And now, after a month of workshops and conferences, the back side of the flip

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.

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. 

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: http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/ .

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, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HwSaXa3mT2HrcQz2dh7dD1e7fTHaofIbU7hzexHp-ZU/edit?usp=sharing, the better to walk participants through the parts of my wiki that I would cover on a given day. 

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: http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138117909/archives2020

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.

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 EVO session on that topic, 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: 

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/

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.

I recorded this one myself, with a larger audience, better delivery on my part, and livelier dynamics with the participants, here: https://learning2gether.net/2020/02/09/teaching-english-through-coding-using-collaborative-projects-that-dont-require-specialist-skills-or-even-a-computer/

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. 

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, 

http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom

but at the Schoology link, I've yet to stock the shelves. I need to get that done today and tomorrow.

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, https://learning2gether.net/

Modeling your PLN: Backchanneling with Students

When many of us think about PLN, or Personal Learning Network, what we envisage involves colleagues sharing information in a social network or community of practice (see http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLN and http://delicious.com/vancestevens/PLE for numerous examples; and I've always liked Scott Leslie's nice collection of PLE diagrams: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams.

We less often think about setting up PLN's with students, but at http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09 I list one of the ten paradigm shifts that I think educators must make as they move into facilitating learning in the 21st century as being "transfer [or] using technology and social media in one walk of life and then transferring those heuristics for learning into the classroom and other teaching situations. For example, people who frequently use Facebook or Twitter might tend not to use social networking or backchanneling in the classroom, because they don't see how to transfer what they do in one part of their life to how they manage their more formal teaching and learning environment, because it's not in the curriculum, etc."

Educators backchannel through their PLNs but in fact we should all be doing this with students (see "Where 3 R's meet 3 C's" about what we should be teaching as 21st century life skills: creativity, communication, collaboration - http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/34037342/The-Three-Rs-Meet-the-Three-Cs). We should be modeling how we network in order to show students how they can do the same in order to become productive knowledge workers in those jobs in the future that haven't been invented yet, as articulated in http://webheadlink.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/jobs-that-havent-been-invented-yet/.

The problem is where networks might collide, as when we mix our social networks on Facebook or Twitter with the very different worlds of our students, and risk distracting clutter in our professional networks if students are allowed into them, or suspicion of impropriety at worst.

Twitter itself has introduced a solution: LISTS. Now you can create a list for your students or separate classes of students and add them to the appropriate list without having to "follow" them. In this way, they don't appear in your Twitter stream, but you can open a LIST and catch up with what they are up to that way.

There are other means of backchanneling in classrooms. Edmodo is one which I have used with students. It works well if people in the class monitor it, but the problem is, it isn't 'real'. We go to Twitter every day in the course of our normal workflow. You check Edmodo only when it occurs to you. Your students do the same. It lacks traction. But many teachers use it as a backchannel tool similar to Twitter, and because you need a code to join a group, it's safe for students.

Another good backchannel tool is Etherpad. This tool was so good that Google bought it to use its technology in Wave. Consequently the tool at http://etherpad.com is shutting down this month (http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/transition-update). However its code has been released as opensource (http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/) so it has already been resurrected in other implementations, and its code will live on as part of Google Wave, which could serve as a model for backchanneling with students or on any kind of project in their productive lives in the future (though a tool that would be effective with students needs to be a lot simpler to use than Wave is right now).

You can use Delicious or Twitter or Google to find other sites that have used the Etherpad code already; e.g. http://twitter.com/#search?q=etherpad and http://delicious.com/tag/etherpad. Readers of this post could help one another by leaving links in comments below to sites that use the Etherpad code; for example: http://piratepad.net/ and http://typewith.me/.

As to why we'd want to backchannel with students, I've found a couple of articles that explain the rationale and suggest some tools:

• This one is something of a classic: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
• Here's an article that talks about 9 ways Twitter can be used in the classroom: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=472. These include note-taking, sharing resources, commenting, amplifying, asking, questions, helping one another, offering suggestions, building community, and opening the classroom
• For backchannel tools: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/01/five-platforms-for-classroom-back.html. The tools introduced are Chatzy, Todaysmeet, Edmodo, Present.ly, and Google Wave
• I've got almost 200 bookmarks for Twitter here: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, many of them mentioning ways Twitter can be used with students.

This posting derives directly from my PLN.  It was originally a response to Lori Teng's comment on my post in one of my other blogs here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/how-to-start-your-pln-on-twitter.  If Lori hadn't commented on that post, and triggered in my brain all the synapses there I'd been storing up related to backchanneling with students, this article would never have been written.

This post therefore is yet another example of how a PLN works to cause us to model and demonstrate for one another, to reflect on and practice what we are learning, and to percolate how we develop our knowledge back into our communities and networks in an ongoing process of lifelong learning.

NOTES:
This post figured into a presentation I gave for a TESOL Arabia chapter event April 10, 2010.  The blog posting for that event, including a link to its recording, is here:
http://justcurious.posterous.com/modeling-and-demonstrating-professional-devel

Here are some Twitter reactions to this post:
http://screencast.com/t/NjI5YWY0M

Proposed chapter on Online Distance Training for ESL/EFL teachers: Case Study of a Community of Practice and its Distributed Learning Network

Have you ever submitted a proposal for something and sent it off and then forgot where you'd put it, so when your proposal was accepted and it came time to act on it, you couldn't retrieve it or remember exactly what you had proposed?

I have just submitted a proposal for a chapter which might appear in a book on teaching ESL online, assuming the book proposal itself is accepted.

In writing the proposal I realized that it answers succinctly in 300 words what people frequently ask me, how did Webheads come about, and what is Webheads anyway, and how does it fit into a framework of professional development? I have referred to this 'fit' as 'teacher autonomy' in this post here, for example, and also in the Slideshare presentation embedded below.

So here's the proposal. It would be useful if it attracted feedback, but apart from that, since it's here, I'll be able to retrieve and remember it later, and in case anyone asks me again about Webheads, this will be a convenient place to point them.

============

Webheads started in 1998 as an online community of EFL students and teachers learning together how technology facilitates language learning through computer-mediated communication. By around the turn of the century it was being dominated by teaching practitioners who in 2002 came to see themselves as a community of practice (CoP) known as Webheads in Action (WiA). As communication over the Internet expanded rapidly into voice and video, and with Web 2.0 making it possible for many users to create content online and share it in cyberspaces promoting social networking, many such communities arose and began overlapping in multiple memberships. This paper explores the concepts of groups, communities, and networks, and relates how WiA evolved from a group to a community (specifically, a CoP), and how this CoP developed contacts with others to function as part of a much wider distributed learning network (DLN) of teachers training one another.

The case of WiA models professional development through connectivism. At each node in the DLN, there is a person who is passionate and knowledgeable (and wants to learn more) about some aspect of teaching through technology. Collectively the nodes comprise the knowledge-base to which each member in each overlapping community has access. Connectivism provides a framework by which the development of pathways of access to that information is of primary importance to the information itself. Professional development then becomes a matter of educators blazing pathways to create channels through which each other's knowledge can be shared and made to flow in all directions, creating a dynamic system conducive to informal, just-in-time learning.

This paper describes how members of WiA utilize such connections to maintain conversations that enable everyone to learn about and practice with latest innovations in educational technology, and contribute to innovative and transformative teaching practices.

Let's start with teacher autonomy: Multiliteracies and Lifelong Learning

View more presentations from vances.

New Millenium Professional Development

I’ve been asked to propose a task force to promote the use of pedagogical technology at the place where I work. This has really got me thinking about how to preach to someone other than the choir. I think I'm going to need some help from my community on this one. I'm being asked to really effect change at an educational institute where there is not a lot of awareness of the very latest issues in educational technology and their impacts on learning. How do I start this ball rolling?

The first issue to be addressed before such a task force can be agreed upon is why it is needed? I believe it is needed, but why would anyone else think so? So the first task of the task force should be to determine its scope regarding the nature of the need in the perceptions of those concerned.

In helping the task force to approach such an analysis, I could suggest many things that my colleagues might want to read. It would be easy to go overboard here. I suppose I should select a baker’s dozen items that I think people should read, but thinking this through just a bit more, perhaps I should think of this as a baker’s dozen number of topics. Each topic would have a set of background readings, one of which would be the one I would recommend be read if one wanted to read just one thing on that topic. The other readings would be available in case the first reading succeeded in piquing interest in the topic.

Not all of the recommended items would be readings per se. A couple would be videos or other media. Sometimes these are more approachable than readings. The various media would illustrate the emergence of multiliterate approaches on the Internet.

Putting off for the moment coming up with the readings, here are the baker’s dozen of topics I am thinking to choose. Many of these items overlap and impinge on other items in the list (RSS is a major component in blogs for example, yet both topics are important enough to be treated separately, and the concept of blogging could accordingly stand alone apart from other asynchronous collaboration media mentioned in item 12.)

1. RSS and push/pull technologies and feed readers
2. Aggregation: tagging, Del.icio.us, and folksonomic classification systems as opposed to taxonomic ones
3. Podcasts: harvesting them primarily, but also producing them, as vital resources in ongoing professional development
4. Paradigm shift: multiliteracies and new learning heuristics
5. Blogging and microblogging
6. Digital storytelling
7. Social networking
8. Distributive learning networks: communities and connectivism
9. Web 2.0
10. Informal / just-in-time learning
11. Synchronous communications: instant messaging, online presentation venues incorporating interactive whiteboard, voice, and video
12. Asynchronous collaborations tools: blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Slideshare and similar, Google docs and similar, Google notebook

How can I expand and fine tune my list of items? I will engage my community of practice, my social network, my distributed learning network, my community of colleagues, most of whom I have never met face to face although we’ve been interacting for the past 5 or ten years. I have asked them for their advice.

This is in fact the key to staying up on the new technologies. It’s a question of keeping attuned to a network of people with something worth sharing. In the most recent age of print literacy one would encounter needed resources in libraries and through journal subscriptions, where the network would consist of a range of static authors.

In the new age it is possible to interact with writers and thinkers directly, but though this is possible and with emerging technologies this possibility can be exploited with great benefit to all concerned, for those who are hesitant to get 'up close' at the very outset, it is not absolutely necessary to interact with people synchronously any more than it is necessary to meet an author of a book or journal article. However, the crucial difference nowadays is in knowing where to find that network of people with information to share most relevant to the individual. It turns out that these people are less frequently publishing in traditional media. So the first thing to learn, as it is with what we should be teaching our students, is HOW we stay on top of things, given new developments in technology having major impacts on both literacy and learning.

So the first challenge of this task force should be to develop a core of educators where I work with a greater awareness of what the new technologies are and their potentials for education, what some people characterize as having transformational potentials. Once consciousness has been raised to a requisite degree, the task force can then begin identifying areas within existing curricula where these technologies might apply. It would be hoped in this phase to involve teachers within those departments who could in turn be made aware of the affordances made possible by principled use of technology in the service of the teaching goals of the various departments.

If anyone reading this has any ideas on how I can better approach this, or if you can think of other topics for my baker's dozen, I'd really appreciate your comments.

I am posting this in draft form in order to hopefully elicit comments and suggestions, but I intend to change this, for example to fill in the readings, at some point in the near future.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/2kkb3v

Meanwhile, Tom Robb was kind enough to send me a copy of his chapter:
Helping teachers to help themselves. In: Hubbard, Philip and Mike Levy (Eds.). Teacher education in CALL. 2006. xii, 354 pp. (pp. 335–347).
More about this book here: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LL%26LT%2014

Robb suggests that supporting teacher autonomy in technology at the program level would benefit from the following elements:

• Survey of institution's technical support environment
• Hire a (CALL or technology) specialist
• Recognize and reward self training and innovation
• Set up a faculty development program
• Budget for training and resource personnel (equal amounts on human, hardware, and software resources)
• Encourage networking
• Provide release time and funding
• and finally, the kicker: brute force, require the use of technology
  

Also Kim Cofino lists diverse aspects involved in "the shift to a 21st century learning environment" in her post: Making the shift happen, Always Learning (Feb 24, 2008):
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

1. Vision and philosophy - "Expecting teachers to change their practice, without providing a thought-out vision and philosophy for why they should change will only result in frustration."
   
2. Leadership - "at some point, school leadership needs to clarify and confirm that this is the direction the school is heading. There needs to be an official acknowledgment of the vision and philosophy and clear expectations that change will happen."
3. Paradigm shift and transparency - "you also need to develop a clear framework which details exactly what the roles are for each individual involved ... - each person on staff will be responsible for some aspect of this transition and they need to know how they fit into the bigger picture."
4. Curriculum and professional development - "Embedding this new model for teaching and learning into the curriculum development process is a natural way to institutionalize change - if it becomes part of our curriculum, it becomes part of our teaching and learning practice."
   
5. Staffing and equipment - "Why would we hire someone with no teaching load - someone who just “helps” people all day? Unfortunately, without the human support (which can range from being a teaching model in the classroom, to curricular or pedagogical support, to technical support, to a “safety blanket”) the technological troubles can end up feeling insurmountable for teachers new to this model of teaching and learning - exactly what you don’t want."
   
6. Infrastructure and communication - "Once staffing and equipment are sufficient, clear infrastructure and communication strategies need to be put in place ... Having resources and knowing how to access them or how to get support are all very different things."
   
7. Resources - "To help teachers and administrators cope with the rapid pace of technological change, developing easy to use resources (like “how to” sheets for both students and teachers, or common rubrics and assessment tools) can make the use of new tools far less intimidating."
   
8. Reflection and adaption - "Another important aspect of reflection is sharing our successes. Finding consistent ways to publicize success - not only within the school, but also to the wider school community, helps teachers gain confidence, explore new areas of teaching and learning, and promote positive attitudes towards this change. We can often get bogged down with solving problems, but sometimes the solution is sharing success."

Cofino's post provides numerous links to additional resources for developing the various aspects which must be addressed in accomplishing such a shift.

Webheads as agents of change in overlapping clouds of distributed learning networks

This is being prepared as a contribution to the APACALL Newsletter, http://www.apacall.org/news/news.html. I've been asked to write a 'three-page blurb on Webheads.'

Webheads is a group of enthusiasts keen on learning as much as possible about the role of technology in education and just as eager to help one another on our individual paths to learning and discovery. In this respect we have networked, or converged, or grouped together, as an anecdote to the problem of recidivism in teacher professional development, discussed in my previous posting here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/wow-of-week-recidivism-in-teacher.html

Webheads started in 1998 as a community of language learners and teachers who began meeting online about then, at a distance, to develop their skills in the learning and teaching of writing in English. In these days before blogging and the advent of the read-write century, Webheads were enabling learners to get to know and interact with one another by posting writings on mailing lists (interactive) and websites (static) with faces of writers appearing in thumbnail portraits next to their compositions, an idea that only later became well-known as a feature in Moodle and other socially oriented educational environments <http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/webheads.htm>. Participants in Writing for Webheads strengthened their bonds by meeting synchronously each Sunday noon GMT. At the start, meetings were in a compelling avatar-based space called The Palace, but when around the turn of the century it became possible to mount synchronous voice chat at our website, Webheads lost no time adding this new dimension to our weekly interactions, and from that time on we began attracting the attention of other online teachers, whom we invited to interact with us at first informally, but then at online events which we mounted at conferences, frequently online.

But with increasing frequency we were invited to appear at face to face events to show delegates at international conferences firsthand how easy it was to engage students in communication with one another using online tools freely available over the Internet. As more teacher voices joined our community, those of the students began to be suppressed. Seeing the need for separate teacher and learner groups, I formed Webheads in Action (WiA) as a session in the second TESOL/EVO annual training event in 2002. EVO, or Electronic Village Online, is a set of free grass-roots professional development seminars on various topics in language learning which take place the first two months of every year (see: http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/TESOL/EVOL/portal.htm).

The timing was impeccable as WiA was at the cutting edge of a movement that was soon to define use of the Internet in the read-write Web century that had just begun the new millennium. We were yet to see the tools which would carry this movement foreward, tools such as blogs, wikis, YouTube, and the proliferation of social networking sites. Yet the impetus was well in place and that first group of teaching practitioners became a dedicated core who have for the most part remained loyal to this beginning in 2002. "Becoming a Webhead" has been offered at every EVO event since 2004, and has in each instance been put on by participants in prior Webheads EVO sessions. Meanwhile, the Yahoo Group which served the first EVO session in 2002 has grown to well over 600 members (and anyone is welcome to join at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads).

Webheads have morphed in how they perceive themselves. In 2002 we thought of ourselves as a phenomenon which had emerged online from a YahooGroup, but this feeling of group quickly developed into the idea that we were a community, and for our first few years we explored the notion that we were a community of practice. This attracted a number of studies, including a dissertation on our group by Webhead Dr. Chris Johnson, which in turn led Etienne Wenger, perhaps the best known writer and researcher on communities of practice, to alter his notions of the CoP paradigm and explain how WiA had influenced his thinking at one of our online Webheads in Action Online Convergences, WiAOC 2007 (referenced below).

More recently, I have come to think of ourselves more as a network than as a community or group. I have been influenced in my thinking largely by George Siemens and his writings on Connectionism (2004) and by Stephen Downes and his numerous writings and podcasts, including his appearance at WiAOC 2007 at which he drove the point home (see also his slide show from a presentation on Distributed Learning, April 3, 2006, at http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/distributed-learning). Indeed, what Downes refers to as a distributed learning network seems to me to characterize the connections in Webheads and our overlap with a Venn diagram patchwork of other communities often largely populated by Webheads members.

The question of what constitutes a Webhead 'member' often comes up. I suppose you are recognized officially as a Webhead if you have enrolled in the YahooGroup, or in the Worldbridges drupal portal at http://www.webheadsinaction.org. Or you might consider yourself a Webhead if you frequent any of the sites listed in the portal that links to all the other Webhead portals here: http://webheads.info. I tell people that being a Webhead is like being a hippy. You know if you are one. And if you are one and see another one, there is likely to be an affinity between the two of you.

This notion of membership dissipates with the degree to which you consider yourself to be more a node on the network than a member of a group. The grouping is then defined by its connections, not by a particular sense of membership. In this perception, each node connects to many others and one cloud of connections might be called Webheads whereas many of the Webheads nodes might have tentacles linking to another cloud called EVO, which in turn would have nodes networked elsewhere but not necessarily directly to Webheads. To take another example, there is a cloud of networked nodes referred to as APACALL (the entity in whose newsletter this posting will soon appear), and many of those nodes reach back into Webheads. At each of our WiAOC convergences, APACALL members have interacted with Webheads as members of panels mounting presentations at those online conferences, so in a network sense, APACALL participants might feel themselves to be a part of the Webhead cloud of networked nodes, though they may not have necessarily joined the WiA YahooGroup, so they wouldn't in that sense be considered as Webheads 'members'. But they might have enrolled in the Worldbridges portal, and here would be another stimulating network, many of whose nodes reach also into the Webheads cloud.

What's interesting about this is what happens with "knowledge" in a network. Downes has a 'Where's Waldo' definition of what it means to know. You don't know where Waldo is until you know, and once you know, you can't not know it. This is a personal definition of knowledge, but we can't all know where Waldo is every time we need to find him, and this is where Webheads rely on their networks. Jay Cross says in his book on informal learning that "The work of the future is knowledge work." David Warlick pointed out in his recent K-12 Online Conference keynote that whereas his father learned in college what he would need to know for the remainder of his working life, his children would have no such assurance. In a so-called 'flat' world where the jobs we teachers train our students for have not been invented yet, those most competitive in the most likely future will be those whose networking skills are most sophisticated and refined.

This I think is what Webheads are about. We encourage one another to enhance our networking skills, learning the tools most appropriate for this as we use them with each other. We model for one another the most appropriate systems for enhancing connectionism and the sharing of knowledge within our distributed learning networks. As we ourselves become more familiar with the basic essential tools, we carry them into our workplaces and classrooms. As we involve our peers and students in effective ways of learning, we model for them, to try and break that cycle of recivitism, of going back to ways of teaching and learning that are becoming increasingly outmoded the further we get into the read-write century, the century where the knowledge worker will prevail.

Webheads are change agents. We work on the easy part first, to change one another. It's harder to effect change with those who are not yet networked or not so committed to learning that they will pay more than lip service to the pursuit of learning full time, which is what lifelong learning is. But the secret is not in teaching, not in assembling groups of students, like horses led to water. The key is in modeling, in showing people how to successfully network, to aggregate content, to work toward the creation of folksonomies through tagging, to pull in knowledge through imaginative use of key technologies like RSS rather than relying on what is pushed their way in email spam and glut of attachments. Another key is to connect, to interact with a network, to touch base frequently with other nodes in your distributed learning network.

But if you're reading this blog, you probably already know that (and if you're not reading this ... beyond reach?? ... sigh ... what's the use?).

As a final illustration of the points made here, an example means by which a distributed learning network might aggregate content, let's look up blog postings tagged webheadsinaction in Technorati, searching for blogs with 'any' authority: http://technorati.com/tag/webheadsinaction?authority=n&language=en

The result yields some insights into connections within our networked community. The first that I find today is a post by Nancy White entitled Community Indicator: Condolences,
citing "a blog that allows a distributed community of practice to share their condolences with a member whose father died." This might not be the kind of knowledge you would expect to be shared in a distributed learning network promoting professional development, as it refers to a personal situation not normally discussed among professionals. Yet read on to the next post, "Miso stalks Spike," an installment in the adventures of a Webhead from Canada who is on an extended trip by van to Mexico (and whom I had encouraged to tag her blog posts 'webheadsinaction' so we in the community would be able to locate and read her posts). Next, there are YouTube videos, including one of Carla's son Dudu explaining the meaning of thanksgiving (Carla is from Brazilia but has just moved to Key West, where her son is showing off an remarkable command of assimilated language and culture). What is all this, you might ask? Not what you expected? It's another key ingredient of Webheads, from the days of thumbnails next to writings and voices in synchronous chat. That ingredient is personality.

Caring about one another is the secret ingredient that has held this community together for almost ten years now. That, plus a proven track record of keeping one another at the cutting edge of educational technology over the past decade while introducing newcomers to the process in an effective and non-threatening manner.



References

Cross, Jay. (2007). Informal Learning. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Downes, Stephen. (2007). Personal Learning the Web 2.0 Way. Presented at WiAOC 2007 - http://www.webheadsinaction.org/wiaoc2007/StephenDownes.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/personal-learning-the-web-20-way.
Recordings: Part 1: http://streamarchives.net/node/84;
Part 2: http://streamarchives.net/node/83

Johnson, Christopher M. "Establishing an Online Community of Practice for Instructors of English as a Foreign Language." Ph.D. Dissertation in Computing Technology in Education from Nova Southeastern University

This case study examined an online group's degree and presence of CoP characteristics, as gleaned from CoP theory. The study analyzed the group's synchronous and asynchronous communication to determine what areas received the most and least "airplay", and how they changed over time. One topic for discussion is how this type of analysis can be used (e.g., comparison to another type of online group, maturity stage of a CoP, "health" of a CoP, etc.). - From CPSquare News, September 7, 2006, http://www.cpsquare.org/News/archives/000073.html

Siemens, George. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.

Warlick, Davd. (2007). Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning. Keynote presentation at K-12 Online Conference. http://k12onlineconference.org/?cat=7

Wenger, Etienne. (2007). Conversation with Suzanne Nyrop. Presentation at WiAOC 2007 - http://www.webheadsinaction.org/wiaoc2007/EtienneWenger.
Slides: http://www.flickr.com/photos/netopnyrop/503628210/in/set-72157600229137116/.
Recordings - Part 1: http://streamarchives.net/node/56;
Part 2 : http://streamarchives.net/node/55

Bibliography on Webheads

Stevens, Vance. 2006. Guest Editor's Introduction: Proceeds of Webheads in Action Online Convergence: Volume 2. In Stevens, V. (Ed.) 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). http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_edit25.htm

Stevens, Vance. 2006. Guest Editor's Introduction: Proceeds of Webheads in Action Online Convergence: Volume 1. In Stevens, V. (Ed.) IATEFL Poland Computer Special Interest Group Teaching English with Technology A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 Vol. 6, Issue 2 (May 2006). http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_edit24.htm

Stevens, V. (2004). Webheads communities: Writing tasks interleaved with synchronous online communication and web page development. In Leaver, B. and Willis, J. (Eds.). Task-based instruction in foreign language education: Practices and programes. Georgetown University Press. pp. 204-217.

• There is a full text of a late draft of my article here, though references are not included: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/taskbase_ch10june192003.htm.
• Here is a Commentary: from the Linguis list, May 2005. AUTHORS: Leaver, Betty Lou; Willis, Jane R. TITLE: Task-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education SUBTITLE: Practices and Programs PUBLISHER: Georgetown University Press YEAR: 2004 "CHAPTER TEN: Webhead communities: Writing tasks interleaved with synchronous online communication and web page development (Vance Stevens) Another instance of virtual classroom implementing writing tasks is described in this chapter. The author reports activities of groups of learners and teachers involved in online writing practices. The writing tasks were aimed at purposeful interaction and technology was a vehicle of implementing pedagogical principles not the driving force. The author's initiative for conducting an online writing and grammar course is reported to have been the starting point of this community of online writers called Webheads. The group interactions involved various topics including projects on which teachers interacted and themes and tasks of interest to learners. Cost, ease of use, multicasting capability, and cross platform adaptability were the criteria in selecting the tools for computer mediated communication. Email groups, web pages, and synchronous chat were the major modalities of interaction and implementation of tasks. After a brief discussion on evaluation and in the conclusion section the author mentions lowering affective obstacles and promoting a sense of community as the main message from the project and recommends that the model be applied in other situations. In an appendix some technology related issues are dealt with.

Stevens, V. and Altun, A. (2002). The Webheads community of language learners online. In Syed, Z. (Ed.). The process of language learning: An EFL perspective. Abu Dhabi: The Military Language Institute. pp. 285-318. There is a pre-publication version of this paper at http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/papers/t2t2001/proceeds.htm

Stevens, Vance. 2001. Developing a Community in Online Language Learning. In Syed, Zafar, and David Heuring, eds. Tools of the Trade: Teaching EFL in the Gulf. Proceeds of the Military Language Institute's 1st annual Teacher-to-Teacher Conference, May 3-4, 2000, Abu Dhabi (UAE) pp 85-101, and on the web at http://lightning.prohosting.com/~vstevens/t2t2000/gvs_t2t_paper.htm.

Coghlan, M. and Stevens, V. 2000. An Online Learning Community -- The Students' Perspective. Paper presented at the Fifth Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, April 12-14, 2000. Retrieved May 6, 2005 from http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/TCC2000.htm

Stevens, Vance. 1999. Writing for Webheads: An online writing course utilizing synchronous chat and student web pages. A paper submitted for the 4th Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference: Best Practices In Delivering, Supporting & Managing Online Learning, April 7-9, 1999 - http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/hawaii99.html

Notes:

A Newsletter ready version of this post appears here:
http://webheadlink.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/webheads-as-agents-of-change-in-overlapping-clouds-of-distributed-learning-networks/

This article has since been published here:
Stevens, Vance. (2007). Webheads as agents of change in overlapping clouds of distributed learning networks. APACALL Newsletter 11, pp. 3-8. Retrieved December 18, 2007 from: http://www.apacall.org/news/Newsletter11.pdf.

WOW of the Week: Recidivism in teacher professional development

Having listened twice to Derek Wenmoth's Professional Learning Networks keynote “Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice” at the recent K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=181 I was all ears when Derek was interviewed on a recent Women of Web 2.0 webcast #51 http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/2594

Derek said a couple of things during the conversation that I thought were well worth blogging. For one thing he said that in New Zealand they had selected individuals in institutes to receive funding in hopes that this would enhance technology at the entire institute through a trickle down effect, but post-studies revealed negligible evidence of trickle down. This doesn't suprise me given the tendency in many institutes for there to be just one or a few people really interested in technology and the majority of people at those institutes either ignoring them or at best largely avoiding the issue. This seems to indicate that funding the norm is not necessarily conducive to the spread of technology at educational institutes and that an institution-wide kick would be needed in order to impact change.

The second thing that Derek said that really grabbed me was to relate how a colleague had been studying the effects of programs of professional development and had come to the conclusion that in cases where teachers did not pursue a course of PD beyond a particular salient event, they were likely to revert to teaching in the way they had been taught within a certain number of months (was it 7? I'll listen again).

Given the vogue in considering learning networks as ecologies, here is a case of ontogony recapitulating philogony, or the offspring or product of a training program reverting to features inherent in a long line of previous trainers. This is to say that something more than a one-off course or training session is needed in order to really cause change in teaching methods. Calling forth a phlosophy of Zen and the Art of Maintaining a Respectable Commitment to Professional Development, it behooves us to realize that change must come from within. It is something that must be worked at continually, through blogging and reading blogs for example, or listening to podcasts such as the one I refer to here, through podcasting oneself occasionally, and through familiarity with what is involved in doing all that in order to inculcate similar learning heuristics in students by MODELING for them, through a teacher's personal professional development habits, what techniques and methods will help keep learners (lifelong-learning students and peers) connected to professional learning networks wherein new-age knowledge resides.

In conference presentations lately I have developed a set of ten aspects of change that are required by educators in order to undergo the shift in mindset that will lead to paradigm shift appropriate to integration of the latest technologies into educational settings. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then the one shown here represents what I normally have to say on this topic. The slide pictured is from the show here: http://docs.google.com/PresentationEditor?id=ddkc6v4f_40cvxvjm

Incidentally, I realize that I have two lists of items numbered 1-5 (hey, do the math!). The problem is that I was not able to get Google Presentation to number a second column of bulleted items consecutively after the first. If you know how, you might leave me a comment.

Who's in charge here? WiZiQ and Elluminate

Late breaking news Dec 18 - I've heard from both Elluminate and WiZiQ by now and have finalized this piece. I'll reconcile this blog with the most current version eventually but for right now, to read the latest version of this article, please visit:
http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/07dec/wiziq_elluminate.htm
or Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/23lbgo

Incidentally, if you wish to comment, please read the latest version and leave your comment below. Soon, the version here will mirror the latest version in its temporary location.

The ABOVE version should appear here within a day or two: http://tesl-ej.org/ej43/int.html

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I wrote this in a hurry and posted it Nov 24 which was right before a publication deadline for TESL-EJ, as this article is intended for the On the Internet column in the December 2007 issue. But the deadline has since been extended to Dec 16 (and slightly beyond) and so there is time to get feedback from the developers at Elluminate and WiZiQ prior to the new deadline. This is being solicited, and also, WiZiQ have meanwhile announced the following enhancements to what I used to write my article:

1. More Documents: Support for Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets.
2. Attendee rights: Off by default; presenter can transfer audio or video control selectively.
3. Two-way video: You and your attendee can share each others’ live video during the session.
4. Whiteboard Tools: The drawing and writing toolbar now includes a “Delete” button. “Undo” and “Redo” also added.
5. New Look and Feel: Panels for chat, attendee list and audio, video settings now occupy the right side.

There is more information at WiZiQ's blog here: http://wiziq.typepad.com/wiziqcom/2007/12/vc-update---mic.html


Meanwhile, here's the article as currently submitted to the December 2007 issue of TESL-EJ

Meanwhile still, Michael Coghlan informs me that "the latest version of Elluminate (v.8) has full duplex for up to 4 speakers if you choose to enable that feature." He says he most often opts to leave it off, and this was discussed last night at Webheads, Svetlana wanting to replicate a f2f classroom online, and me pointing out that the technology wasn't up to it because of feedback when participants don't wear headphones (moderators always having to troubleshoot that one) and also DELAYS ... in a meeting the other day we had one participant appearing rude interrupting other speakers (on full duplex) when in fact he was simply experiencing delay and was responding at appropriate junctures ... we have also experienced this when attempting guitar jams online .. impossible to synch up).

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A recent Women of Web 2.0 webcast http://www.edtechtalk.com/WomenofWeb2.0 (and subsequent podcast, on the Worldbridges EdTechTalk channel http://www.edtechtalk.com/) discussed the hottest Web 2.0 applications these days (obvious grist for an On the Internet column editor). Honorable mention went to NetVibes <http://www.netvibes.com/>, VoiceThread <http://voicethread.com/#home, and WiZiQ <http://www.wiziq.com/>, among others.

This article is an attempt to compare the free and open source, social networking Web 2.0 tool WiZiQ with Elluminate, one of its more successful enterprise counterparts, not just as per features of the two programs, but regarding the use of each tool that the design of each respectively forces or allows

WiZiQ currently is all the rage on Webheads and Learning with Computers, two email lists with around 1000 tech using educators interacting constantly in dozens of email messages each day (message archives viewable online or via RSS feeds from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/ and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/, repectively), and it's also a popular topic in the edublogosphere. For a quick overview of WiZiQ, there's a slick promotional video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yty0cPzlcU. What WiZiQ is and why is it so popular with tech-crunching educators is what I have been reflecting on recently, in conjunction with the critical issue in education of who exactly is in change here?.

First I should explain that WiZiQ is a free presentation software working entirely online, no download to your computer, that allows you to interact with other participants in a common virtual space. The space contains a whiteboard, which users can turn into multiple whiteboards, and upload PowerPoint slide shows to one or more of them. The slide shows are hosted more or less permanently at WiZiQ where they can be searched on by content, tags, or groupings, a feature reminiscent of Slideshare <http://www.slideshare.net/>. Users can also converse synchronously in full duplex, and if the moderator has elected to enable web cams, he or she can select one to display from participants who have theirs on. On the down side, there is no web tour, though URLs can be posted to the text chat.

All sessions are automatically recorded and are available at the URL where the session was hosted. Sessions can be hosted by anyone registered with WiZiQ and anyone registered can attend any other session to which they have been invited. The system is similar to Skypecasting, where any registered Skype user can start one, and only registered Skype users would be able to attend, which seems not out of the ordinary in the case of Skype, since you need the software on your computer and a Skype ID to skype (the verb) someone anyway.

WiZiQ takes advantage of registration in a way not exploited by Skype, however. WiZiQ has set itself up as a social networking site. Users can update their profiles with concepts they are interested in (i.e. tags) and presumably this will help link up users with common interests, though the system is new and (at time of deadline) we haven't yet found how a tag which many users share evolves into a more formal 'group'. The system does allow members to create and join groups, and to form networks of associations between users. For example, if you set up a session, you can choose to invite everyone in your group or limit the invitation to selected members in your network and they will all receive a message which not only informs them of your session, but to which they can conveniently reply. This is a feature that seems to work well with WiZiQ, though I have received messages from people I didn't realize I was networked with. WiZiQ is clearly a work in progress, under development, but with social networking sites, unless you directly probe the developer, many of the features will become apparent only after extensive usage and interaction.

One reason that WiZiQ has attracted so much attention is that educators are always on the lookout for free tools that promote synchronous interaction coupled with information dissemination within a network, especially one that lends itself to a formal venue, such as a class or a 'presentation' online. WiZiQ is the first product of its kind to emerge since the recent DimDim effort http://www.dimdim.com/, a similar, and open source, project which somehow seems to have receded from the periscope views of the instructor networks mentioned above. In that project, network members such as Moira Hunter had been working closely with the developer of DimDim. In the case of WiZiQ, the developer Harman Singh, appears to be similarly approachable, and responds personally to feedback from users.

Preferences vary, but one popular choice of an integrated set of online presentation tools has been Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com/. Although Elluminate is not free, it is often used for free by educators when they participate in sponsored or funded online conferences or sessions, or work through a community like Learning Times http://www.learningtimes.org/, which has provided free access to an Elluminate "Meeting Room" on its left sidebar for years. Learning Times has also been gracious in providing access to Elluminate meeting rooms for individuals and events which in turn provide educational services for free. For example, they have donated their services as sponsors of two WiAOC Conferences now http://wiaoc.org/. Elluminate itself has just started offering free 'rooms' to educators, but supplies each with only enough bandwidth for three participants: http://elluminate.com/vroom/.

Elluminate has proven to be a very robust platform despite being heavy on the front end at low bandwidths (it checks to see if the most recent version is on your computer and takes a few minutes to install the latest, and then it checks three proxies -- your browser, Java, and Elluminate itself -- which must all be set correctly, but which you would notice only if trying to connect from behind a firewall). Once connected, it generally works pretty well. It's cross platform and fairly intuitive to use, which is to say that in practice few complain of problems figuring out how to use it. The room will have been assigned a URL, but once this is given out, guests can enter the room with or without a moderator present. The moderator can assign other moderators to share power, and can remove those privileges as easily. The moderator can also grant individuals the right to use mics or web cams. With Elluminate, speech only works one direction at a time, but this works well since it imposes a turn taking order. The moderator can also 'take back' the mic in case a participant neglects to relinquish it (resulting in too long a silence).

Whereas only one web cam can be shown at a time, as long as the moderator has allowed it, participants can self-select to broadcast whenever the cam spot is available, and a preview mode allows for preening prior to going prime time. Participants also have access to a whiteboard onto which they can superimpose text, paint graphics, or image files from their personal disk drives, and a moderator can upload PowerPoint or other prepared materials, and can drive web tours in such a way that all participants visit the same URLs. Elluminate also allows moderators to share applications, for example a browser window. This differs from a web tour because with application sharing, the moderator can scroll and all participant windows will scroll as well.

Unlike WiZiQ, recordings are not made automatically, but when activated the recording is hosted on Elluminate servers, where it can be played back by anyone with access to the URL. As with WiZiQ, if there is a way to save a copy to a personal computer, I am not aware of it. However, some users make Camtasia versions of recorded sessions which can serve as personal archives or be hosted privately <http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp>, and word on the street is that TechSmith has released the only slightly outdated version 3 of Camtasia Studio as a free (as opposed to trial) download: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/22/techsmith-offers-free-camtasia-studio-download/. Camstudio, the open source version of Camtasia, should work just as well <http://camstudio.org/>.

Elluminate lends itself well to a variety of styles of presentation. It works well with informal groupings where people just want to meet and discuss while sharing collaborative resources, and it works well for people who want to make more formal presentations but open participation to more audience interaction during or after the presentation. In my experience I have never thought it necessary to restrict anyone's access to the tools while moderating a session, though I have attended sessions where moderators have preferred to lock it down and force participants to request attention before being granted access to the mic once the moderator had notified them that such requests would be attended to (when the moderator has wished to restrict access during the presentation itself). Elluminate allows participants to raise hand icons to request attention, to clap hands, present a thumbs up or down, and control various other emoticons and graphical whiteboard icons as well, again assuming these have been allowed by the moderator. Elluminate, in other words, works well for moderators who wish to encourage peer to peer collaboration throughout a session, as well as for moderators who feel the stakes are high enough for them to exercise enough control to enable them to stage-manage an event.

However, what I have been reflecting on with regard to these two applications -- WiZiQ and Elluminate -- is not so much the descriptive differences between them, but the philosophical ones, the assumptions behind what a presenter's purpose would be which must have driven design of each system. What particularly interests me is WiZiQ's approach, so different from that of Elluminate, to the role of the presenter/moderator. Two other differences have been mentioned and are not really part of my reflection, though each is an important crucial difference in its own right. These are the fact that WiZiQ is free and is being developed obviously in hopes of attracting a following, and presumably feedback such as I am providing here, and secondly its social networking features, very interesting, but not a focus of this review.

A WiZiQ session develops very differently to an Elluminate one. First of all, the moderator will schedule a session, as is the right of anyone who has registered with WiZiQ beforehand. At this stage the moderator can elect to enable the web cam feature for the upcoming session in addition to voice. The moderator can schedule any amount of time for the session up to two hours (and I believe that once in the session, the moderator can top up the session with more time if needed).

However, the role of the moderator in WiZiQ is very different from that of the moderator of an Elluminate session. Most crucially, in a WiZiQ session, the moderator must be pro-active in driving the interaction from the point of appearing on time for the session to begin with. Let's say the moderator has scheduled the session for noon, and has invited a number of participants from his or her network. Those people will receive an email saying that the session begins at noon, and no one, not even the moderator, can enter the session before then. The moderator is then in a position of having to upload materials to the whiteboard with participants present who have been informed that the session was to begin at noon. One way to avoid this would be to not invite anyone from the moderator's network, so there would be no system-generated emails, and the moderator might then invite participants through a separate network to arrive for a presentation set to begin at 12:30, or whenever the moderator expects to be ready. However, this would obviate benefits inherent in the social network features, so what is needed here is the ability of the moderator to get in beforehand and set up the session.

WiZiQ allows for fully duplex voice chat, as you get with Skypecasts, which start similarly to a WiZiQ session. WiZiQ at least deals with one problem with Skypecasts - in WiZiQ participants arrive muted until granted permission to speak. This is both bane and boon, boon to the moderator who is the sole participant who is able to speak until he or she decides to start granting others the mic, and bane in case the moderator is not there for whatever reason. In that case participants must text chat, as there would be no one available to allow them to talk. With Elluminate, it should be recalled that participants who gather at a working Elluminate room will be fully voice empowered unless a moderator arrives who wishes to switch them off.

Because of its simplex, one-person-speaks-at-a time functionality, Elluminate users do not encounter the problems faced by users of Skype and WiZiQ when everyone is able to talk at once -- these issues being background noise and feedback. With Elluminate, it might also be recalled that users in general need little or no training in order to participate, but with Skype and WiZiQ considerable time and effort often has to be expended on mic etiquette. Users of duplex synchronous voice chat tools need to wear headsets so that their mics don't pick up what others are saying from the speakers and feed it back into the voice stream with delay, giving an echo effect that can disrupt speech in the person trying to speak. In worst cases, this can cause high-volume whine until the offending user self-mutes or is muted. Similarly when participants are in an area with loud background noise, they need to mute their mics when not speaking so that the noise doesn't distort the conversation being played to everyone else.

If the moderator has to deal with sound issues while trying to present, this increases task load, so a course of least resistance for moderators is to simply leave the default settings in place, so that everyone but the moderator is muted. The moderator then opens up one mic at a time in response to a hand raised, the icon provided for participants to get attention. Similarly, if the moderator has activated web cams for the session, then the moderator's web cam will appear from the moment it is switched on, but for others to have the cam, the moderator must select that person and pass web cam control on. If the moderator is on the ball, this might be a good way to ensure that anyone who is speaking is pictured while speaking, but then the moderator would be taking on a role of director or puppeteer, constantly switching between speakers and web cams by granting the appropriate privileges at just the right juncture in the presentation.

Another odd thing happens in WiZiQ when the moderator grants voice permission, and that is that permission to use a microphone brings with it permission to have moderator control over whiteboards, including the option to create new ones and toggle from one to another. It's hard to second guess the developers of the product on this one, but the ramifications are several-fold. In particular, the moderator cannot grant many participants microphone privilege without a corresponding increasing in chance of chaos occurring with whatever presentation materials are on the screen. If the moderator stopped on a particular slide for example and invited comment and then threw the floor open to all participants, all participants might start seeing the slides and whiteboard changing without anyone knowing who was making the changes, and when the moderator regained control there might be a few whiteboards more than when the chaos started.

So it must have been assumed in designing this system that the moderator would not think to do this. In our experiments with this system we have found that the moderator would be in any event unwise to un-mute all mics due to the sound issues mentioned earlier, so the system seems to have been designed with less flexible view of how a moderator might want to conduct a session than that allowed by Elluminate.

What then must a moderator do in order to make an effective presentation in WiZiQ, and what would a group do in order to hold an effective brainstorming session in WiZiQ? These are important questions to raise at this time, while WiZiQ and perhaps other similar products are under development, and while the developers are still in a position to respond to feedback from the educational community.

In its present rendition, WiZiQ is designed for a moderator who wishes to have control. In practice, that moderator is kept a bit busy to be both moderator and presenter. There are a lot of balls to juggle, trying to sort out the duplex audio issues, manage the web cams, plus toggle the whiteboards, in addition to making a presentation which entails conversation with participants. Even in Elluminate, where moderation is not quite so hands on, moderators find it convenient to work in tandem, one person presenting and another handling the back channels. This is possible in Elluminate because one moderator can appoint another (but is not yet an option in WiZiQ). It might be wise for WiZiQ to go the same route, and provide this option to the main moderator. Also, it would help to allow moderators finer control over privileges, instead of bundling such a wide set of privileges with anyone who is able to use a microphone.

So to answer the first question above, to make an effective presentation in WiZiQ, the moderator needs to keep control of it, and this is best done by withholding control from others, or by being careful and abstemious in how that control is parceled out. In my experience with similar tools, and due to my idiosyncratic personal learning and presentation style, I do not take as great pleasure in participating in discussions where participants are not free to interject as in those where they have this right. Here preference of style would be a matter of personality, but with Elluminate one has the choice of adopting the approach one prefers. With WiZiQ that choice is made of necessity.

As to the next question, how best to run a brainstorming session with more relaxed participants, WiZiQ would be a good choice for this because it is free, and would likely be adopted by members of a community, who might also wish to take advantage of its social networking aspects. In such a community, where members would interact over time, they would likely get to know one another and would educate each other in proper use of the tools (how to mute mics and wear headsets for example). WiZiQ appears to me to have its strengths in situations which would benefit from access to social networking tools, and connectivist philosophy.

So if one were to make the choice right now which client one were to choose, it would depend perhaps on how much money one had (WiZiQ is free), how high the stakes were within one's community (Elluminate is more stable and robust, and more flexible with regard to role of moderator), and whether or not the social networking possibilities with WiZiQ were worth exploring. WiZiQ is developing an enthusiastic following, and as part of a community of users that includes its developers, the possibility at this juncture of influencing the course of development is additionally encouraging.

Perhaps this article can contribute to the development effort. In order to encourage feedback I have blogged it at http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/whos-in-charge-here-wiziq-and.html. If you feel you have anything to contribute to this discussion, please visit the blog and add your two cents, and/or leave comments at the 'official' WiZiQ blog at http://wiziq.typepad.com/. You can also subscribe to Elluminate blog reviews at http://www.elluminate.com/rss/blogs.xml.

Post-WiAOC 2007: CONNECTing Conversations on Networking, Education - aftermath

Webheads http://webheads.info has just finished its second almost-annual, universally global, completely free, online conference. http://wiaoc.org. I say 'just' but the conference, which we also term a 'convergence' ended ten days ago. And I'm just now finding time to blog it.

It's not that I'm lazy or spaced out, but the convergence took all spare time from me for many weeks leading up to it, and when it ended I had desperately to attend to odds and ends I'd been holding at bay, like spending time with a neglected family and creating exams and giving and marking them plus a backlog of student assignments, and finalizing grade reports (which I just now finished; hence my return to posting here).

And finally I'm looking forward to having time for some reflection. I'm at the stage where suddenly a halcion summer has appeared as a gently spreading plateau at the end of a long uphill struggle, and I'm staring ahead at three months of being able to spend time on my own projects for a change.

I have some interesting projects in the works. I just emerged from a planning meeting at my workplace and discovered that it is being assumed that my role in upcoming development in courses I teach will be to implement a web 2.0 multiliteracies, blogging, social networking component in a syllabus that focuses heavily on transiting from Office 2003 to 2007 (should I introduce Open Office? that would be a thrust too far I'm afraid). I had blogged my plans for this curriculum component much earlier here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/02/multiliteracies-and-curriculum.html but it has only now been confirmed to me that this is what I'll be working on next term.

I'm elated at that because it fits in with courses I'm giving in Spain this summer, and perhaps in Sudan in August (see http://www.vancestevens.com/papers), and I've been doing courses and workshops lately in web 2.0 and in particular an interesting project on writingmatrix which I just posted on in a self access learning list.

The question on the self-access list was how to keep students learning English over the summer, in particular how to encourage them to engage in "conversation/interaction of meaning/substance"

I suggested for "written conversation/interaction of meaning/substance -- Keep blogs?

"The teacher could promise to comment on them from time to time during the summer. The teacher could manage this task by using bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com.

"To learn how to start blogs students and teachers can use this tutorial:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/blogger_tutorial.htm

"But students could seek out students from other countries and have some fun making new friends this summer by joining in the writingmatrix project. To do this your students simply tag their summer fun postings writingmatrix. Then they can use http://www.technorati.com/ (search on tags) to find other blog posts with the writingmatrix tag. When they find another blog they like of someone else in the writingmatrix project they simply leave a comment and perhaps invite that person to view their blog."

I further noted that "at http://wiaoc.org/ project members organized a presentation entitled Writingmatrix: CONNECTing students with blogs, tags, and social networking, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/. The other teachers are Nelba Quintana and Rita Zeinstejer (from Argentina), Doris Molero (from Venezuela), and Sasha Sirk (Slovenia).

I put my slides explaining the project online here http://www.slideshare.net/vances/vance-writingmatrix-wiaoc2007/ and the other contributions are posted at http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174 .
A recording of the presentation at WiAOC can be found here:
http://streamarchives.net/node/48

"This is an attempt to utilize the social networking aspect of blogs (via the simple means of tagging posts in such a way that identifies each posting as being that of another student in the project) to enable students to make friends through blogging. If it works for you or your students I'd appreciate having your feedback."

Then to check on the project I went to Technorati and did a search on writingmatrix: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

I was looking to see what students had posted but I came upon a blog post that mentioned writingmatrix but was tagged wiaoc 2007: http://maryhillis.blogspot.com/2007/05/wiaoc-2007.html. Mary Hillis had visited the convergence but found she really liked our presentation, the one mentioned above, and another one on blogging by Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel, and Ronaldo Lima. It is gratifying to see that aggregation based on tagging is working and is indeed putting like-minded students and teachers in touch with one another.

I left a comment of course.

And if Mary stops by here, "Hi Mary!"

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Someone responded to my list posting, asking "How do you tag?"
Here is my response:

What are known as TAGS in social networking might be called something else in various blogs and wikis. For example, in Blogger they are called LABELS in English and Etiquetas in Spanish Blogspot blogs, and probably something else in German. There’s a good article on Tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags. This explains the concept but doesn’t tell you how to do it.

I’ve also seen tags called ‘categories’

Technorati focuses on blogs and analyses what’s out there according to their tags (among other features).

We have a project where we try to get kids late teens to tag (or ‘label) their blog posts writingmatrix . To find the post I visit
http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

and there, just grabbing one at random, http://leonardobravo726.blogspot.com/2007/05/welcome-to-my-blog.html, I find it’s one of Doris’s students from Maracaibo. Doris works at URBE. This students tagged his blog posting efl, introduction, urbe, and writingmatrix. I found it by requesting tags for writingmatrix. If you searched all blog posts tagged efl you’d probably turn up thousands, but if you were looking for URBE for example, you’d find fewer, and some of these would be tagged writingmatrix as well.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+urbe and got 4 hits but I’m sure there are more. We still haven’t learned how all this really works. We need teachers in this mix to help us figure it out.

Still playing around, I tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+urbe and got 29 hits, so I think this is the correct syntax.

I've tagged this post in a number of ways. You can find my tags below where it says 'labels for this post.' You might be able to find my post (this one) with a technorati search on writingmatrix but I also used wiaoc2007 and vance among many other tags.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+vance and got 5 hits, but none of them what I was looking for (this post, at least not yet ;-) (and same results for http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+vance). There were surprises.

One of the teachers in the project is starting a tag project on serendipity, and serendipity is exactly where this leads. And if you think this is fun, wait till we get on to del.icio.us. That’s where the kids will really get carried away (find out who’s reading their posts, who’s tagging them, what they’re tagging them ;-)

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/serendipity

And got 32,000 hits, starting at 15 min ago. This is a case where I would recommend Rita try TWO tags serendipity+writingmatrix to narrow down the field. Right now there are no hits in that combination, which means it would probably work VERY well if she has her kids do it the multiple-tag way.

You can also tag flickr photos, google maps (I think, or if not there must be 3rd party software that allows it), and at least half the stuff if not 99% of what you can put up on the read-write web 2.0. So students can take pics during their hols and post them online and tag them writingmatrix or whatever and their friends can find them.

You’ll find you have that opportunity (to tag) on almost any web 2.0 site. It might take some looking for but it’s worth doing.

Unarticle: Unleashing the transformative power of the unorganized Internet

Webhead Link hangs out midwater near a pod of orcas at Meteora in Second Life while over in Breeze, Sean FitzGerald observes that "students are into different technologies than teachers ... teachers are into email, blogs, and del.icio.us ... students are into texting, IM and MySpaces."

Deadlines are a mother of invention. By March 10 this time around I had neither an article in hand for my 'column' in TESL-EJ nor a clear purpose for writing one (hence this unarticle). But I'm constantly 'On the Internet', too constantly in the opinion of some, and have in mind unleashing a stream of consciousness on the many convergences I'm playing with there at the moment. I'm not sure if you'll feel enlightened or inflicted upon after reading this but here goes.

The most immediate inspiration for this unarticle came from a community I've been enjoying interacting with lately, a group of engaging Antipodeans who just recently held an unconference. In case you were wondering, an 'unconference' according to Wikipedia, and these days, what's not according to Wikipedia, is "a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference >

In order that their unconference would not be uneventful however, someone did take it upon themselves to set up a wiki for it <http://talo.wikispaces.com/swapmeet07a>, and watching this wiki grow over time was a lesson in the wisdom of crowds: how a group of people can organize themselves into a viable focus while working through a Web 2.0 online tool which participants edit from computer workstations in countries all over the world, with little apparent editorial control over the process.

For an excellent example of how wikis undergo change over time, and how a distributed network operates to mediate both vandalism and radicalism, check out the fascinating screencast of the evolution of the article in Wikipedia on 'Heavy metal umlaut": http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html .

The impetus for this particular unconference was a "Swapmeet" or face-to-face gathering of teachers in Adelaide, whose participants would fly in from other parts of Australia and New Zealand, but because they convene throughout the year via a listserv (called TALO, Teaching and Learning Online) their group includes many educators in many parts of the world far, far from Adelaide. Some of these people wanted to be included at a distance, and since the group's domain of interest is to enhance collaboration through connectivity, they had the wherewithal to do so. So these participants used the availablity of online tools which made possible for anyone in the group to write on various free online spaces so that each could contribute something to the unconference agenda and thereby make the on-site events accessible no matter where people happened to be checking in from.

You can easily see where the participants came from by visiting the Frappr map that was until just recently on the front page of the wiki (till someone found it distracting and relegated it to a link in the sidebar <http://www.frappr.com/teachandlearnonline>). A Frappr map is one where multiple participants can place their pins on a world map and then upload a picture and shoutout so that the map displays this information next to where on the planet each person comes from. The site can generate various scripts which anyone whose technical skills have reached copy/paste can paste right into their own website.

OK, granted, you have to have a website, but these days - where with just a slightly higher level of functional computer literacy than copy/paste anyone almost with a mouse and an Internet connection can set up a blog or a wiki (ok, a large number of post-preschoolers under 30) - this is not considered rocket science.

It's hard to describe the congealing power of having people's pictures and shared vignettes start popping up all over the map, but a click on that Frappr map link will illustrate the concept. And the ensuing display is only one of several scripts that one can choose from. It's also possible to enhance your site with a scrolling slide show of people's photos simply by pasting the associated script to your writeable web space. Whatever the display Frappr allows people to then view the show and, if they want to add their pictures, to do so and so make their personal mark on the collective project. Frappr is an excellent tool when you want to elicit pictures from throughout your community. If the pictures reside with you then other tools such as Bubbleshare will allow you to post them online and then copy scripts to paste to your web space, again giving you various display options.

When I last visited the unconference Swapmeet wiki I didn't see the Frappr map there which I had intended to cite in this unarticle. I was disappointed only for a few moments (I only later noticed its link in the sidebar). It is the nature of wikis that each step in the editing process can be recalled. I discovered that by simply clicking on History I could pull up previous versions of the wiki (yep, every last one) and find the map I was looking for from an edit at about the time I remembered it had been there.

This technique of paging through its wiki revision history allows one to observe the development of the unconference project. Anyone can click on the History tab and see the 200+ iterations of the process since Leigh Blackall started sketching out some ideas for the gathering on Feb 18. You can see how, from Leigh's rough outline, tables grew into which people posted their photographs and proposals of what they might like to discuss. Once the online element became apparent and on-site participants realized they'd have to accommodate numerous time zones, a schedule was posted where people could write-in their availability, and the community discussed various ways of contacting one another synchronously. In the end they settled on Breeze, an enterprise product with a nice interface but many limitations. Learning about the advantages and limitations of such interfaces is one reason that community members find it so important to constantly engage in online experiments with one another.

Second Life (Stevens, 2006) was another place where successful encounters occurred (though speaking of limitations, only for those with the computing power and bandwidth to get in-world and stay there). Participants in the Second Life sessions were able to explore and appreciate the builds of some of the unconference participants, and either text chat to one another in-world, or carry on conversations in Skype on the side. Second Life is rife with scripted objects that can be shared by participants who 'drop' them someplace where others can pick them up and keep them in their inventories. One of these scripts allows avatars to wear small headsets that when in range of others with similar headsets will allow them to initiate Skype calls with one another.

Stephen Downes <http://downes.ca/> put himself down for a Skypecast at the TALO Swapmeet wiki. His Skypecast was scheduled for 2:30 a.m. my time but another mediating aspect of the web 2.0 is that, unless you wish to interact personally at every such event, you can often attend them asynchronously. Stephen for example can be relied on to record his presentations and post them to his website where they can be downloaded as podcasts (Stanley, 2006). Folks interested in educational technology can avail themselves of an almost endless supply of such materials. Endless is considered here to be more listening material than a human with a job requiring even minimal attention, and interests outside of a profession, could possibly want to listen to in a conceivable available listening lifetime.

The principle of podcatching, as it is sometimes known, is that you identify podcasts online that you would like to listen to regularly and then subscribe to their RSS feeds. In order to access the feeds you run an aggregator, for example iTunes or Juice. The aggregator visits the source of your subscribed podcasts and determines if there are any there you haven't downloaded yet, and if so it fetches these automatically and stores them on your computer as mp3 files. With iTunes you can then synch with your iPod so that collections of files can be transferred to your mp3 player for you to listen to at leisure. If you want less automaticity and more control over the transfer process without having to enter the brain of an iTunes software designer, you might find that another aggregator is more intuitive for your purposes. In any event you end up with a set of mp3 files on your listening device which you can play back later at your convenience.

Listening to podcasts has benefits for those wishing to improve their skills in educational technology similar to those operating in language learning. Harvesting podcasts would be a great way to learn a language, and many such podcasts exist which purport to teach languages. Some of these that I have heard waste a lot of bandwidth with native language as opposed to target practice. For example, I might hear, "Good morning, today we're going to learn more idioms in French," etc. and so on for several minutes in English, which is not teaching me anything about French. The problem in fact is that this is teaching. As someone has said, I love to learn but I hate to be taught. Teaching is when someone else decides what you should learn. Whereas it is understood that novice learners might benefit from some degree of control over what is deemed good for them, mature professionals should be at the other end of the spectrum.

John Higgins once defined authentic language as any instance of language not created by a teacher for the purpose of teaching languages, and this is the kind of language that I feel is particularly appropriate to mature learners of a language, whereas the other is inefficient and therefore wastes time for learners who wish to cut to the chase. Therefore, choice of podcast in a target language for me would be dictated by genre and subject matter, with inauthentic instructional materials being appropriate only if I were just beginning to learn that language. Once over the beginner threshold podcasts can be quite valuable. I can listen at leisure. I can replay. The original recordings are on my computer where I can have fine access to them. I can use Audacity for example to trim away parts of the recording that I'm not interested in. I could even compile a collection of edited recordings and podcast them myself. Many source recordings have been put online under Creative Commons license, so that their reuse in this way on a personal, non-commercial site, would be perfectly legal. As a teacher of a language course I might assign my students to locate, edit, and repodcast samples of shareable language that they had found most useful to them personally. I would then encourage my students to share with one another their findings in a system of aggregation of each other's podcasted and blogged content as outlined here: http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm.

Generally speaking anyone thinking to use such techniques with students needs to become familiar with the techniques themselves. This is where there are parallels between learning educational technology and learning a language. Not all effective language teachers are native speakers. The same applies to currently practicing teachers using educational technology in almost any context, since the generation that grew up without ubiquitous access to computers has not yet been supplanted by the next. Marc Prensky <http://www.marcprensky.com/> places a digital divide between digital natives and digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001). The latter he says will always speak with an 'accent' yet most educational professionals today are in this position of having to shift from 20th century ways of "connecting" to 21st century modalities; i.e. online with each other and affectively with students (another of Prensky's mantras: Enrage me or engage me: Prensky, 2005).

Just as a non-native speaker of a language who wishes to teach it would have to become fluently familiar with that language, so digital immigrants wanting to use educational technology need to familiarize themselves with the practices and concepts of what they wish to use with students. Podcasts can play a role in helping language learners become familiar with a language since learners can immerse themselves in (and re-mix, rewind, re-purpose, replay) recorded instances of authentic language. What many teachers of these languages and other subjects are beginning to realize is that the same holds true with educational technology. Ed tech is like a foreign language to many with concepts not immediately grasped. Educators can use the same techniques that they could later pass on to their students to intereract with peers slightly more ahead of the curve discussing these concepts in terms that become more understandable the more one listens to conversations in which the concepts are discussed.

One good podcast site, where one can access a steady stream of conversations that guide interested peers into (the more you listen) the decreasingly arcane world of educational technology, is the Worldbridges network <http://www.worldbridges.net/> (Lebow, 2006). Another clearly explicated podcast site with a long history of frequent updates is that created by Wesley Fryer, Working at the Speed of Creativity <http://www.speedofcreativity.org/>. Wesley's job (at AT&T) requires him to travel from state to state in the USA presenting at conferences and teacher in-service gatherings on topics offering advice on practical applications to education of the most popular Web 2.0 tools. His presentations are pitched at practicing teachers, and delivered in terms that presume little prior knowledge. Wesley introduces his podcasts with home-made digital audio snippets in productions that are as slick as they are folksy, making for easy listening on a wide range of weighty yet approachable, current, and pertinent ed tech topics.

Wesley was also one of the organizers of the recent K-12 Online Conference <http://k12onlineconference.org/>. Unlike the unconference mentioned at the start of this unarticle (which is gradually evolving into an article) the K-12 Online Conference used a wide spectrum of tools similar to those used by the community pulling together the TALO Swapmeet. The organizers of both conferences used free Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, Skypecasts, YouTube, and Flickr and Frappr photos to present content (and SurveyMonkey to evaluate it). But what set the K-12 conference apart from other online conferences proliferating on the web was their extensive use of social networking and aggregated content. Artifacts for the conference were tagged and aggregated in a number of ways; for example using Technorati to create a network of associated blog posts that is still updating <http://technorati.com/search/k12onlineconference.org/>, del.icio.us links tagged on k12online <http://del.icio.us/search/?all=k12online >, and David Warlick's Hitchikr which aggregates artifacts tagged k12online2006 <http://www.hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=113>.

One highly positive development over the past year or two in use of Internet in educational technology has been the steady proliferation of opportunities for educators to come together to share and exchange expertise at free events where sophisticated use of Web 2.0 tools is what needs to be understood in order to enable participants to interact with one another. These events are about professional development but unlike face-to-face venues where participants could easily take passive roles in sitting back and being told about the latest technologies, participants in online events have to do what is being inculcated. Normally, people who are adept at adapting Web 2.0 tools to collaboration in education try their best to help bring everyone else up to speed in order that all may participate, and a typical reaction of newbies to such sessions is of how positive the experience was, that new friendships were formed, and like-minded peers were found at last from outside the immediate and often constraining confines of the physical walls that still delineate most institutionalized educational settings.

One such event that has been ongoing for several years now is the TESOL Electronic Village Online sessions <http://evo07sessions.pbwiki.com/> (Hanson-Smith and Bauer-Ramazani, 2004). This is another grass-roots effort at professional development through using technology at a distance which has grown in scope and popularity in recent years. Although based traditionally in YahooGroup portals and instant messaging and online presentation tools, the individual sessions have been branching into many other venues lately such as blogs, wikis, webcasting, and Second Life. The most enthusiastic participants express views suggesting transformative experiences have occurred after taking part in these sessions. Less sanguine reactions would still applaud the trend whereby quality professional development is available to interested educators at no cost and at their convenience over the Internet, without the hassle of registration formalities or the inconvenience and expense of travel.

Another venue to continue with this trend for professional development is the upcoming second Webheads in Action Online Convergence scheduled for May 18-20, 2007 <http://wiaoc.org>. The first one <http://2005.wiaoc.org> was reported in an On the Internet column in Stevens, 2005. This is a free online conference where pretty much anything goes. Whereas the organizers try to make things as clear as possible for attendees, participants and presenters are encouraged to explore as many modalities for communication and interaction as possible in an effort to help each other learn the tools, so there is a tolerance for experimentation at the expense of a simple one-stop interface. But part of what there is to learn about Internet literacy is how to personally organize the morass of information accessible online through efficient aggregation. So the conference will attempt also to show participants how order can be gleaned from what what would otherwise seem chaotic on the Internet by utilizing many of the social networking features so appropriately employed at the K-12 Online conference while carrying on the work of the community largely associated with the annual EVO events.

If you have sustained sufficient interest to read this far into this unarticle you yourself are likely to have undergone many changes in the way you have found yourself working in the past year. Those most prone to staying abreast of educational technology are probably finding themselves adopting new work habits monthly or even weekly. For example, I wrote first drafts of this in Google Docs so that I could access it from any computer on the Internet whereas a year ago I might have been using an application on my local computer and carrying files around on a flash disc. When completed I pasted it to my blog <http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/> where it might attract comments; whereas before I would have put it in a static HTML file and posted it to a Web 1.0 page and had the TESL-EJ editors get it from there. That I absorbed these techniques and eventually changed my behavior in this and other ways I use the Internet came about in part from listening to innumerable podcasts that gradually pre-disposed me to try out working in alternative ways that have since become second nature. The other most significant part of my professional development comes from constant interaction with other teaching professionals online, and tapping in to a Venn diagram of numerous overlapping distributed learning networks.

Staying abreast of developments in educational technology requires that you go pro-active and utilize the many opportunities for professional development that abound on the Internet. There is no shortage of such opportunities and they are becoming more numerous and more easily accessible. You don't need to travel to participate, you don't need to pay, and you don't need to wait for someone else to organize an event - you can organize it yourself or in the case of an unconference, unorganize it by letting the participants organize it themselves. New technologies making these scenarios possible have been termed subversive and disruptive because they challenge old ways of doing things and suggest many new alternatives. This unarticle encourages you to experiment and explore, and perhaps we will meet online one day through one of the means mentioned here.

Some time ago I coined the term "firewall in the mind" to refer to cases where transformative technologies are utilized in ways characteristic of whatever technology had previously dominated, before the potential of the new medium was fully explored. Papert (1980), in his book Mindstorms, used the analogy of early movie-makers who shot scenes straight on, to replicate how a viewer might experience a play from an (albeit front-row) seat in a theater. Now, static Web 1.0 pages are considered analogous to a theater view of the Internet, where the audience observes but is not expected to interact. An example of that would be the appearance of this unarticle in the static web-based TESL-EJ online journal <http://tesl-ej.org/>.

It makes sense to me, as editor of the On the Internet column in TESL-EJ, to push the envelope ever so slightly and blog my present and future contributions to this column. That way readers will have a chance to themselves explore one of the more transformative aspects of the Internet, its ability to foster audience participation in the form of conversations. Blogs invite comments and RSS subscriptions, and both are now possible at the blog location of this post: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/03/unarticle.html

References

Hanson-Smith, Elizabeth , and Christine Bauer-Ramazani. (2004). Professional Development: The Electronic Village Online of the TESOL CALL Interest Section . Vol. 8. No. 2

Lebow, Jeff. (2006). Worldbridges: The Potential of Live, Interactive Webcasting. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 1: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej37/int.html

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: children, computers and powerful ideas. Brighton, The Harvester Press.

Prensky, Marc. (2005). Engage me or enrage me. What today's learners demand. Educause Review, Sept./Oct. 2005. Retrieved March 10, 2007 from: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf

Prensky, Marc. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon 9, 5. Retrieved December 27, 2006 from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf#search=%22prensky%22digital%20native%22%22.

Stanley, Graham. (2006). Podcasting: Audio on the Internet Comes of Age. TESL-EJ, Volume 9, Number 4: http://tesl-ej.org/ej36/int.html

Stevens, Vance. (2006). Second Life in Education and Language Learning. TESL-EJ, Volume 10, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej39/int.html

Stevens, Vance. (2005). Behind the scenes at the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, November 18-20, 2005: TESL-EJ, Volume 9, Number 3: http://tesl-ej.org/ej35/int.html

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Note: This unarticle has been published in the On the Internet column in the March 2007 issue of TESL-EJ: http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej40/int.html . There is also a static web version of the article here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/07march/unarticle.htm . All were the same on March 14, 2007, except that the web articles have full-size screen shots (1389x608 pixels, if you download them - otherwise they're appx 600x300 in the web page displays).

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