Sunday, December 8, 2019

Presentation idea: Flipping conference presentations in 2019

APACALL Newsletter #23 has just come out. I wrote an article for it. For the record, it's:
Stevens, V. (2019). Flipping conference presentations. APACALL Newsletter 23, December, 14-18. Retrieved from http://www.apacall.org/news/APACALL_Newsletter23.pdf
I want to turn this into a blog post so that I can update and annotate it. So what follows is the text of the article as published above, but illustrated and hyperlinked in such a way that readers can better follow the flip. Here goes:

Flipping Conference Presentations in 2019
Vance Stevens
Learning2gether.net, Penang, Malaysia

At conferences I have attended this year, I have given several presentations primarily focusing on two themes. 
  • The first of these was SMALL, a construct I have been writing about since 2009 and which stands for Social Media-Assisted Language Learning. 
  • The other theme I have been pursuing is a technique I have developed for encouraging weak non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers to develop fluency in their writing by giving them feedback in Google docs using the voice option available on mobile and tablet computers (Stevens, 2019a). 
These presentations might be of more than passing interest to readers of this blog because of how I managed to “flip” them, which is to say, 
  1. get them up online in advance of the presentation, 
  2. refer the live or online audience to the slides and other materials for viewing at their fingertips and on their personal devices while I am presenting, 
  3. and then put these and all related materials online so that the audience, or anyone for that matter, might view the materials later. 
For this purpose, I use https://learning2gether.net/, which is a podcast site where I have produced over 430 episodes since 2010 on various aspects of bridging learning technology with language learning pedagogy. You can see an index of all these podcast episodes here.

Thinking SMALL
One of the better examples of this occurred in April, 2019 at the Penang English Language Learning and Teaching Association (PELLTA, http://pellta.org/) international conference in Penang, Malaysia where I presented a version of my paper entitled Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning (Stevens, 2019a).

I had earlier that year conducted a survey of teachers on their perspectives on using social media with students and had presented the results in March as part of a panel at a CALL-IS Academic Session on SMALL: Research, Practice, Impact of Social Media-Assisted Language Learning, which had been Webcast from TESOL 2019 in Atlanta, so we had a recording of the entire symposium; and I had placed my Google Slides online, where they can be found at Stevens 2019 (March 13) along with the video link to my part of the panel.



That talk focused more on the research results than did the one I was planning for Penang. Based on what I had presented in Atlanta, I revised the Atlanta Google Slides presentation to reflect what changes I intended to make in Penang, and placed it on open access where anyone with the link could view it here: http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance. 

I then rehearsed the presentation in Zoom while sharing my screen as a dress-rehearsal for the presentation itself, and uploaded the mp4 recording file to YouTube. I then put links in the Google Slides linking to the YouTube rehearsal recording, which you can see here:

 

I next announced to my personal learning networks that I was planning to webcast in Zoom live from my conference presentation venue. To my live and distance audiences, I noted that I would only be able to overview the topic in the half hour available to presenters; therefore the presentation would be flipped. By this I meant that the full version of the presentation; i.e. slides, write up, and rehearsal video, were being made available for viewing before the brief live presentation itself.

To make the link more accessible to my on-site participants I created a TinyURL to the slides, http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance, and communicated that to them at the beginning of my presentation, rather than try to get across to them the full and more complex link to the Google Slides. With a tiny URL, the TinyURL.com part is easy for audiences to remember or type into a browser, and I was able to specify the logically remembered pellta2019vance when I generated the TinyURL.

During the on-site presentation, I pointed out to those present that they could bring up my slides right then if they wished on their personal devices and not only follow them that way, but have access to all the live links that existed on almost every slide to provide greater depth to the presentation. I pointed out that after the presentation, they could review the slides, read the write-up, and watch the rehearsal recording to see what I had intended to say, as well as see the recording that I was making of the presentation itself, which I would upload later to YouTube. I told them I would place the link to the video and all the other artifacts I would afterwards put online, at the link they already had, as you can now see in slide 2 at http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance.



One of those links to other artifacts was to the blog post I created on my Learning2gether site, where they and anyone reading this would not only be able to reconstruct the presentation, but seek greater depth in the presentation that I had already given in Atlanta, and also in the one that I would be giving that summer at the CALL Research Conference in Hong Kong, which I also recorded in Zoom, and which furthermore resulted in a formal chapter being published in the conference proceedings (Stevens, 2019a). All of this material and all these links can be found online in my blog at Stevens 2019 (April 19) and in my Google Slides presentation, slide 25.

Supporting Student Writing with the Help of Voice-to-Text
In another example of flipping presentations this year, I presented a technique I had developed for using voice to encourage revision from student writing. The technique has the students share an empty Google Doc with the teacher but start their writing on paper in class. The teacher collects the papers and then reads them correctly into the blank Google Docs using speech-to-text. The teacher makes printouts of each student’s Google Doc, which now has what they had written expressed in correct language and writes notes on these printouts suggesting revision and improvement to the papers. The paper printouts are returned to the students along with their original papers, and the students continue writing in Google Docs, for as many revisions as possible, now focused both on content and on whatever errors occur or re-occur. 

I had presented a paper on my work with this technique at the ALLT conference in UAE in 2018 and had published a description of my research into the technique in the conference proceedings (Stevens, 2019b).

On March 7, 2019 I was asked to demonstrate the technique from my home in Penang, Malaysia online to a group of EFL teachers physically attending a webinar event at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. This gave me an opportunity to consolidate my previously published research on the topic and focus it into a practical presentation. I webcast the event in Zoom and archived it as Stevens, 2019 (March 7). The archive of the presentation consolidated previous work I had done on this technique, included a slide show attempting to clarify the demonstration, and in addition produced a video of the demonstration itself.



Meanwhile, I had submitted a proposal to the GLoCALL 2019 conference in Danang, Vietnam, offering to demonstrate again the technique in a workshop, which was accepted and scheduled for delivery at the conference, as a workshop mind you, in the ridiculously short time of only 25 minutes.

Fortunately I was able to get my point across in that time by flipping my presentation not only from having done it online the previous March, but by having had the opportunity to present it online at MMVC19, the 8th annual Moodle Moot Virtual Conference, only a few days before the presentation in Danang; see Stevens (2019, August 4). Here, in preparation for both the online and on-site conferences, I had not only improved my slide presentation but I had written out what I intended to say, and the online conference had produced a video of how the Danang presentation might ideally go if I had had more time to present it. As with previous conferences, I was able to tell my audience in Danang where they could find the slides by again given them a TinyURL link, https://tinyurl.com/glocall2019vance.

That TinyURL led to a complete writeup in Google Docs of what was meant to take place during the workshop in Danang. At the top of the write-up one can now find a link to the Google Slides deck and a link to the archive blog post at Stevens, 2019 (August 9). At slide 23 in that slide deck, one can see the MMVC19 rehearsal presentation, embedded there from its YouTube link, here: https://youtu.be/6QnTds__hf0



DIYLMS: Tools used
This is roughly the topic of some workshops I'm planning prior to ThaiTESOL in Bangkok the last couple of weeks in January, 2020. I plan to discuss flipped learning and model how to do the flip, introduce the tools, and reflect on what’s happened to some of our best free tools .lately. So let's look a what the tools are in the first place? To start with, what tools did I use in the example sited in this blog post?

Polls give students things to write about. For the research mentioned here, I used Google Forms, but there are many more; e.g.


More tools are described at 8 Best Polling Apps for Android and iOS Smartphones
by Gaurav Bidasaria June 15, 2019: https://techwiser.com/best-polling-apps/

Blogs and wikis provide space to host your portal and centralize your message. I’m using Blogger for this article, and https://learning2gether.net/ is based in https://wordpress.com/ for its podcast and archives, and PBWorks for its planning and index pages, http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/.

Other options include Weebly (I’m not fond of the free version; limited functionality with no ‘undo option for example). I prefer Wix; see Wix vs Weebly vs WordPress: Web War III, October 7, 2019,  by Dan Barraclough. Google Docs is also an excellent option as a wiki portal

I did the webcasting mentioned above through Zoom, https://zoom.us/. Other useful tools for webcasting are OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), a robust, full featured open-source and freely downloadable screen capture and simulcasting tool, https://obsproject.com/. There are also Facebook Live and YouTube Live.

For pre-presentation screen capture recording, I used Zoom for this purpose as well. But other options are:


Image capture is essential for materials creation. There are hard and easy ways to capture images from your screen. Sometimes you have to use the hard way; for example if you want to show users a website with its context menus exposed and mouse over the one you want so that it’s highlighted, you’ll need to use your operating system's screen capture tool (PrtScr in Windows; button combinations on iPad and Android) and then share the captured image in iOS or Android, or by pasting to Paint in Windows, saving it as a file, and then sharing the file.

But for cropping and capturing a part of a screen, you can use the Snipping Tool in Windows, or, my favorite, Jing, mentioned above. I like Jing over almost all other tools because you can save your capture as a file on your computer, or on the web at Screencast.com where you immediately get its URL (saved to your memory buffer) so you can paste it into a chat, let’s say, or send it in an email, and the receiver can see your screen via the URL you paste into the chat or email.


I use Jing a lot in preparing slides, which these days I do in Google Slides, where you can prepare your show online, collaboratively, for free, and have its URL as you work on-the-fly, which you can share directly with an audience. Google Slides these days imports MS PowerPoint slides almost faithfully (as far as I can see; though it didn’t always used to). It also seems to export faithfully to (download as) MS PowerPoint slides.

Faithful correspondence between Google Slides and PPT is handy in case you use https://www.slideshare.net/, which was acquired a few years ago by Linked In, which gives it a certain social presence. When I present and have uploaded my slides to Slideshare.net, I can tell my audience that they can find them at https://slideshare.net/vances. Of course they would also have a direct URL, but that short link pulls up my latest slide show off the top and is fairly mnemonic in case you want to give an audience the opportunity to follow your slides while you are presenting. And another affordance is that Slideshare.net hyperlinks all the URLs. My slides always have a lot of links that give them much greater depth than would be possible to convey in the presentation itself, so this is an important feature in case people in your audience want to explore your concepts either while you are presenting or afterwards.

Of course, Google Docs has all of these features as well, except for  the mnemonic URL. Google URLs are quite long and need to be shortened. Fortunately, there are many URL shortening tools; e.g. the three dozen listed at 37 URL shorteners and how to create custom branded shortlinks, October 6, 2017, by Eric Sachs, https://sachsmarketinggroup.com/37-url-shorteners-create-custom-branded-shortlinks/, but the one I prefer is TinyURL because it’s reliable (it's been around for a long time) and allows you to specify the URL you wish to shorten. All TinyURLs begin with https://tinyurl.com/ but the interface allows you to specify what appears after the slash. This allows me to create mnemonic URLs for those very lengthy Google Docs and Google Slides presentation URLs.

This takes us up through preparing your materials in advance and having your audience follow them during their presentation, but how can your audience share these materials with their social audiences or with you, as a backchannel, while you are presenting if you wish, or afterwards?

The key is in creating a unique tag for the event. It could be the mnemonic part of your TinyURL, so that the tag for https://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance could be #pelta2019vance. Or it could be a course tag, such as the EVO Minecraft MOOC course we have coming up for EVO 2020, #evomc20. Or it could be a conference tag such as #glocall2019, whose hits you can see aggregated at https://twitter.com/search?q=glocall2019.

The latter is a good example of how participants at a conference can crowd-source through Twitter their impressions of a conference, tag them with the conference tag, and then watch as their colleagues share their own impressions. Participants in one session can track what’s going on in sessions they are missing even as they help their colleagues know what’s going on where they are. Since all the tweets carry a picture (or icon) of the person tweeting, it’s not uncommon for two people in the same session to see that someone else is tweeting in that session, look around the room, and find the other person looking for them. In such a way, bonds are formed between like minded colleagues.

What works for conferences can work for courses, either at a distance or blended, or in physical classrooms, or in workshops. Hash tags aggregated on Twitter or Facebook or through other means can form an ePortfolio of what the students or participants are doing collectively. They enable to collection of artifacts in one place where they can be displayed to demonstrate the outcome of whatever the task or project was.

These are components of a DIYCMS, a do-it-yourself content management system (CMS). All the tools mentioned so far are for creating, storing, and displaying content, and as it happens, for free. A CMS is a portal where content for a learning journey can be placed online for others to find and follow.

Add to that a means for having users upload their own content to the space, for this user-generated content to be responded to and evaluated, perhaps by peers in forums, then you have an LMS, or learning management system. If this is based in free tools such as Moodle, Schoology, Canvas, or Edmodo, or in a wiki where the community can upload content and interact with each other, then we have a DIYLMS, see http://diylms.pbworks.com/.

Still to come, stay tuned …

Audio and video editing tools

And a reflection on the tools we have lost

Here are a few I'd like to mention:

  • Ning, one of our first community-shattering turnabouts - Stevens, Vance. (2010). The Ning Thing. TESL-EJ 14(1), 1-7. Retrieved from  http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf; also available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/
  • Google+ Communities, which abruptly went offline one year ago
  • Yahoo Groups, which has been hosting many of our communities since last century, is disappearing as we speak, on only a few months notice (gone as a CMS after Dec 14, 2019
  • PBWorks only let’s you have one free workspace now
  • Today’s Meet disappeared this past year, 
But there’s Yo!Teachj, a backchannel chat tool that can replace Today's Meet, which I used to use for passing messages to and from classes and other gatherings. I learned about Yo!Teach here
http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html

Yo!Teach is one of the similar tools listed at this website, Jeff Knutson, February 12, 2019, Give students a chance to connect with each other and be heard.
https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement

What happens next? What if we lose Google? Imagine when you have to download all your data from there on short notice, or lose it?

Conclusion
I have developed my presentation techniques over decades of presenting at online and on-site conferences, and in hopes of improving on the offers of many colleagues, whose presentations I have attended, to send them my email address and they would send me a copy of their slides. The flipped method provides a means for attendees at conferences to be better prepared to follow a speaker’s presentation by having access to presentation materials on hand during and possibly even before the presentation, and attendees can have a means of following up on their learning which provides much greater depth than what can be gleaned from a skeletal slide show. 

Furthermore, flipped learning is an approach intended for teachers to apply in their classes. In my presentations I hope to model for my peers how the flip works in a way they can understand experientially. Hopefully, on careful consideration of this approach, attendees at my presentations might try it out in their own professional lives, both with their students in class, and with their audiences when they present at conferences.

References 
Stevens, V. (2019a). Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, Q. Ma, & J. L. F. King (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth International CALL Research Conference: Social CALL (pp. 257-272). Hong Kong: The Education University of Hong Kong. Retrieved from https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/CALL2019proceedings_stevensSMALL.pdf

Stevens, V. (2019b). Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings. In Zoghbor, W., Al Alami, S., & Alexiou, T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Conference: Teaching and Learning in a Globalized World (pp. 22-47). Dubai: Zayed University Press. Retrieved from https://www.vancestevens.com/papers/2019/ALLT2018_Proceedings_vstevensVoiceFeebback_onWriting.pdf

Stevens, V. (2019, March 7). Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text. [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/07/vance-stevens-presents-on-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/

Stevens, V. (2019, March 13). CALL-IS academic session on SMALL: Research, practice, impact of social media-assisted language learning – Webcasting from TESOL 2019 Atlanta [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/

Stevens, V. (2019, April 19). Thinking SMALL at the 2019 PELLTA conference in Penang, Malaysia. [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/

Stevens, V. (2019, August 4). Learning2gether with Vance Stevens at MMVC19 – Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/04/learning2gether-with-vance-stevens-at-mmvc19-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/

Stevens, V. (2019, August 9). Supporting student writing with the help of voice-to-text – presented at GLoCALL 2019 in Danang, Vietnam. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://learning2gether.net/2019/08/09/supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text-presented-on-august-9-at-glocall-2019-in-danang-vietnam/






Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Learning2gether ten years after, and going on beyond episode 430

I often feel guilty about not posting more here, but I blog most regularly these days at my Learning2gether blog,
https://learning2gether.net/

Learning2gether was an offshoot in 2010 of the three WiAOC conferences we famously crowd-sourced under the auspices of Webheads in Action in 2005, 2007, and 2009 (http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm). L2g has been going strong since 2010 and is almost up to its 430th episode as I write this post. Normally I post notices of events on the L2g Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/. I also keep an index of all L2g events, going back since their inception in 2010, here:
http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/34456755/archiveindex

I'm going there now to retrieve the following information which I need to paste here in order to create the state of play I'm focusing on in this blog post.

Learning2gether episode 426 took place on Tue, Oct 15, 2019. I soon afterwards blogged it, but I had always meant to go back and 'complete' the post. I have by now found time to revise this post and annotate it by adding further anecdotes and detail and expanding on my links to further information. So even if you have seen it before, you might want to revisit'
https://learning2gether.net/2019/10/15/steven-herder-interviews-vance-stevens-in-the-itdi-teachers-room/


Meanwhile, Electronic Village Online coordinators and moderators (http://evosession.pbworks.com) have been gearing up for EVO2020, which is the 20th year of EVO by the way, and as I am one of the EVO coordinators I was involved in the EVO moderator PD (professional development) month which has been taking place during this time. Each Sunday during the month there were events where moderators were supposed to attend and raise questions and discuss issues relating to EVO. Since this was ostensibly EVO business, I didn't feel right about inviting all and sundry, which is why I never made an announcement on any of the L2g spaces, but Jane Chien and I were responsible for preparing the third week of moderator PD (in Schoology, https://app.schoology.com/course/2264046012/) and the topic was what group spaces to use, such as Schoology, and how to replace groups that had recently disappeared; e.g. the Google+ Communities which had served us so well, and YahooGroups, which EVO Coordinators had been using (and both groups have now gone over to Groups.io).

Since the topic was relevant to anyone involved in eLearning or professional development through communities of practice, Jane and I suppressed the business part and held the session as a discussion, and produced L2g Episode 427 on Sun, Nov 3, 2019: Vance Stevens and Jane Chien host Learning2gether with Week 3 EVO Moderator Professional Development – Online spaces, certificates, and badges
https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/03/learning2gether-with-week-3-evo-moderator-professional-development-online-spaces-certificates-and-badges/



Again I did not announce the EVO Moderator PD Month event for the following Sunday on Learning2gether, but that link above contains at the end of it, a video embed starting at 25 min 35 seconds, which is where Nellie asked for moderators to come on and discuss the online spaces they had chosen for their sessions. First up was Graham Stanley, who spoke about how his Escape the Room session is organized, and he invited me to join him in the discussion, which also makes interesting listening. Here it is, starting with Graham:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1547&v=0W--5Kuk2mA&feature=emb_logo

Heike Philp, who co-moderates the Escape the Room session with Graham, was at that event and she mentioned in it that she was doing a simulcast from Firenze in a week's time on educational applications of virtual worlds, and I asked her to send me the information. When I hadn't heard from her a few days later and as time was growing short, I sent her a reminder --  and, as she is a writer at http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/, she didn't reply to me directly, but wrote up the information directly on the wiki and asked me afterwards if I could come on in the Q and A period and take 5 min to talk about EVO Minecraft MOOC. Because she had entered it in the wiki and invited me to speak, I made it the next L2g episode, which is archived as L2g Episode 428, Wed, Nov 13, 2019 -  Learning2gether with Heike Philp and GUINEVERE simulcasting colloquium on games in virtual worlds
https://learning2gether.net/2019/11/13/learning2gether-with-heike-philp-and-guinevere-simulcasting-colloquium-on-games-in-virtual-worlds/

So that brings us up to the present where on Monday Nov 18, the annual Global Education Conference starts. It's a 3 day conference where presenters who fit fixed, but also flexible, criteria self-select to put their events up on a Ning and then schedule themselves to present at the conference. You can find more information here:
http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#MonNov18WedNov20The9thAnnualGECGlobalEducationConference

I'll be co-presenting on day 3 of the conference with Hanaa Khamis, who has been hosting L2g events recently from Egypt in my L2g Zoom Room. Our presentation is on Wednesday Nov 20 on upgrading teachers' tech-enabled pedagogical skills via the power of participatory learning through communities of practice and PLNs of like-minded peers. That event is announced here:
http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#WedNov200900UTCHanaaKhamisandVanceStevensatGECnbspParticipatorycultureofCPDthroughselfsustainingPLNs

And finally (or at least, it will be time for a break) when I did the interview with iTDi back in October, I told Steven Herder and Phil Brown that I was very curious to talk to to them about their business iTDi, which has some free components which they put on while trying to balance against the bottom line, so I got them to agree to come on L2g on my terms and discuss those issues.That happens on Thursday Nov 21, and there is more information here:
http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#ThuNov21noonUTCSteveHerderandPhilipShigeoBrownoniTDiandthechallengeofcommercialviabilityvssocialcommunityneeds

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Workshops for teachers and teacher trainers

Now that I'm retired, I am sometimes asked what kind of workshops I could do for teachers, so I've gone into my websites and compiled an inventory of my skills and pretensions, hopefully more the former than the latter. Two places where I address this directly are on my CV at https://vancestevens.com/papers/CurriculumVitaeVance.pdf and at the top of my ongoing listing of presentations and publications at http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html

I've come up with a list of 24 topics, which derive from a set of concepts which explain and contextualize the workshops I have in mind. The concepts relate to projects I've been working on actively over the past year, since I left my last paid EFL teaching job in July, 2018, and the list of 24 workshops appears at the end of this blog post.

But I mean for this post to be a work in progress. That is, I might use this as a space to flesh out my ideas and concepts and possibly come up with more ideas for workshops. But every journey starts with a first step.

Where I've derived my expertise

The first steps in my current tangents started with a two year journey mostly overland through Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in the 1970's which plopped me back in Texas, table rase, ready to start a new life teaching English. Within a year my new job had taken me to the TESOL conference in New York in 1976, where I was able to find an EFL job in Saudi Arabia that very year. This is where I first got my hands on a computer in my workplace, leading to my being appointed to head a task force to develop a CAI facility for EFL at the university where I worked.

By 1981 I had started an MA in Hawaii which produced a thesis relating to what we were then calling CALI, and an invitation to attend a symposium in Toronto in 1983, where the acronym was changed to CALL, and which put me in position to co-found the CALL Interest Section in TESOL in 1985 and become its first chair. By then I was teaching EFL and working in CALL at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman where I developed and managed the Learning Resource Center and produced CALL software there. This qualified me, when I left SQU in 1995, to get a position as Director of EFL Courseware Design and become involved in producing CALL software at a start up company in Cupertino, California.

This was where my career path headed toward the mountain top. Because I missed teaching, I got involved with teaching online as a volunteer. Two years later I was in Abu Dhabi working as a consultant for a language center being envisioned there. We were putting in a LAN and suddenly I could hang out online. In my spare time I upped my game and created websites which gathered followers in the Webheads student and teacher movements. In 2003 I became a coordinator with EVO, Electronic Village Online, now in its 20th year as a significant precursor to what are now known as MOOCs. This is where I started working in various ways on the projects described below.

Coding in ELT

Based on my experience with coding language teaching materials, working 2 years full-time as a software developer, and having recently co-written an article on coding in English language teaching, http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/, I proposed a workshop at CAMTESOL 2020 on practical coding activities for language teachers to use in the classroom, even without computers (currently awaiting acceptance):
  • The presenter gives examples of language teachers who use coding in language classes to promote the 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking, analysis, and problem solving, in addition to the more obviously language-related skills of communication and collaboration. The workshop introduces and guides participants through a simple activity using a step-by-step approach, presented in accessible terminology, that can clarify for them this relationship between coding and language development. The activity is set out in a handout that participants can use during the workshop and with students later in class. The activity requires neither a computer nor prior knowledge of programming, only the instructions on the handout, and participants will be pointed to repositories of many more such activities.
The proposal is for a 30 min “workshop” and for an audience that may not have devices handy, but can be extrapolated to a longer one that can be done using computers

Technology in the Classroom/E-learning/Blended learning/CALL

I have been teaching online since 1998 and since then have consistently taken initiatives to seed and nurture communities of practice of learners and teaching peers, one of which, http://webheads.info, has been in action for 20 years. In all of my teaching jobs since then I have taken on roles such as CALL coordinator, computing instructor, Moodle administrator, software developer, and professional development coordinator. I blend learning for my face-to-face classes by creating wiki spaces where students can download materials and submit work online. This could suggest a variety of different workshop topics

One could be simply practical technologies for classroom use - specifics would depend on what kind of facilities existed at the target institution: do students have Internet or just teachers or neither; do students have their own devices? Personal phones, tablets, PCs, personal or in lab configurations? Do teachers have access to smart boards, some way of projecting in the class? Etc. I blogged issues faced when giving this kind of workshop in Khorat, Thailand in 2008, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html. More recent materials along these lines can be found at another of my blogs, http://toolkit4learning.blogspot.com/.

DIYLMS

DIYLMS stands for do-it-yourself-learning-management-system, or the tools needed to cobble together a portal and other free Web 2.0 tools facilitating blended or online learning, to whatever degree appropriate. The concept is illustrated in two workshops I gave on the topic in 2012, in Dubai http://diylms.pbworks.com/ and Erzincan, Turkey, http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/ where there is a wiki portal (i.e. handout) for the workshops and links to the materials to be covered in the workshops, and a means of students submitting work to the facilitator.

Also in 2012 I gave a plenary in Marrakech on the topic, recording and slides at https://learning2gether.net/2012/02/08/learner-centred-do-it-yourself-learning-manag/. I gave other presentations around that time, and published on the topic, which in 2011 I was calling MePortolios, https://learning2gether.net/2011/08/22/me-portfolios-putting-the-me-in-me-learning-v/

Professional development through networking in communities of practice

Another kind of workshop I could give could be on ways to engage in continuing professional development through engaging in networks of other learners / teachers and communities of practice.
I have been a coordinator of EVO (the TESOL sponsored Electronic Village Online) since 2002 and for the past two decades I have conceived and moderated several EVO sessions designed to train teachers in topics ranging from pursuing professional development online through communities of practice, leveraging multiliteracies and 21st century skills and tools in their teaching and PD, and most recently, gamification.

It happens that I may be in Thailand at the end of January. I would be just starting a 5-week session of EVO Minecraft MOOC, http://minecraftmooc.org. That is, I will be interacting online in a live on-going (in its 6th year) community of practice whose purpose is to understand what gamification is and feels like through participation in Minecraft, and how what we learn can be used with our students and impact their learning. Therefore, I could give workshops on
  • Minecraft itself, 
  • on game-based learning and gamification (two similar but different things), 
  • or use the opportunity to have a live community of practice on hand to illustrate the look and feel of ongoing professional development in such a context.
  • EVO - Electronic Village Online: Recharge your professional development with the friendliest and most engaging trainers on the planet, free

    Since these sessions will have just started (Jan 11 through Feb 16, 2020, http://evosessions.pbworks.com/) it occurs to me that a great workshop would be to introduce EVO to participants, get them to enrol in a session, and then follow up by getting them to introduce themselves to their chosen community, and get started on the first week’s activities. It wouldn’t matter too much if they were a little late to the party
Multimedia skills

My definitive work in regard to multimedia professional development is https://learning2gether.net, a podcast series I have been doing for the past ten years, without any funding, using free Web 2.0 tools. Besides the community of practice and networked learning aspects, this work requires numerous media skills which I could also train via workshops. These include
  • the rationale for podcasting in language learning, 
  • spaces for meeting synchronously online, 
  • recording, editing, and streaming audio and video, 
  • harvesting recordings and uploading to YouTube and Vimeo. 
  • Using screen casting to create podcasts, interactions with teacher or student peers, and even produce lesson materials

    e.g. the simple-to-use Screencast-o-matic to the more complicated but more versatile OBS (Open Broadast Software), which I have used to “Record Lesson Materials On-the-Fly” as presented at TESOL in Seattle, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/tesol2017vance. I am part of a team using this software for live webcasting from the last three TESOL conferences. 
Another aspect of this work is tagging and making your materials known through social networking, as in my 2010 BrazTESOL workshop on http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/TagGames

Task and Content-Based Instruction / Content and Language Integrated Learning / ESP

From 2003-2011, I taught computing as a subject in its own right, through the medium of English to EFL students, when I was a computing instructor at Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, and in 2004 I published a book chapter on using task-based learning in an EFL online context. From 2013-2018, I helped develop curriculum and materials, and adapted materials directed at pilot and aviation support cadets while teaching EFL at a UAE air college. I could give workshops on developing materials for ESP

Research Writing and Publication / Academic Writing

This is usually what I volunteer to teach when I am working as a teacher. I have produced and edited hundreds of publications. I have often taught at the college level and specialized in teaching academic writing to low to intermediate proficiency students. I usually create wiki portals to help my students with concepts and activities; e.g. one I created to teach academic writing for my students at New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi, at http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/.

Some of my most recent publications and presentations have been on technology-enhanced techniques for giving feedback to students and dealing with plagiarism. My particular focus is on utilizing the voice capabilities of modern mobile, tablet, and PC devices for improving effectiveness and efficiency in giving well-directed feedback on writing to students, something that can take a lot of a teacher’s time.

Workshops on teaching ESOL skills

As a teacher with 40 years experience in EFL I could also give workshops on more traditional topics such as grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, vocabulary. I would have a lot to impart about the latter topic through my background of research and publication in concordancing and familiarity with a number of corpus-based and gamified tools for vocabulary acquisition.

Here’s the above distilled into a list, which I may develop further here in the future:

  1. Coding in ELT: Empowering teachers to integrate coding into their language lessons, and why (or why not?)
  2. Technology in the Classroom/E-learning/Blended learning/CALL environments
  3. Practical technologies for classroom use (need to narrow down its purpose based on need)
  4. DIYLMS: Designing classroom ecologies (do-it-yourself-learning-management-systems) from free and easily available Web 2.0 tools
  5. Helping students direct and archive their learning in MePortfolios
  6. Continuing professional development through engaging in networks of other learners / teachers and communities of practice
  7. EVO - Electronic Village Online: Start today, NOW, right in this workshop, to recharge your professional development with the friendliest and most engaging trainers on the planet, free
  8. Learning2gether to teach and learn through communities of practice
  9. Using multiliteracies and 21st century skills and tools in your own PD so that it helps you model to students how to learn in a future world that is here already
  10. Minecraft in language learning, why and how?
  11. Interacting live and online with EVO Minecraft MOOC,
  12. Gamification or game-based learning? What’s the difference and how can they be utilized in my classrooms
  13. Joining MOOCs and communities of practice to help you broaden your learning through free and self-directed continuing PD; or start your own MOOC
  14. What multimedia skills do you need for language teaching?
  15. Podcasting in language learning: Helping students learn through both consuming and creating content that helps them learn English
  16. Record lesson materials on-the-fly using tools for capturing images, audio, and whatever else happens on your screen
  17. Using YouTube and Vimeo in language learning as both a consumer and creator of content.
  18. Tag games: Bringing groups of learners together through intelligent use of tagging and aggregating content (making your materials known) through social networking
  19. Task and Content-Based Instruction / Content and Language Integrated Learning / ESP
  20. Improve you research writing and publication skills: Academic writing for teachers and learners
  21. Utilizing the voice capabilities of modern mobile, tablet, and PC devices for improving effectiveness and efficiency in giving well-directed feedback on writing
  22. Help your students improve their vocabulary skills through use of concordancing, and other corpus-based and gamified tools for vocabulary acquisition
  23. Kick your pronunciation teaching skills up a notch: Exploring the videos in the ESL Teachers’ Guide to Pronunciation Teaching Using Online Resources
  24. Grammar, reading, listening, writing: Which should you teach first and why? Defend your choice!


Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Why not call CALL SMALL?

I'm giving a talk in Hong Kong today entitled "Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning," from a distance due to a mishap. I know what to say - I'm trying to nail down how to say it.  Hence this blog post.



I've given this talk twice already this year, or one like it (and my talk in HK will be different from the other two). Both of those earlier talks were entitled "Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning," but the focus on each was slightly different. Both gave a background for my thinking on SMALL over the past decade, based first on my credentials in using social media in communities of practice with students and teaching peers stretching back past the turn of the century, and  pointed out that I was possibly the first to use the term SMALL in the literature, as far as I can tell from my searches on Google Scholar. I have a slide for that.

But in those two talks, that's the point where the focus shifted. The first was delivered at the annual TESOL conference in Atlanta in March 2019 and reported on a survey I had done on educator attitudes on teacher and student perceptions of social media used for learning. This happens to be what I proposed to talk about in Hong Kong. I blogged that presentation here,
https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/13/call-is-academic-session-on-small-research-practice-impact-of-social-media-assisted-language-learning-webcast-from-tesol-2019-atlanta/

The second was delivered at the biannual PELLTA conference in Penang a month later and reported on a project I had done the year before in my last teaching gig in Al Ain, UAE, on using the voice capabilities inherent in Google Docs (on Android, OS, or Windows devices) to give feedback through Google Docs to poorly performing and unmotivated students on their writing (Stevens, 2019a).

I am a great fan of flipped learning, including flipping presentations, which is to say I make sure that the materials I plan to cover are all online, so that rather than having to, in 25 short minutes, explain in exquisite detail all I have to say, I can overview what I would have covered if I had had more time, and refer people to the links for them to follow down whatever rabbit holes they wish to step into. Furthermore, my presentation at PELLTA in Penang was double-flipped. In rehearsing my presentation prior to the conference (to test how was I going say what I hoped to say in the 25 minutes I had for that one) it occurred to me to record the rehearsal in Zoom. So when I went to the presentation I told my audience that they could find online, at the TinyURL I provided them:
  • the slides for my presentation 
  • a prose write up of what I intended to say 
  • the rehearsal recording online
As far as I can tell, people rarely take me up on my suggestion to follow along in my slide show or prose presentation versions during my presentations. They are not conditioned for it, but one day, they will be! And then they will expect of presenters to lay out their slides in advance, and also have a recording of the presentation available afterwards.

That was the second flip -- to record the presentation as I gave it in Zoom, so that the audience could listen later if they wished. And I told the audience where they could find the link to the recording. In my last slide in the materials listed above, I had a QR code up that they could shoot, and I gave them a mnemonic URL,
http://tinyurl.com/pellta2019vance, which would take them to my slides, and which would in turn, in due time, have the link to the recording I had just made.

So it was all there, and all that material can be found at my blog post here:
https://learning2gether.net/2019/04/19/vance-stevens-on-thinking-small-at-the-2019-pellta-conference-in-penang-malaysia/

I plan to do something similar for my presentation to the HK audience, for which I had created a similar link http://tinyurl.com/call2019vance (but I broke the link here because I was not able to update the slides stored there with the latest version, now uploaded to Google Slides).

And here's what I told the delegates at the conference on the day.


The presentation is in three parts:

1. Background regarding the case for CAI, CALL and SMALL
2. Why teachers must model productive social media techniques with one another
3. Survey of the extent to which teachers are preparing students to engage in collaborative work models

1. Background regarding the case for CAI, CALL, and SMALL

First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I do not advocate for any changes in acronym or disruption to the established order where the term CALL has served us so well. I do not suggest that the follow-on to this CALL Research Conference on the theme of social CALL should be the SMALL Research Conference 2020. That would be ridiculous.

As we know, Stephen Bax is perhaps best known in CALL circles for his suggestion that computers have become so normalized in today's world that the C in CALL is decreasingly descriptive (Bax, 2003 and 2011). This has led many to discuss whether a better acronym would more accurately characterize the role of computers in language learning.

In their article, renowned for its (depth of analysis as well as its) title, Why call CALL “CALL”?, Levy and Hubbard (2005) argue for the retention of the term CALL because the term is serviceable and practical; it describes what we do, and the term had been in use for two decades at the time the article was written, over three decades at this juncture.

However, CALL was not always CALL. Prior to the formation of the CALL Interest Section in TESOL in 1984, the use of computers in education was most often referred to as CAI, for computer assisted instruction. The symposium at the TESOL conference in Toronto in 1983 that kicked of the formation of the CALL-IS the following year was called the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Symposium. The program for it can be found here online:
https://www.call-is.org/WP/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/83_TESOL_Conference_Papers.pdf

The term CAI became CALL in just ten minutes at the symposium on CAI when John Higgins proposed, and "argued eloquently that the name of our endeavor should be changed forthwith to CALL, to place the emphasis on 'learning'" Stevens (2015, n.p., 4th paragraph in body of article). A discussion ensued. I argued at that time for the retention of  CAI, citing essentially the same arguments as did Levy and Hubbard in 2005: the literature was all in reference to CAI, and people had been calling it that since computers had started guiding students through whatever could be taught in an algorithm and keep people on task until "mastery learning" was achieved. A vote was taken, democracy prevailed, and we started referring to our field as CALL.

So, nothing lasts forever. However, there are many contenders continually being mooted for a replacement to CALL. I concede that agreement from among proponents of alternative acronyms is unlikely: MALL, SMALL, TALL, TELL ... I haven't heard MELL yet, and SMALL does not lend itself to this kind of transformation. But Levy and Hubbard also insert a longevity caveat into their argument for retention of CALL, where they note that “perhaps … the label CALL cannot ultimately make the transition from pre-network to network-based teaching and learning,” (pp. 143-144).

So why not call CALL SMALL? Now that we find ourselves in just such an age of network-based teaching and learning, and gathered together here at a CALL Research Conference on Social CALL, it is worthwhile to consider how we have re-positioned ourselves, whether or not some chose to call it SMALL, albeit subsumed under the umbrella term, CALL.

This year, I felt for the first time since I started promoting the term ten years ago that SMALL might be coming of age when I was asked to join the panel on what was proposed as a CALL academic session on Social Media Language Learning at the 2019 TESOL conference in Atlanta. After some negotiation with the other panelists, and passing along some of my articles and book chapters on the topic (e.g. Stevens, 2014), they agreed with me to change the title to Social Media-Assisted Language Learning, or SMALL. It was the first time I had ever achieved agreement from a group of respected peers on my choice of acronym in what Levy and Hubbard had referred to as this new age of 'network-based teaching and learning'.

That's my main message for my talk tomorrow, but in my limited time remaining I'd like to touch on the following areas which I touched on in my proposal.

2. Why teachers must model productive social media techniques with one another

Second, how modeling SMALL with peers is precursor to teachers using it with students. Many of these tools and skills work through peers scaffolding one another to bring each other up to speed on the ins and outs. I don't anticipate having time to cover this in greater detail today, but I refer my audience to slide 15 in this presentation
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ls3ZeIEk9vssYXBxoVbzn0_K99Wz9vcxWJU_v3wmgSA/edit?usp=sharing

Here, those wishing to explore further can find more background on the importance of social media in communities of practice of educators learning how to use social media in their own learning in collaboration with one another in order to be in a position to use social media with their students. I share here my background working within such communities of practice since 1998, and relate some stories of how individuals have made use of their participation in these communities when working with students.

In my presentation today, I add one more such story …

I have been 'column' editor of the TESL-EJ "On the Internet column" since taking over from Jim Duber in 2002. My editing style is unique to any I have experienced with any other editor I have ever worked with. I have authors whose work I am editing share their work in Google Docs and then use the powerful feedback tools in Google Docs to work with authors to negotiate optimal wording of their work to be published later in TESL-EJ.

I recently worked with Gavin Wu as editor of an article he published in the TESL-EJ  (Wu, 2018).  Gavin mentions how this worked for him in this passage from his article:

"collaborative work is very much needed and workplace collaboration is viewed as a necessary skill for current and future global employees (Jones & Hafner, 2012). In academia, cross-national collaboration is nothing new (e.g., the teacher/researcher in Hong Kong collaborated productively in Google Docs with the section editor in the United Arab Emirates on this piece of work), however, the question we may need to consider is to what extent our students are prepared for engaging in such collaborative work modes?"

Indeed! Gavin appears to have responded positively to scaffolding through working with me in using Google Docs to arrive at a publishable version of his article, and after he had experienced that, he used it as an example of a point he was making to begin with. So, we learn by doing, especially by doing in collaboration with one another, and once we've absorbed that lesson, we pass these skills on through engaging our students in the same and similar techniques.

3. Survey of the extent to which teachers are preparing students to engage in collaborative work models

And finally, I plan to mention a few salient results from the 60 responses to a survey I created gauging educators’ perceptions of certain aspects of using social media with each other and with students. I'll settle on two or three salient take-aways to highlight in my brief presentation, whereas the complete report should be available in the conference proceedings (Stevens, 2019b).

I haven't placed the materials I covered here in this blog post, but you can see them in the slides embedded at the beginning of this post, and they were selected from parts of the following documents:
  1. A “long” version of the chapter I submitted to the conference proceedings containing my findings shared publicly here:
    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AVhvkr8moLB_BgLbvhO2UY2v4-VQVOlNfyjU6l58-IU/edit?usp=sharing
  2. The updated replacement version of my slides which I place on Google Slides because Slideshare.net removed an essential function from its service, the ability to replace slides uploaded before giving a presentation with a version with the tweaks you make after the presentation. The latest and definitive version of these slides is now here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iqCH3O-b5XELHiUx77qhmC6_7DlBASB8_KET2Flrp1U/edit?usp=sharing.
  3. The recording of my presentation in Zoom which is embedded in this blog post and is available on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/bwG-4nNKSkE
  4. The Learning2gether episode #415 blog post in which the most current and updated version of the slides appears, and in which the video and also an audio mp3 of the talk are embedded:
    https://learning2gether.net/2019/07/10/thinking-small-about-social-media-assisted-language-learning-vance-stevens-presenting-at-the-2019-call-research-conference-hong-kong/
And there are more notes on SMALL documenting more of what I touch on here, at http://tinyurl.com/small2014

In Conclusion

The title of this post is Why NOT call CALL SMALL. Without the emphasis shown here, this could be interpreted as WHY NOT, so that the question appears to be a suggestion that we do just that. However, with the emphasis shown this could be interpreted as presenting an argument for why we NOT take such a step.

I do not intend in my presentation to call for radical change. Looking back, it appears that such a change was called for back in 1983, and as a result the CALL Interest Section in TESOL did not become the CALI-IS; whereas CALICO, the computer assisted language instruction consortium, itself founded in 1983, carries forward to this day the concept of CAI as opposed to CALL, |https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALICO_(consortium).

I don't anticipate seeing the formation of a social media assisted language instruction consortium in my lifetime. However, as the presentations at the 2019 CALL Research Conference on Social CALL should suggest, this appears to be a robust and viable interest in CALL in this new age of 'network-based teaching and learning'. Certainly a prime and current focus in our using computers in language learning should be on what computers do best for language learners, which is to facilitate communication among them and with native speakers of a language, largely through social media.


References

Bax, S. (2003). CALL – Past, present and future. System, 31(1), 13–28. Retrieved from http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jonrein/internettech10/bax_03.pdf

Bax, S. (2011). Normalisation revisited: The effective use of technology in language education. International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 1(2), 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/3754724/Normalisation_Revisited_The_Effective_Use_of_Technology_in_Language_Education

Levy, M. and Hubbard, P. (2005). Why call CALL “CALL”? Computer Assisted Language Learning, July 2005. DOI: 10.1080/09588220500208884. Retrieved from Research Gate.

Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development. In J. Son (Ed.). Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2014connectivist_learning.pdf

Stevens, V. (2015). How the TESOL CALL Interest Section began (updated). On CALL (Sept 2015). Retrieved from http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2015-08-25/1.html

Stevens, V. (2019a). Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings. In W. Zoghbor, S. Al Alami & T. Alexiou, (Eds.). Proceedings of the 1st Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Conference: Teaching and Learning in a Globalized World. Dubai: Zayed University Press, pp.22-47. Retrieved from https://www.zu.ac.ae/main/en/research/publications/_books_reports/2018/ALLT2018Proceedings.pdf

Stevens, V. (2019b). Thinking SMALL about social media assisted language learning. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, Q. Ma, & J. L. F. King (Eds.). Proceedings of the Twentieth International CALL Research Conference: Social CALL (pp. 257-272). Hong Kong: The Education University of Hong Kong. The unpaginated PDF submitted for inclusion is available:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12idx3CM3iixWLWvzfupIU53VfFPw6sYD/view

Wu, J. G. (2018). Mobile Collaborative Learning in a Chinese Tertiary EFL Context.TESL-EJ, 22(2), Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej86/ej86int
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, January 18, 2019

Hold that thought: Ideas big and SMALL about blending social media and eLearning 3.0 regarding hosting participatory communities of practice and online conferences

I didn't meant to brainstorm my impetus for this post into such a long title: Hold that thought: Ideas big and SMALL about blending social media and eLearning 3.0 regarding hosting participatory communities of practice and online conferences. Here's what the title is about:

Hold that thought


The Hold that Thought part was because all the ingredients of this post have been percolating around my brain for a few weeks and I'm under pressure to get them down in writing by the end of the month so I can propose some talks at an upcoming round of conferences this year. At some point you have to start writing about them. This post is my attempt at grabbing that tiger by the tail and wrestling it to the ground where I can get a grasp of all the ideas at interplay.

Thinking SMALL 


Thinking SMALL is something I've been doing for some time. SMALL, or social media assisted language learning, is a term I coined ten years ago on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of CALL-IS at the 2009 TESOL conference, Denver (see slide 8 here):
http://www.slideshare.net/vances/celebrating-25-years-of-call.


I've laid claim consistently to the term since then, as I've documented here in links to a dozen blog posts and presentations from 2009 to 2013 where I mentioned SMALL. In 2014 I articulated my position on SMALL in a book chapter (Stevens, 2014), available at http://tinyurl.com/small2014.

Despite my frequent 'mention' of it over the years, my acronym never got traction, mainly because there were so many other good acronyms out there trying to make the same point. The point is, as Stephen Bax was arguing eloquently and prolifically at the time, computers had been normalized to the point that the 'computer' part of CALL was hardly any longer meaningful. Many replacements for the C word had been suggested: MALL (mobile assisted), TALL (tech assisted), TELL (tech enhanced), MALL (mobile assisted), BALL (blog assisted), SNALL (social network assisted) etc. and these often came up in conversations where I would put forward my own choice of acronym, but I could see that there was a variety of opinion on the matter, all with more or less equal merit, and therefore the best course of action was the one with least resistance, just continue using the term that everyone was familiar with and that everyone understood to be the umbrella term for all the sub-acronyms: CALL.

Meanwhile, I have continued to attend TESOL conferences each year, because I am invited to give a talk or join a panel, or am involved in Webcasting, and I plan to attend the TESOL conference in 2019 in Atlanta to appear on a panel as a result of the invitation worded as follows:

"Thank you for your proposal submission for the TESOL 2019 International Convention & English Language Expo. Your proposal, number 1020-004276, titled, "SMALL: Research, Practice, Impact of Social Media-Assisted Language Learning," has been included in the TESOL 2019 convention program, held on 12-15 March 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA."

The title of this event was agreed to by all the co-panelists (Sandy Wagner, Susan Gaer,  Elke Stappert, and Maria Tomeho-Palermino, and myself) following my suggestion that we adopt my acronym. And they all agreed :-) Traction at last!

Toward achieving that agreement, I had sent my co-panelists the link to my book chapter on SMALL at http://tinyurl.com/small2014. In order to work on our proposal, the panel collaborated on a Google Doc, the use of which, incidentally, is a prime example of how SMALL works (Stevens, 2015). The document can be edited by only the panelists but is shared publicly here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1buLaqwYcs4vdjE1vwg_qtiJ7ETQkL4Rw3_A5Qjfsa2s/edit?usp=sharing 

As indicated in the above document, the following is my proposed contribution to the panel:

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

Thinking SMALL: A case for social media assisted language learning

CALL by definition is COMPUTER assisted language learning, but these days almost everything has a computer. As Stephen Bax used to eloquently and prolifically remind us, the 'computer' part of CALL has long been tending toward normalization. It no longer seems that the computer part of the equation carries significant weight. The weight has shifted to what computers DO.

What computers do best for language learners is to facilitate communication between them and other speakers of the target language, most predominantly through social media. I believe that SM assists LL more than does the old C, so I have been calling CALL SMALL at every opportunity and encouraging people to "think SMALL" in order to de-emphasize the computer part of CALL as we evolve toward SMALL.

Language is all about communication, and it is through meaningful communication that students of languages learn them, and to a much lesser extent through learning about the structure of the language (though of course, learning how to correctly shape communication and developing predictive knowledge of the language can help with understanding by helping to decode what people are saying). This in turn facilitates communication which in turn forms the substrate for language learning.

I am aware that there is a clamor of other acronyms to describe our field; e.g. TELL, MALL, SMLL etc etc and whenever I nudge SMALL to the fore it is usually drowned out by others suggesting equally qualified acronyms with the same passion as my suggestion. In my presentation I will summarize some of the arguments I have been making for SMALL over the years since I first started mooting the concept in 2009.

Also, a part of my message is that many of these tools and skills work through peers scaffolding one another to bring each other up to speed on the ins and outs. In a piece I just edited for Gavin Wu for the TESL-EJ On the Internet column (Wu, Junjie Gavin. (2018). Mobile Collaborative Learning in a Chinese Tertiary EFL Context.TESL-EJ, Volume 22, Number 2, Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej86/ej86int/) Gavin mentions how this worked for him in this passage from his article:

"Collaborative work is very much needed and workplace collaboration is viewed as a necessary skill for current and future global employees (Jones & Hafner, 2012). In academia, cross-national collaboration is nothing new (e.g., the teacher/researcher in Hong Kong collaborated productively in Google Docs with the section editor in the United Arab Emirates on this piece of work), however, the question we may need to consider is to what extent our students are prepared for engaging in such collaborative work modes?"

Using Google Docs to arrive at a publishable version of an article in process appears to have been a new experience for Gavin, but after being exposed to it, he used it in his article as an example of the point he was making to begin with. So, we learn by doing, and pass these skills on through engaging our students in the same and similar techniques.

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

Meanwhile, I am preparing an abstract for the XXth International Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Research Conference to be held at The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong from 10 - 12 July 2019, https://www.call2019.org/. The conference theme is "Social CALL" meaning "the social dimensions of CALL, more specially the social challenges and responsibilities in respected discipline." The call for papers has been issued with abstracts due at the end of January, 2019, https://www.call2019.org/call%20for%20papers.php.

I am planning to attend several other conferences this year if my proposals are accepted.  These will follow on the trajectory of my work in social CALL laid out in my book chapter on SMALL, as traced from Writing for Webheads and Webheads in Action (WiA) at the start of this century, http://webheads.info, and the three free, global WiA online convergences we mounted in 2005, 2007, and 2009, http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/wiaoc_index.htm. Another thread binding my work since the turn of the century has been my work with Electronic Village Online (EVO, http://evosessions.pbworks.com/) in which I have participated as both a coordinator and moderator of sessions since 2002.

One of my longest running sessions was Multiliteracies, which I conducted in one form or another from 2004 through 2014, and which was known in its latest renditions, once I had bit the koolaid of connectivism, as MultiMOOC, http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/.

My latest and most recent project, run under the auspices of EVO since 2015, has been EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC, http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/). The social interaction in this project has been best captured in the wide-ranging and graphically colorful interaction of its Google+ Community (G+C, https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112993649763396826671). Google plans to shut down this community in April of this year due to known hacking of the platform, apparently because they don't wish to address the threat of congressional oversight as has happened with Facebook since 2016 (and Google+ is not the financial mainstay of Google so they have decided not to defend it). Thus we will need to harvest as much data as we can from this platform before April in order to be able to use what we have built there in any analysis of how we fit in with the participatory culture that makes Minecraft so compelling for language learning.

We have already used blog tools experimentally in this effort; e.g. Mircea Patrascu's harvest of posts through the end of the year here, https://evomcarchive.blogspot.com/. We are presently engaged in our most current EVOMC session, #evomc19, so we will need to make a last harvest when the session ends in February. I hope to use the resulting data in my presentations, updating what we have learned about gamification of SMALL through this effort, as it has evolved over the years each year since 2015.

Two other conferences I'm planning to attend, assuming my proposals are accepted, are:

Blending social media and eLearning 3.0 into a substrate for hosting participatory communities of practice


The loss of Google+ Communities (G+Cs) is going to be a huge blow to thousands of communities of practice, who stand to lose not only their data and transaction histories, but their connections with one another that were made possible only through the community. We don't necessarily have a way of contacting the 350 people who are members of the G+C EVO Minecraft MOOC. Our links with each other, except in the many cases where we have formed personal bonds with our community members, is through their Google profiles, which, except when hacked, Google disguises as to true identities. This is sure to be the biggest blow to educational CoPs since Ning withdrew its free services in 2010 (Stevens, 2010) or the more recent demise of Wikispaces ( whose end came on July 31, 2018 for sites used purely for education).

It's also going to send all these CoPs out looking for new homes. EVO Minecraft MOOC has already started experimenting with Google Groups and Google Classrooms, though neither seem all that compelling. We have also been considering Moodle, since a couple of people in our group have experience and training on that platform, the platform is free an open source, and training opportunities abound. Other possibilities include (off the top of my head here) Canva, Schoology, Edmodo, Peer-to-peer university (P2PU), Wikiversity ... I'll add to this list as others occur or are suggested to me.

eLearning 3.0


The eLearning 3.0 part is a concept put forward by Stephen Downes in a recent MOOC he hosted by that name, https://el30.mooc.ca/, and which I described (to an extent) in a blog post here:
https://learning2gether.net/2018/12/17/learning2gether-with-stephen-downes-about-elearning-3-0/. The most interesting thing to me about this and all of Stephen's MOOCs is the platform he has developed for hosting his events, which he calls gRSShopper. The grasshopper flits about collecting content via RSS feeds and couches it all in a platform that runs personal learning environments (PLEs) such as MOOCs. The platform has evolved over the years since Stephen co-hosted the first MOOC in 2008, Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge (CCK08, https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08---the-distributed-course).

The portal pages for these early MOOCs seem to have disappeared from U of Manitoba's servers, but these early cMOOCs were proofs of concept that algorithms could manage the massive part of MOOCs, the large numbers of participants. The idea was that the participants could learn from one another without any direct intervention from a teacher directing that learning from on-high (in other words, knowledge was distributed through aggregation, not delivered top-down). I recall that Stephen's scripts aggregated all content tagged #cck08 and displayed it via his gRSShopper-driven portal script (and to prevent spam, he required bloggers in CCK08 to register their blogs, and the script would aggravate all tagged content only from trusted users).

Here's how Stephen describes gRSShopper. Visit https://grsshopper.downes.ca/ to learn more.



I don't recall exactly how much of the platform was in operation in 2008 but Stephen explained and demonstrated gRSShopper at an Innovation Forum presentation as a prototype for a PLE on Jul 07, 2009. The YouTube link is https://youtu.be/1W6frOLNgLU.


Stephen not only uses gRSShopper as the PLE driving all his MOOCs but invites others to use it freely. He explained in some detail during the eLearning 3.0 MOOC how it works and how anyone can do that. You can tease out the relevant material through the links on this page, https://el30.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm, which, if followed systematically, would allow you to replay the entire course. At the bottom of the page, you can see that the page itself is generated from gRSShopper (I did a ctrl-F search on that page to get the notice to highlight in yellow before making the screen capture).






Blending social media and eLearning 3.0 into platforms for online conferences


This project is one requested of me by the president of APACALL Jeong Bae Son. APACALL is considering holding online conferences. Jeong Bae and other colleagues in APACALL were participants in our WiaOC conferences, which at the time seemed to set a new standard for hosting conferences by using free Web 2.0 tools and ignoring pay walls, as was the norm for other online conferences taking place before that time. Nowadays, the standard is much more rigorous, but Jeong Bae asked me to look into how other conferences host their online events.

I've addressed this in a couple of blog posts.

My report to APACALL, when I am able to focus on it, will combine an annotated listing of successfully run online conferences, an inventory of essential and desired features in mounting one's own, and some suggestions on how APACALL might move forward on the concept based on what is learned from reacting to the changing playing field given the considerations noted above.

& Etc.


Another project I have been working on obliquely is one proposed to me by Jennifer Verschoor a couple of years ago. Jennifer's idea is for us to put our heads together on developing coding as a focus for language learning. We created a rationale for it in Stevens and Verschoor (2017) but we haven't developed the notion much beyond that. In both our cases, we simply lacked time to work on it, Jen because she is in so much demand in her consultancy work, and me because I had a full-time job. Now that my full-time work has ended, that will be one less constraint on our time (once the other wheels alluded to in this post are set in motion and running of their own accord).

References


Stevens, Vance. (2010). The Ning Thing. TESL-EJ, Volume 14, Number 1: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume14/ej53/ej53int/; pdf: http://www.tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej53/int.pdf.

Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development" in Son, J.-B. (Ed.). Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/computer-assisted-language-learning/;
Also available at http://tinyurl.com/small2014.

Stevens, V.  (2015). Finding Your Voice: Teaching Writing Using Tablets with Voice Capability. TESL-EJ, Volume 19, Number 3, Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume19/ej75/ej75int/.
Also available at: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf; pp. 1-11 in pdf.

Stevens, V. & Verschoor, J. (2017). Coding and English Language Teaching. TESL-EJ, Volume 21, Number 2, Available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume21/ej82/ej82int/. Also available at: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej82/int.pdf; pp. 1-15.


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)