EdTechTESOL

I gave a presentation at JALT-CALL this past weekend, entitled “Blogging in Two Languages: An International Peer Assistance Exchange”, and I just made a quick VoiceThread version to share online. The project involved the interaction between both native speakers and language learners of English and Japanese in language courses at two universities. Japanese language students from the University of New Hampshire and English language students from the University of Yamanashi collaborated in a blog exchange, where they all created content in their target language while serving as native language consumers and peer-teachers to the other group.

The goals were to provide the students with broader access to native input in the target language, create a social learning network to extend the learning beyond the classroom, and help students to start developing a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) to provide a framework for more autonomous language learning.

Just in case you skipped over the presentation, here is a link to the Ning site that I set up to facilitate creating such blog exhchanges for your Japanese or English language learners: L1 L2 Blog Exchange.
Questions and/or comments greatly appreciated!

The folks at LiveMocha, who have set their sites on creating “the world’s largest community of language learners”^[1] went live with their social network for language learning. I must say that this site is an interesting concept, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I was a bit surprised at first when I noticed that none of the main people behind this seem to have any background in language education^[2] , but they seem to want to stress the social aspect of language learning, so maybe they are not as concerned with SLA theory as much. They actually side-step this point rather nicely in their latest blog post when they say “People want to communicate with and integrate into cultures; they don’t want to be linguists.”^[3] This is a good point, and specifically for the type of users that they are looking for. As more web savvy learners seek to create their own PLE for self-directed learning, I am sure that LiveMocha will be getting some of their attention.

As to the site itself, it provides users with three main sections for Learning, Practicing, and Sharing. The Learning sections is focused around courses with online lessons, the Practice section involves scripted speaking activities, both individual and with a partner, and directed writings. These activities can be reviewed by native speaker members in the Share section. Currently, they only have lessons available in six languages, but perhaps they have more on the way. Users can still use the social aspect in many languages even if they are not yet supported by Courses on the site. The landing page for members lists other members who are native speakers of languages you are studying, and members who are studying the same languages as you. These are listed under the heading of “Make Friends Now!” This may lead to making international connections with fellow students or native speakers of languages in your profile. The opportunity for authentic communication is great, and I know that my English students here in Japan have few such chances. Maybe this new tool will put a dent in some of the “practice English with me” calls I used to get so often on Skype…
Bottom line, I like it. It may need some work, but the site is at least a great concept. I am not ready to send my students in headfirst, but I will keeping my eye on this one…

Via Lifehacker

It seems that Google is jumping into the social bookmarking market^[1] with their new service Google Shared Stuff. Although there are already many good social bookmarking sites out there, Google has finally put a face to it. They have included a profile section on your shared page, complete with photo, occupation, location, links, and even space for a self intro. Facebook meets Del.icio.us?

Although Google has become a huge part of my own PLE^[2] I must say I am on the fence with this one…

What they have done well:

• The addition of the profile. Simply adding a photo and a little personal information makes social bookmarking just a bit more social. I am a very visual person, so being able to connect the face to the content is important to me.
• Integration. Google is a core part of my PLE, so keeping things in the family appeals to me.
• Sharing options. The Shared Stuff pop-up gives you the additional choices of sending the bookmark as an email or even posting it to other social bookmarking sites.
• Subscriptions and RSS. Maybe this is a given, but I need to give them credit for it. You can either subscribe by RSS (Google Reader, perhaps?), or add a widget to your iGoogle page.
• Article Preview. There is an option to inclue an image of the page with your bookmark. You can even cycle through images to choose the best one.

What needs work:

• No option for importing bookmarks. This will probably come with time, as Google has a track record of rolling things out a step at a time. (Do they do this to avoid software bugs, or to allow users to gain confidence with the interface before “complicating” it?)
• No Tag Cloud, or Tag list. Again, this may come with time.
• Article Preview. You can add an image of the page, but it is saved as a very small image and does not link to a full size image. (Are the Google servers running out of space?)

These are just first impressions, and the service is still young, but until they enable bookmark importing I think I will hold off for now.