Using elgg with EFL & ESL students :: Blog

The culture of teaching and learning is a rich topic to explore. Not only are there the stereotypical differences between learning by memorising and learning by doing but there are also differences across generations and this is particularly noticeable when you work in adult education. In this case your participants have clear expectations about what is going to happen in the classroom based on their prior experience. For these people it can be just as big a culture shock to come into the participative and experiential classroom as visiting another country.

Teaching Culture was the name of a project I participated in a couple of years ago when we developed an international training course to encourage teachers in adult education to include more cultural awareness and cultural competency aspects in their courses. The coordinating partner for that project was the German Volkshochschule Rhein-Sieg and I was delighted to be invited to take part in their workshop day on September 7th which was just after the VITAE project meeting ended nearby in Remagen.

Knowing how keen VHS in general and VHS Rhein-Sieg in particular are on training I was surprised to discover that the idea of a teacher workshop/conference day was new. In fact it was the closing event of the Teaching Culture project 2 years ago which had given them the idea. In addition to the workshop I gave with Laurent Borgmann about using digital tools in learning there was a wide variety of topics explored that day including Suggestopedia, learning styles and using songs in French teaching.

Inevitably Laurent and I could not let this opportunity go and we were both armed with our recorders. The first results of our conversations are the topic of the latest Absolutely Intercultural show in which we find out about the generation differences in attitudes to learning, the gender bias in adult education and the need to include fun in learning. In the case of the workshop day this included a wonderfully multi-cultural lunch and to round off the day a musical performance by Mauricio Virgens from Brazil and Andres Villamil from Colombia who played for us and 'bossanovarised' our lives a little. Included in the podcast are extracts of the music we heard and an explanation of how Mauricio sees himself as a cultural ambassador for his country through his music and acerbic observations about life in Germany as a Brazilian.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/what-does-a-personal-learning-e

I’m doing two presentations on Personal Learning Environments this week - one in Braga in Portugal and one on line at Bar Camp Berlin. Regular readers will know these are not my first presentations on PLEs. And lately I have been concerned that the debate has been stalling a little. We have been very good at saying what a PLE is not - it is not an instititional learning system etc. but rather hazy on just what it is. So that is the theme of the all brand new - new words, new pictures presentation. I will release the slides in Friday and try to get an audio version out in next two weeks. One of the points which I am at pains to make is that a PLE is not just a technical infrastruture - indeed it is possible to imanagine a PLE which involves not computers what so ever. Anyway here is a picture Jenny Hughes drew for me of her PLE>

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/a-month-of-meetings/

last week was spent with my head in a bunch of spreadsheets doing the Pontydysgu accounts.

But this week I’m on the road. tomorrow and Thursday Pontydysgu is organising an international seminar in Newport, Wales on the Training of Trainers in Europe. And Thurdsay night I am off to Braga for a conference on web 2.0, social software and learning. Saturday I am presenting at Bar Camp Berlin through a video tie up from Braga. Then a quick flight to Bremen and on Sunday I am off to Glasgow for a meeting with Careers Scotland. Tuesday night I will be in Maidstone, Kent for a meeting on e-Portfolios. Back to Bremen for three days, then Barcelona. The following week is Seville and perhaps London. Phew. But the real point is that if our paths are crossing I would love to meet up with any of you. Just send me an email saying where you will be.

I was interested to find out that a course is being run in Ning about Web 2.0 tools in business. I am curious as to how a course can be administered in Ning and so have joined up. Find it at http://workliteracy.ning.com/ What is also interesting is that participants have the opportunity of three levels of commitment.

1. Spectator

2. Joiner/collector

3. Creator

And so each level gets a different task. Now that's what I call differentiation! This is only good for life long learning activities unfortunately and could not be accommodated in a an exam-oriented course. There is another model though and that is George Siemens and Stephen Downes Connectivism course where there are two levels of involvement, one of which is the engaged and active level leading to certification.

Since being asked to teach a class called 'Communication and IT' I have been looking around for inspiring materials. Coincidentally I joined yet another Ning Community one of whose members was Dennis O'Connor who drew attention to an amazing array of materials, lesson plans and interactive games to make students more aware about effective internet searching, website evaluation and so on. Even though the materials are in English I intend trying some of them out with my Danish students. In fact there are far too many resources for me to make use of them all but I particularly liked the keyword challenges and the web evaluation tool. Then I discovered even more in this area while I was exploring what Flowgram could do and watched this web tour by  N Norris about information literacy which inlcudes 21st century Information Fluency and much more besides.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/teachers-nerdyness-and-tech/

Jenny Hughes has had a hard week editing a handbook for teachers on technology. The stress is begining to show. Whilst waiting for partners from the Taccle project (who are producing the handbook) to arrive, she twittered to me this reflection on teachers and nerdyness on an open skype channel :). And teachers - we love you really. LOL

“teachers get nerdy about who sits where in staff room

17:56

and nerdy about cardigans

17:56

and potted plants on the window sill

17:56

and using a ruler to do their register

17:56

and not lending anyone their red pen

17:57

and sandwiches in tupperware containers

17:57

and the Daily Mail

17:58

and whether its morally justified in going on strike when the future of the world is in their hand

17:58

and keeping peppermints in their desk

17:59

and seeig if they can make their suply of sugar paper last longer than anyone else

17:59

and nature tables

18:00

and box pleated skirts

18:00

(thats just the men)

18:00

and having special things for de-icing their windows

18:01

and posting a list of Rules of the Staff Room on the wall

18:02

which always starts with the milk and biscuit buying rota

18:02

and ends with a warning about not leaving dirty cups

18:02

which is underlined 3 times

18:03

with too many exclamation marks

18:03

but computers, I assure you, they are not nerdy about

18:05

Mind you (because Im bored sitting in hotel waiting for foreigners) teachers do have some techy skills

18:09

they are very good with shoe lace technology

18:12

have built in sensors and rapid response programmes for spotting the kid who is going to throw up or piss themselves

18:13

some of us were shit hot on the ballistics of board rubbers

18:14

(you have to be able to get  them to land wood side down on the desk to give kid nasty noisy fright or felt side down to leave them spluttering and coughing in a cloud of chalk dust. Its a high level skill)

18:18

they are competent at every sort of print technology from Caxton, through spirit copiers, Bandas, Roneos and Gestetners with or without wax stencils and including John Bull printing outfits. You can assess competence by seeing how big the pink, purple or green stain on their fingers is.

18:20

the older ones    can still tune the wireless in to Music and Movement (with Daphne Oxenford)

18:22

and some of them can even fit together those plastic shapes that make geodesic domes. The others stuff them in the back of the cupboard and hope the kids don’t find them

18:23

they are really good at measuring the length of the playground with a push along wheely thing and they check it every year just to make sure

18:24

and best of all they have pencil sharpeners whith a handle you turn on their desks. They are awesome.

18:25

so not entirely techno deficient

18:27

it’s just those com…comt…compu things

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on line again tomorrow

18:29

Actually it's not over yet. We started a couple of weeks ago with some online introductory exercises through the course website for which we use Moodle. Some of the participants wondered why there was an online introduction but as I explained to them during the two day face to face part of the course this was a way of giving them the experience of using online tools before we met. It seems that this needs to be emphasised more so that its purpose is clearer.

There were 12 participants in the end after a couple of cancellations. The face to face part of the course was an opportunity to see pedagogical examples of the main Web 2.0 tools in use and to try them out on a practical basis. So every participant had an opportunity to start a blog, produce a part of a podcast and edit a wiki. There was also a lightening introduction to social bookmarking, personal webpages and social networking using Ning as an example. It was especially the pedagogical examples which inspired participants to think in concrete terms how they could apply some of these tools in their own teaching.

It was interesting that a couple of them started thinking in terms of how to disseminate the ideas to colleagues rather than looking at the design of a specific teaching module. This is also a good result for the project because we are looking at having a multiplier effect.

We had used an adaptation of the LOTI lesson plan as inspiration for planning. This is a form to be filled in and our participants suggested that it should be a checklist rather than a form and being familiar with the pressure of full time teaching I can understand completely why this would be a more useful approach.

So now the participants have returned home to work on their teaching plans and try them out. We will be keeping in contact over the next five weeks or so and will meet one last time for a mini-online conference using one of the synchronous meeting tools we used to get in contact with Niels Damgaard in Oslo and Karin Høgh in Copenhagen,

I am really looking forward to finding out what this very mixed group of teachers come up with.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/open-learning-the-debate-contin

Continuing the open learning debate….I greatly like this diagramme by George Siemens. I think there is much of merit here. Very happpy to see acknowledgemnt of the importance of self publishing (as opposed to academic reporsitories). However there are a few things missed out.

Firstly if we take congniscence of Jenny Hughes’ defintion of learning as ‘to find and follow a track’ as counterposed to curriculum  from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ as race or racecourse, then instotutions and teacher have an important role in assisting learners in developing their own learning pathways.

A second important  role is that of assessment. But to understand this we need to decouple assessment from acceditation. If we design assessment as a learning process and move from assessemnt of learning to asssessement for learning this could become an integral part of the process of finding and developing learning pathways. This is not so utopian. Serendipitously. The Times newpaper today published an article about innovative assessment in UK universities. The struggle, though, as with self and peer assessment is in assessment having to match accreditation procedures. Without this link, we could open up all jinds of new forms of assessment.

A final point on accreditation. Many learners do not want or require accreditation. Indeed it is the formal accreditation procedures which deters them for signing up for a learning programme. And as Antnio Fini, talking about the home made certificate he got from the OpenEd2007 course, says: “all my connections, blog posts, comments, collective works, presentations, articles related to that experience, are still out there as tangible proofs of this learning. So I could equally put the OpenEd course in my CV and could ask to my supervisor to evaluate all that activity for credit in my PhD, also without that piece of paper!”

Why not put the learners in charge of accreditation. Lets leave it to them to decide how they wish to show what and how they have learned - albeit with support. I once co-ran a course with Jenny Hughes where we offered the particpants their certificate at the start of the courese. They refused! But it did raise the issue of why they were doing the course and how they valued learning. And that is an issue we need to bring to the fore.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/have-you-got-something-to-say-a

Every month we are running Sounds of the Bazaar ‘Emerging Mondays’ - a topical live internet radio show combining the best of radio, live chat and occasionally some extravagant social activity inside Second Life. The aim is to bring lively commentary and debate on topical issues to the start of each month.

Upcoming

27th October 2008: Emerging Mondays: the Digital Identity show

‘What is digital identity?’

So what does digital identity mean to you? Do you care? As more of our lives, from personal to professional activities, find their way online how do we cope with managing our fractured and distributed digital presence. Can we ever keep ‘personal’ separate from ‘professional’ when tools and services mash-up our online identities in ways that are beyond our control? What does this mean for the development of new literacies and new services that seek to put our identities back within our grasp.

With interviews, music, strong opinion, poetry, our very own edupunk granny Leila and more. LIVE.

Have you got soemthing to say about identities. Would you liek to come on th programme through a skype or telephone link-up. In depth interviews or just two minute vox spots are all welcome. Tell us a story or read a poem. If you are interested just drop  me an email - graham10 [@] mac.com.

We will be broadcasting *LIVE* from 1800 - 1900 UK time, 1900 - 2000 Central European Time. Links to the programme url and chatroom to follow.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/10/open-learning-is-here-where-nex

First we had open educational resources. This was a step forward but the resources were variable in quality, hard to find and were often tied to courses which made them hard to use for self study. Those issues haven’t gone away but improvements in search technologies and a wider general conciousness about the value of self publishing open resources means it is increasingly easy to find what you want.

And now we are witnessing an explosion in open learning. Of course there are the big publicity happenings like the CCK08 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemans on connectivism.

But more important is the flowering of opportunties for learning from many, many diverse sources. One of the best things about Twitter is it opens access to many events going on and opportunities to partiucpate at a distance. Last week I dropped in on a TeachMeet session being organised as part of the Scottish Learning Festival. Someone had ’shouted it out” in Twitter, I followed the link and ended up in a broadcast over the UK Open Universities free Flashmeeting service. There was about twenty or so of us particpating online. Whilst the quality of the video sometimes left something to be desired (and I was stuggling to follow Glaswegian accents) this was more than made up for by the quality and humour in the online chat.

Yesterday morning I recieved this in my email: “You have a live session today with cristinacost on ‘Connecting Online : Sharing Life’s Experiences’. The session will start at 10:00 AM W. Europe Standard Time and is 60 minutes long.”  This is a free course being organised in the WizIQ environment. Sadly I am bogged down in administration and had no time to go. But over the last year there has been an explosion of such open courses and seminars. We are organising one such series oursleves through the Jisc Evolve project.

And this morning Cristina Costa showed me her online bookclub “Living Literature though Exploration.” This more than anything impresses me as to how we have moved towards real open learning through Web 2.0 tools (in this case as simplle as a shared blog and some bookmarks.

However there remain a number of issues.

The last barrier to open learning - and a very complex one - is that of accreditation. Whilst I am sceptical about the Connectivism MOOC, it is raising a number of central questions about open learning, not least that of accreditation. Under the Connectivism course model, only 34 (I think) sdtudents are offically enrolled for accreditation and therefore pay fees. Their fees pay for the costs of the course which is open and free to everyone else. As part of this they get feedback form tutors on course assignments and accreditation at the end of the course. How important is this for learning? And would it be possible for a student to develop a portfolio based on particpation in the course and then claim accreditation elsewhere? Are we moving to a model where learning is open but institutions have a major role in accrediting that learning (presumably through a portfolio model)? Can we develop a concept of open accreditation? And what would that mean?