality – from Trepidation, fear of being exposed as not knowing TO F.U.N. = encourage class to explore despite risk of Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense
7. Transfer – from lecture, sit/get TO modeling, demonstration
8. Directionality – from push TO pull e.g. RSS
9. Ownership – from proprietary TO open source
10. Classification – from taxonomy TO folksonomy

The above remarks were made in a talk given online at an online event put on by George Siemens et al: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/

This conference and much of what George organizes along these lines, and what Webheads attempt in http://wiaoc.org, are excellent examples and models of where I think these paradigm shifts are taking us.

So where I would be taking my 6-8 minute presentation would be to work from our early attempts to organize what we started back in 1983, doing the best we could in the paradigm available. For example I used to solicit articles for and cobble together an MS-DOS Newsletter and photocopy it at Sultan Qaboos University, where I worked, and send it out in department mail to a list of names I had collected, often by snail mail. These were the days where we would keep in a box in someone's house somewhere for 360 days a year all our disks of educational software which we lugged to each TESOL conference. Later we accumulated some of this on a CD that Deborah and Norm (right? or Elizabeth??) put together, and eventually stored on a server in Australia (who was the guy who hosted that?). Having to distribute our work on physical media and then post it entailed costs which got me in trouble at SQU when I felt the need to request compensation from recipients who needed an invoice so they could get money from petty cash from their institutes which I created and eventually got stung with accusations of commercialism, when all I and like-minded colleagues really wanted to do was share our stuff for free at no cost to me or to the recipient, which we can all easily do now that the paradigm has shifted.

So from our clumsy beginnings in CALL-IS with all the software fairs that ended in swap meets and hard copy newsletters and presentations at physical conferences which we sometimes managed to broadcast to the outside world (always the question, should we ask TESOL if we can do this? the edupunk answer, uughhh *bump foreheads!*) ... up through to EVO, which emerged through CALL-IS thinking and much effort over the past decade, and which I see as a model showing the right direction for us. Webheads has been a fixture in all but the first EVO session, and this is another model for interactions with one another, many participants in EVO being members of either and often both CALL-IS and Webheads. And when we model through any of these entities (EVO, CALL-IS, Webheads), we do so in such a way that we help anyone along who wants to follow the model.

This I think has always been what CALL-IS has intended and tried to do. It's people helping one another, since the days where as young people we would happily pitch in to all hours with no compensation beyond whatever support our workplaces provided in getting us to TESOL conferences in the first place.

Now we don't pitch in so obviously at annual conferences. I mean we do, but nothing as labor intensive as those who were not there cannot imagine (sleep deprivation but also commeradie). But the paradigm shift that I would like to focus on is the one which now allows us to treat our annual conferences not as The Cake but as a tasty layer of icing on a larger cake on which we sustain by ourselves throughout the year. That has always been what CALL-IS has intended to do, to provide people with a means to communicate and network not only at the annual conference but between conferences. We now have several models for doing this. To recapitulate, some of these which I have mentioned here are:

• CALL-IS, which has always provided mechanisms for facilitating interpersonal interactions among members at conferences; e.g. the CALL Hospitality Room and after-hours gatherings, as well as for interacting during the year (newsletters, Moodles, sponsorship of EVO)
  
• EVO (speaking of which) is an excellent model of sustained professional growth where procedures have been refined over the years for training new moderators in EVO culture and technique and for implementing quality control while involving as many as possible in free 6-week professional development seminars.
• Webheads got its start in professional development as an EVO session (formerly it had been an EFL community focused on students). The growth of Webheads illustrates the distinction between groups, communities, and networks. Webheads started as a YahooGroup, and soon its participants were thinking of themselves as a community. But its members have branched out into so many spaces, and are drawn from so many, that it is fruitful to view Webheads as a circle on a Venn diagram that intersects with other circles which in turn intersect with each other, so that Webheads are obliquely connected to a huge network that is always feeding more knowledge into the community. One mechanism for doing this is Webheads in Action Online Convergence, a bi-annual free online conference whose third rendition is due to occur in May 2009 (http://wiaoc.org )
  
• George Siemens has characterized this type of interaction as connectivism, whereby to paraphrase his words, the pipe is more important than its contents. By this he means to say that by configuring one's network so as to establish the right connections one can ensure that knowledge, or content, will flow through the pipe and be accessible as needed, when needed. George and others have implemented this concept through a series of free online conferences where everyone learns and benefits.

So, to get back to the question of where we have come in the past 25 years, and where we are headed, I have in all this time felt that CALL-IS has been helping us to come ever closer to achieving many personal and professional goals through proper utilization of technology in meeting these shared goals. Foremost among these has been to develop mechanisms to create climates in which personal and professional development are enhanced through interaction with sharing with empathetic peers. One major affordance of technology is where it facilitates communication, and facilitated communication is of prime importance both in bringing distributed communities together online AND as an important component in the practice of groups involved in language learning (the reason for CALL-IS formation in fact). Hence those who put these mechanisms in place 25 years ago shared a vision that we were embarking on a path that would prove its worth in time, despite many nay-sayers who did not share this vision and who saw no need to change tried and true ways of learning languages with infusions of technology whose great potential relatively few understood.

Today we find available a plethora of tools which help us to accomplish our goals both face to face and online for 365 days of the year. These tools allow those who see the educational potential inherent in web 2.0, blogging, wikis, Skype, webcasting, podcasting, YouTube, Twitter, Moodle, Facebook, the list goes on and on, to accomplish their goals almost apart from traditional structures such as face-to-face conferences and dues-collecting organizations. This is not to decry the importance of conferences such as the TESOL annual conferences nor of professional organizations such as TESOL. They play crucial roles in bringing together practitioners and making possible palpable connections, and TESOL plays behind the scenes roles in areas such as teacher benefits and professional standards.

However, much of what traditional publishers and face-to-face conferences offer and what professional organizations such as TESOL provide in the way of connectivism and networking is now available in substantial measure to practitioners for free at almost any time of the day or night, at greater convenience, and even in greater intensity (or less, it's up to the user) than what is possible through traditional entities who retain the baggage of logistics and expense for providing what people have until recently been willing to travel and pay for.

So my point is that traditional entities need to adapt, to shift with the sands of shifting paradigms so as not to be swallowed by the dunes. Those of us who have seen CALL-IS develop since the days when it was the most important means for many of us to flourish in our professional careers, for the most part would like to see TESOL and CALL-IS continue to be important fixtures in our professional lives. In fact, TESOL has often listened to CALL-IS advice (and sometimes not ;-) so one role of CALL-IS is to help TESOL adapt to these shifting paradigms in order that it retains its relevance to teachers of English to speakers of other languages throughout the world, recognizing that the most progressive of these practitioners are already sharing and organizing and networking constantly and spontaneously in productive ways that almost always circumvent any intrusion from any organizing body with a constitution, by-laws, and fee structure.

So how should TESOL and CALL-IS adapt? One way would be to capitalize on events such as EVO which attract people to TESOL without charging them money, giving them the impression that TESOL has something to offer and to share with no strings attached. Then if they want certification, let us say, they can avail themselves of certificate offerings available through TESOL for which there would be a charge. Another way would be to open conferences up to online participation. George Siemens says simply that it is "unacceptable" for conferences to not make allowances for people to network online in back channels with other conference participants and with the wider world not at the conference, by providing free wireless capability to all paid participants at a conference, and of course to presenters so they can model and demonstrate what they are talking about, and so the participants can try out and DO what the presenters are talking about at the conference.

For TESOL to get through THAT barrier either major hotels in the Western World are going to have to provide wireless connections throughout their facilities and stop charging exorbitant prices for them, or TESOL is going to have to stop using expensive hotels. For either of these things to happen, someone's business model has got to change. People are starting to realize that they don't need to pony up to other people's greed when this prevents them from accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, especially when they can do it better elsewhere, and for free.

The past quarter century has seen a group of people who had no other alternative take advantage of the connectivism offered by TESOL to come together and form a group which I think is one quite apart from other interest sections in TESOL. The next quarter century could see more of the same but I doubt it. This is my prediction: that CALL-IS will continue to exist a quarter century from now, but that

• It might no longer be called CALL
• It might be an entity apart from TESOL
• TESOL will have moved to a means of interaction more inclusive of social media, or it might have ceased to exist
• In the former case, TESOL will encourage and facilitate wider collaboration within subgroups such as CALL-IS within its Interest Section structure

Meanwhile, this just in over my Twitter network. Here's how a truly connected conference works. As I recall, Deborah has been involved in ISTE there in Eugene. ISTE's annual conference is NECC (correct me if I'm wrong here). Here's a URL for a blog posting that shows how a truly functional as opposed to dysfunctional conference should work with regard to networking:

http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/03/13/calling-all-twitter-users-going-to-necc-2009/

Here, Joe Corbett has set up a spreadsheet and embedded it in a blog post where those going to NECC can record their Twitter (and blog) addresses and can then follow each other at the conference. NECC has been Twitterfied for several years now, I think it was two years ago or three that NECC goers 'discovered' they could tweet throughout the conference and started using Twitter as the tool de force for networking there.

This happens only when there is connectivity available at the conference of course. NECC is a conference to watch to see how people connect with each other during the conference and with the outside world while they're at it. When the conference is in session, it is a truly international event with people following uStreams and other feeds from all over the world and interacting with the conference-goers. This makes NECC exciting. Participants are excited to go there. People all over the world are starting their build-up now and marking their calendars to spend some time online checking out what's going on in Washington DC June 28-July 1 2009 from wherever they happen to be online.

Twitter is used at TESOL but only effectively via iPhone. Do you recall that at our CALL-IS academic session last year, TESOL was able to get us an Internet connection only 15-20 minutes into our session? I had the Internet connected computer, went on to Twitter, and almost immediately received a tweet from Carla Arena via her cell phone from the audience. There should have been dozens of Twitterers in the audience operating from their wifi enabled laptops.

Afterthoughts
(Fine print for the record, I'm adding this perspective after the first three comments were posted)

It occurred to me as an afterthought to this post to refine further this perspective in light of the last 25 years and the next. It's probably hard for someone whose experience in this field is only in the past decade to appreciate what computer-based language practitioners were up against in 1983. Ours was a minority view, a small group of us, a couple dozen in Hawaii in 1982, a couple hundred in Toronto in 1983, and growing steadily thereafter, out of the whole membership of TESOL. We were constantly having to argue the case that computers were not only a way forward, but THE way forward. Those who saw the light were convinced that there was no going back on technology, but there were many in entrenched positions, peers and administrators, creating obstacles which disappeared only as people became gradually aware of the potential of computers, began routinely using computers themselves, and as computers started insinuating themselves significantly into day to day life, creating changes as fundamental as rendering almost extinct film cameras and VCRs, with impacts on education that were considered radical and revolutionary 25 years ago, but are simply taken for granted today. One dinosaur that didn't even EXIST 25 years ago was the fax machine, and now that too is headed for extinction.

This hindsight might help us in formulating a vision of our world 25 years from now, when it is understood a la Alan Toffler, in Future Shock, a book written almost 40 years ago, that change is accelerating as we zoom ahead, so that changes we imagine based on patterns unfolding over the past 25 years could conceivably happen in ten or 15.

Right now I think that we are essentially with social networking where we were with computers 25 years ago. Social networking implies being constantly connected. Increasing numbers of people are learning, and keeping themselves updated and informed, through utilization of many forms of social media. Many of these people are teachers and teacher-trainers, and they are inculcating these skills in a growing segment of a generation of young people. In other words, this is also a phenomenon that is not going to go away.

So my predictions with regard to TESOL and CALL-IS (while admittedly pure speculation and to be treated as such ;-) are based in a view of a world that was much different 25 years ago and will have changed again in the next 25 years, possibly acceleratedly more than in the past quarter century. I think that social networking will be as taken for granted by then as computers are today. I think that (free) Internet connectivity will be much easier to find and will be considered to be essential infrastructure, like TV or radio, or water, by then. Perhaps corporate hotels will have stopped placing significant financial blocks preventing connectivity and conferences such as this one, and institutions like TESOL will be able to connect their participants with each other and with the outside world in the course of evolution within the organization, without having to make internal changes.

But we are leaving the era where people feel that it is acceptable to pay big money to come to a conference where they are forced to leave their social network behind. David Warlick said essentially this in his 2008 K-12 Online keynote talk http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144, to wit that to cut kids off from their networks in schools (by filtering their networking tools) was an "insult" to them. David's description of his talk recapitulates what I have been trying to express with regard to teaching professionals: "Today, for the first time in decades (in generations of teachers), we are facing the challenge of changing our notions about teaching and learning to adapt to a rapidly changing world. We are struggling to rethink what it is to be educated, to reinvent the classroom, and redefine what it is to be a teacher and a student. There is much that has changed, and for much of it, we have responded to by attempting to ignore, filter, or to block it out."

I think that in the future people will do what they are learning to do through social networking, and that is to move into areas where they can accomplish their goals while remaining connected to their supportive and knowledgeable networks. People who are already doing this are finding that

1. they can learn from one another and from experts in their field throughout the year in ways that used to be possible only by physically attending major conferences
2. therefore annual conference with limited connectivity are of benefit primarily to people who don't otherwise constantly interact in communities of practice and distributed learning networks
   
3. UNLESS participants can leverage benefits of face-to-face attendance at major conferences with interaction with their wider networks

In this latter case such conferences can have great benefit to not only those at the conference, but to those in the learning networks of conference participants, who in turn learn from their online interactants when they attend their own face-to-face professional gatherings, and the circuit is reversed.

It follows that is only the latter kind of conferences that people will continue to pay to attend over the next 25 years. Institutions that don't cater to what they will find increasingly demanded will not fare well in this climate. Hopefully we as members of these institutions will be able to act effectively as change agents to bring about desired changes, as CALL-IS has to some extent been able to do within TESOL over the past 25 years.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/callis25years

CALL Consultancy

It's past time for another blog post (school just started, 5 classes, busy!). I'll make one here from a recent email. It's in reply to someone here in the UAE who asked me if I could make a proposal for a modest computer-based language lab. His company is involved with vocational training of national oil company employees and these companies like to buy a 'package' that they can build to spec and then plug their students into. I used to do this kind of work when I worked for the Military Language Institute here in Abu Dhabi, and we were frequently invited to scout remote locations and propose computer-based facilities for satellite clones of what we had done at the MLI. My feeling at the time was that what we had done in our context was to put tools in the hands of the knowledgeable practitioners we had with us at the MLI in Abu Dhabi, but that if you grafted the same thing onto another location minus the skilled practitioners, you were unlikely to achieve the same results. Not only that but our proposals were frequently warped and sidetracked by the commanders at the bases who had their own ideas of what students should be doing for language training, and these ideas would be best served by purchasing shrink-wrapped software and inflicting that on students, rather than encouraging teachers and students to flourish in the constructivist learning environments we had in mind.

It's been a while since I've been involved in such projects, but the following is in reply to someone who requested that I submit a proposal for such a language learning facility. He was asking that this proposal be comparable to that submitted by a well-known vendor of educational software in the UAE:

"I've worked a lot with [that vendor]. They are good people. Competent too. But they are not teachers. They can sell you a product and support it and display decent command of that product, but they can't really advise you on how to use the product, and in this situation the product you buy might not really be what you had in mind, or what some teacher you've yet to hire has in mind, to accomplish what you had in mind when you bought it.

"I don't sell products commercially. My expertise is as a consultant. I think I know how people learn languages and I know what tools exist online to support my view of how people learn languages, and as most of these are free, I'm surprised when people go for what commercial vendors have to offer without examining their underlying premises. I think this is often through some basic misunderstanding of what is needed and what is available, and such misconceptions can usually be traced to the person in charge who has the money and who is hiring the likes of us to find the products that can be bought that will support what might under fine or perhaps even rough focus be a bogus view of language learning.

"I think it is essential to define what you think the students should be doing in your lab. That's what I might help with, but it would not be to prescribe, but to discuss with the stakeholders what their view is and to try and apprise them of the most current thinking on the topic, and maybe put them in touch with current thinkers. There are several communities of tech savvy educators who are in perpetual discourse on this topic. If I were to have input on this process think it would be to put your practitioners in touch with this community, through its blogs, podcasts, live webcasts, presentations, and seminars etc and get some dialog going as to what you want the students to do. Otherwise THAT crucial aspect is driven by the vendors, which will sidetrack you until someone comes along and sees what you have in hand, and figures out how THAT can be used to instantiate a viable view of language learners and how your students can best learn via technology."

So that's my thought for today. Any other thoughts out there you'd like to share in comments to this post?

Writingmatrix Update

I have recently returned from a brief holiday in France and Spain after delivering a series of lectures which I documented at http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm. There you can find links to Elluminate recordings of the lectures, links to the slide shows, and texts of the lectures I gave (more or less) illustrated with the graphics from the slide shows. Eventually Bobbi and I will link photos from our trip from there.

Meanwhile, the Writingmatrix project is getting interesting. This morning, Webheads held their usual chat at noon GMT this morning (each Sunday noon GMT for the past 8 years) in Tapped In http://www.tappedin.org . This morning some of the chat was about Writingmatrix. Webheads are bloggers and are very interested in this project. Some said they would like to join us at a live chat to be held later this evening (in the USA; Monday a.m. in Europe/Middle East, Asia).

Now, why am I writing all of this here? The reason is I wish to conduct an experiment. I am going to TAG this post writingmatrix and webheads. Then it should appear in the Technorati searches on those tags at the following URLs:

• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix
• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/webheads

In this way, anyone who is already in the project and who has put the RSS feed of the output from those searches in the aggregator (like Bloglines) will be able to find this post.

The second part of the experiment is to acknowledge the work of one of the students, Matias Basilico, who has left some interesting posts on the concepts that make Writingmatrix effective in helping students in different parts of the world find each other's writing and collaborate on it.

• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/07/pingback-tracking-distributed.html
• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/06/rss-organize-and-update-your-content.html

The concept being experimented here is that of Pingback. By linking to Matias's posts in this way he should be alerted in his blog. There should be a link in his blog back to this posting.

And there is! Have a look below his posts. So it works!

And also I want to see what this code does. Technorati says: See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:

writingmatrix

Multiliteracies and Curriculum

The computer-culture in the UAE, where I teach Arab-national first- and second-year college students, tends to be high relative to other countries in the region. Still, with developments in the field racing ahead in the year 2007, teachers as well as students are challenged to keep up with concepts driving the emerging literacies. There is an opportunity in the courses I teach now to revise the literacy aspects of our curriculum to help learners understand some of the ramifications of evolving uses of the latest technologies.

Basic premises

In the materials I'm involved with, the focus is to raise learner awareness of changes to the social structure of software. I don’t intend to call it exactly that at this introductory level, but perhaps a good starting point, one directed at a wider sophisticated audience, is Time's declaration of YOU as its person of the year.

In recognizing all of us as people of the year, Time has acknowledged that there has been a dramatic shift in alignment of control over the power structures traditionally used to convey and arbitrate media. One aspect of this shift is that software (and publishing and other social orders impacted by that software) have moved from the enterprise model into a more user-centric one where normal people and smaller, even individual, entities and groupings have increasing power over software and the Internet, and over content provided in both domains. This shift has important ramifications for the way people can now work both individually and collaboratively with software running either on their PC's and/or over the Internet.

ENTERPRISE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

I look at software as falling into these main categories: Enterprise, Open Source, Web 2.0

Enterprise software can be characterised by companies like Microsoft, which create software for sale and profit and guard its code, revealing only what is necessary to allow others to design products that will work with it, in such a way that the company retains control over the process and retains its dominance over aspiring competitors. One result, apart from satisfaction of the shareholders in the company, is software that sometimes gets 'published' without adequate testing, so that users are vulnerable, and the company, as in the case of Microsoft, is constantly having to supply patches, since the real testing of the software occurs only after it has been purchased and shipped.

Many software developers have responded with their support of an alternative Open Source model of software development. In contrast to the enterprise model, the software is developed by interested parties seeking not profit, but mainly to enhance their standing within a community of developers by being associated with the creation of the best possible software for a given task. The code is not guarded at all. It's made publically available in the hope that others in the community will create improvements to it. The result is generally software that gets thoroughly tested during the development process, so there are rarely unanticipated surprises for end-users (and if there are, the community learns about it quickly and moves together to correct the problem). Open source software is not created for profit, but business models are emerging whereby money can be made developing refinements and specific implementations of open source resources for companies whose profits rely on using that software effectively.

Open source software is by definition freely downloadable, but where it has to be set up on a server, this might be inconvenient for some users. Again the community has tended to share resources, so that server-based services are sometimes made available to all users. The concept has broadened into what has come to be known as Web 2.0, or the read-write Web. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to characterize the 20th century as the read-only century and the present one as the read-write century. Lessig's point is that whereas the enterprise model dominated media distribution until only recently, we are rapidly entering an era where this is no longer the case. It is important that this development be better understood by its beneficiaries (all of us) as the impacts are far-reaching in the way we organize ourselves productively through our understanding of what it means to be 'literate'.

I don't intend to include all that follows in the course, but as background and illustration of how these models apply in the real world, we can draw from the following cases:

Thomas Freedman in his influential book The World is Flat discusses how IBM gave up developing its own enterprise rival to Apache server and instead contributed its best engineers to the Apache community in order to be able to resume a business model on which the deliverables would be enhancements to the Apache kernel. That’s just one example of the power of community to produce a superior product (for free) compared to a commercial, patented, closed-source one.

Another good example is characterized in the Blackboard vs. Moodle approaches to development of learning management systems (background information regarding this controversy abounds on the Internet; here is a link to a Feb 2007 article in the well-respected T.H.E. Journal).

My own perception is that Blackboard is becoming regarded in the Open Source community as an old-school Goliath who’s made waves and rocked boats by taking out patents on certain aspects of LMS’s that other developers consider open source and unpatentable. On the day its patents were granted Blackboard brought suit against one of its competitors, Desire to Learn, for royalties owed under the new patents. This has sent shivers down the rest of the open source CMS community in case Blackboard were to use its fait accompli at the patent office to go after users of Moodle and others, including end users, for not paying royalties to the patent holder. But now we see this being reversed one slingshot at a time. Blackboard is seen to be undermining its own potential customer base at the cost of its reputation in the educational community, and more recently there are moves afoot to have the patent decisions reversed.

While this is going on, Sakai, another white horse open source project, is reaching fruition. If you agree that Moodle, arguably the strongest open source rival to Blackboard to date, scales well to enterprise settings despite its lesser polish, then seemingly the only real argument for paying licensing fees to Blackboard is that it might be worth the costs (to some customers) for an LMS solution that appears more crisply enterprise in a Web browser. Sakai apparently looks the part, slick and groomed for enterprise, yet has been developed for free distribution as an open source project by educational entities each taking responsibility for developing different parts of it. It seems that this could be a rather large nail destined for the coffin of closed-source enterprise ventures.

I find this of great interest in my own work context, but I see these two examples appearing, if at all, as text boxes in the materials I envisage , whose purpose would be to make the point that open source is on its way to significantly augmenting if not replacing the enterprise model of software development.

So to continue with a course outline, I am thinking ...

1. Enterprise and Open Source software
2. An overview of Web 2.0 tools
3. Social Networking
4. Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management

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Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:

MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/

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AN OVERVIEW OF WEB 2.0 TOOLS

There are many hooks for a wider understanding and use of Web 2.0 tools in modern curriculum settings. Collaborative Google spreadsheets might be used in portfolio/project work for example. I’m not sure if you can format in Google docs to the extent you can in MS Word, but the potential is certainly worth exploring.

The two most salient Web 2.0 tools with application for our students are blogs and their close cousins podcasts and wikis, though there are many more -- online collaborative calendars, for example. I hope to list a few more here eventually; meanwhile:

• Many listings of Web 2.0 tools are linked from my Moodle course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments (guest access welcome).
• A well illustrated example of how the younger generation sees these tools as being used in various modalities ranging from social collaboration to enterprise project management can be found here: http://www.wsjb.com/RPC/V1/Home.html
• I have just come across a good listing of "Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies" at this wiki: http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Aggregation

The concept with greatest implication for collaborative and project work in education (and beyond, in the real world of collaboration and project management in the workplace) is that blogs and wikis can be aggregated.

I have an explanation of how this is accomplished at http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm. This document explains how blogs for a class can be aggregated via an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) in such a way that they can be efficiently read/followed by the teacher and others in the class, or by manager and co-workers in an enterprise project venture.

Tags

Blogs can be tagged, and tags also can be aggregated. One device for doing that is http://del.icio.us/ . Jon Pederson has developed a good explanation of how del.icio.us can be used to good effect by educators: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

The concepts of tagging and aggregation lie at the heart of social networking. For example, my son posts family photos at his Facebook acct and tags the ones of me DAD. I then get an email that tagged photos are available. I get the URLs of only my photos but the whole albums are available as long as the owner has indicated that s/he trusts me with them. I don’t think we need to introduce our students to Facebook here in the Middle East, but participation in social networking sites like Facebook illustrate how the concepts work in a social context.

Podcasting

Podcasting is one highly productive example of how these concepts can be focused on two important literacy goals:

1. achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
2. and staying abreast through lifelong learning.

In order to access podcasts, one needs to have a working knowledge of using an aggregator such as iTunes or Juice (a level of knowledge akin to knowing how to drive as opposed to knowing how to build or repair a car).

The working knowledge needed is two-fold:

1. ability to subscribe to podcasts
2. and to occasionally refresh subscriptions.

Internet search skills are needed to locate desired podcasts in the first place, and some multimedia and file management skills will help in downloading, storing, retrieving, and playing the files retrieved. A computer is all that is essentially needed for this, though most people like to transfer their files to an mp3 player and listen to them while away from their computer.

Although the only skill levels needed harvest podcasts are at the level of those needed while driving, higher education is pursued in order to achieve greater understanding, in the case of driving, of the mechanics and physical forces involved in converting energy to produce the torque to propel the car, etc. Similary, among the goals of a computer literacy course should be some understanding how RSS and aggregation works, and in theory how one can create one's own blogs and podcasts, and disseminate these to a wider audience through social networking skills.

Again, I have a Web document covering aspects of these issues: http://www.vancestevens.com/casting.htm

Conclusion

Enterprise is the ‘beyond’ application of these principles. But I think that blogs and wikis could be very well worked into current curriculum in student collaborative projects and in all aspects involving reporting findings from Internet search. These techniques and concepts could become built into those modules, and enable the class to pull together while learning about team techniques based in social networking concepts.

In not only social and enterprise but also in educational project/class management contexts, I think that these concepts are important because they show the way teams are learning to work together using the latest shareable Web-based technologies once they have achieved the requisite level of computer literacy.