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/

DIYLMS: Do-it-yourself learning management systems

It's been a while since I've posted here, but meanwhile I've been laying tracks in other spaces around the Web. I still consider this to be my central blog where I try to record my most introspective thoughts on social media assisted learning but I've been posting my most recent writings in other blogs and wikis.

I've just returned from a stint of edutourism in Morocco and Turkey, interspersed with two presentations at TESOL Arabia in Dubai, and I'm leaving shortly for Philadelphia where I'm due to give yet another presentation, followed by another in Sharjah April 3, and then a final one scheduled for Taichung in May, before I finish my teaching and take a break for the summer.

The talk in Taichung is a co-presentation with Aiden Yeh on "Thinking SMALL: Facilitating online teacher professional development" and is along the lines of a book chapter I had promised to produce last summer, before losing my previous job and finding myself up against a wall, which I've now managed to climb and scramble over.  In the process of finding a way over that wall, the book chapter fell by the wayside.

As a part of that protracted scramble I took on a part-time teaching job with New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi teaching research writing to expat and local UAE students at NYIT. I was given a syllabus to cover but was left to my own devices as to how I would realize it, so I created a wiki with links to online versions of all the course materials at http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/ and got students to submit their work primarily in Google Docs.  When I finally got a full-time job with the Higher Colleges of Technology Abu Dhabi Men's College, CERT, I carried over what I had learned working with student writers at NYIT to my new posting teaching academic composition via yet another wiki, this time tailor-made for cadets at the UAE Naval College. Here I employed similar techniques as at NYIT, taking submissions in Google Docs and organizing the course with links to syllabus materials, screencast tutorials, and other course resources at another wiki made for that purpose,  http://academiccomposition.pbworks.com/.

I felt more comfortable with constructing courses in this way than I did using Moodle (as I'd been doing in my previous teaching position at The Petroleum Institute,  http://www.pimoodle.org/course/category.php?id=9, guest access allowed). My realization that a wiki-based environment could do much and more of what I had accomplished with Moodle led me to coin a concept I dubbed DIYLMS, do-it-yourself learning management systems.  When I was invited to go to Marrakech as guest of the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (LT-SIG) and MATE (Moroccan Associate of Teachers of English) to give the keynote speech at a conference there, I suggested DIYLMS as a topic.  This was fine with them, my talk was very well received, and I archived the event with recordings and other image artifacts at one of my Posterous blog spaces, since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html

Here are the slides from that keynote:

Learner-centred do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems

View more PowerPoint from Vance Stevens

I had already written a rationale for the DIYLMS concept as a link from the course at NYIT http://fcwr101.pbworks.com/DIYLMS but I expanded this into its own wiki when I was asked to help with a pre-conference development course in Dubai the day before the official start of the 2012 TESOL Arabia Conference at the HCT Dubai Women's College. The professional development course was entitled "Online Teaching and Learning in TESOL", and I followed fellow-presenters Nicky Hockly and Justin Shewell to give my workshop on DIYLMS.  True to form, I created a wiki as a portal for the workshop and gave a hands-on follow up to the rationale I'd laid down in Marrakech.  The wiki portal is here: http://diylms.pbworks.com/ and the slides are below:

DIYLMS = Do it yourself Learning Management Systems, Part 2 the Workshop

View more PowerPoint from Vance Stevens

This event took place just before a deadline I was supposed to meet as editor of the On the Internet column in the TESL-EJ journal, so I drafted an article explaining the components of DIYLMS and posted it to its own blog which I'd created in case any participants wanted to subscribe and experience firsthand the particular affordances of Posterous as a tool in DIYLMS:
http://diylms.posterous.com/ (Posterous shut down at the end of April 2013; the post has since moved to http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/learner-centered-do-it-yourself.html).  All of this was meant to model for participants at the TESOL Arabia workshop how a DIYLMS might be constructed and convey something of its look and feel to those who participated in the workshop. The TESL-EJ version has since been published as:

Stevens, Vance. (2012). Learner-centered Do-it-yourself Learning Management Systems. TESL-EJ, Volume 15, Number 4, pp. 1-14: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej60/int.pdf. Also at http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume15/ej60/ej60int/

Meanwhile I was invited to travel to Turkey as guest of Erzincan University to give seminars to their students and teachers March 13 and 14, 2012.   Details were ironed out at the last minute, and I was not given adequate notice to prepare handouts for the students, so again I used the tried and true techniques of working from a wiki which I created for the occasion: http://erzincancalling.pbworks.com/.  Again my intent was to teach through demonstrating and modeling how learning can accrue from appropriately configured use of social media-enabled Web 2.0 tools.

The workshop was a challenge because it was given to four dozen participants sitting at as many computers arranged in rows set perpendicular to the front of the room, so those in the back of the room were for all intents and purposes distance learners.  I reached into my hat and pulled out one rabbit after another in an attempt to attract the students to spaces we could all cohabitate online.  At some point, one of the brighter students asked the correct question; essentially, how does this all hang together and what does it have to do with learning English?

In answer to that I got the students to crowd-source sites they were using for learning English in TitanPad, one of the more robust Etherpad clones, and had just pasted their contributions into a Google Doc when the workshop abruptly ended with the students simultaneously exhibiting signs of not wanting to miss lunch, but not before they had almost all registered in the Google Doc I had just created for them as the next step in their interactive learning process.

I was at that point only midstream in where I was trying to take them but I realized I had a powerful tool in that they were all registered in this one Google Doc, so I registered their teachers there as well, and began imagining that this could potentially be just the start of an extended blended learning journey, if the students wanted to carry on where we'd left off through use of the tools I had just put in place for them.

Meanwhile one of my Facebook friends had been asking if anyone could contribute an article needed right away for a journal in Serbia, so I agreed to write up my observations as further explanation to the students and teachers in Erzincan of what we had started together, and I invited my Serbian colleagues to publish it if they wished.  That writeup has been moved here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/turning-3-hour-face-to-face-seminar.html

I'm due to trot all this out once again April 3rd at the 6th eLearning in Action conference at the Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology:  http://194.170.54.16/events/edtechpd2012/index.asp, which I hope to simulcast in Blackboard / Collaborate (Elluminate).  If you can stand more, stay tuned :-)

I hope to add here links to that recording, as well as links to my TESL-EJ article and to the one for the Serbian journal, both of which I think should be published soon.