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L1L2 Blog Exchange Presentation

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

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!

Also filed in Blogging, Collaboration, Motivation, PLE, Presentations | | Comments (1)

Avoiding Dead End Blogging in the Classroom

Sunday, October 28, 2007

One of the great failures of blogging in the classroom is that the blogs rarely extend beyond the semester. Why is this?

I think that most teachers underestimate the blogging process and simply think that students will just do it without proper scaffolding and guidance. This is a great failure, as what this turns into is a simple journal activity done online, which completely ignores the greater possibilities of a learning blog. Why not introduce students to the full blogging cycle of reading -> commenting -> posting -> discussing?

Students need to be made aware of the benefits of reaching out and reading other blogs as resources of information, sources of discussion and ideas. They must learn to comment to start discussions with other authors before posting on their own. They should know what is out there before adding to the discussion in their own blogs, so that they know where to start. Teachers need to provide the required scaffolding to walk the students through this process before allowing them to jump in too quickly. Too often new tools fall by the wayside simply because we are not shown how to use them properly… With proper guidance, students will be able to create their own social networks around their blogs, benefit from collaboration and discussion with other, and take more control over their own learning environment…

I have come across two great resources this week about how to set up blogging in the classroom, and I highly recommend checking them out if you are looking to kickstart your students’ learning blogs. It could make the difference between your students blogging because “they have to” and blogging because “they want to”…

First, check out the post “Blogging: It Isn’t About Writing” over at The Four Eyed Technologist. This is a great post about the cycle of blogging and gives some great tips on how to properly scaffold the process in your classroom. Next, take a click over to the presentation page for “Sustained Blogging in the Classroom” by Jeff Utecht. He also has a wiki page set up on the topic. Jeff gives a 23 minute presentation on blogging in the classroom that will really help you set up your classroom for blogging success. The video download is a bit heavy at 291MB, but well worth it.

Image credits: Rosino on Flickr

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Digg for Education?

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Educators worldwide seem to have latched on to social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl and others, but why not take it a step further? Personally, I like to take a look through the links of others in my network, but sometimes the plain links don’t tell the whole story. Why did they save that link? What is special about it? What do they think about it? These questions all pass through my mind as I view these links, and it makes me wish that these services offered “discuss this” links. Sure, I could simply email my comments and/or questions, but why not have that built in? Wouldn’t that put a little more ’social’ in social bookmarking?

So this is why my interest was peaked when I saw that my hosting service added a new “one-click install” to the Goodies section. The new software is Pligg, and it is an open source Digg clone. I couldn’t resist, so I decided to install the program to see how hard it is to set up and get running. As I write this now, I am still waiting for the “one-click install” to complete. Any moment now…

Before deciding to give Pligg a try, I did to a quick search for social bookmarking sites specifically for educators, but I did not find much. One interesting site is Edtags.org, which seems to be the work of a doctoral student at Harvard. It is interesting, but seems to be for the use of Harvard students and staff only. Perhaps this is only while they work out the system? I was surprised though as their seems to be little “social” activity on the site currently. They claim over 500 users, but the articles with the highest “votes” only seem to have around three! I was also unable, in my brief search, to find an article that had been commented on. The site seems to be a work in progress, and you can get more details from their blog. I will probably keep an eye on this one, as it would be interesting if they opened it up beyond the Harvard community.

In the meantime, I guess I will just be playing with Pligg, as I would love to see a fully functioning Digg-type site specifically for educators…

Do you think that educators would use such a tool? The Edtags site does seem to lack in the actual social interaction aspect. They have the communication tools built-in and available, and they are certainly sharing links, but are they discussing them? Are they interacting in any real way? After all, without the communication aspect, why not just share a del.icio.us account? Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for their work, I am just curious why so little discussion seems to evolve from the sharing…

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A Hot Cup Of Language Learning

Thursday, September 27, 2007

The folks at LiveMocha, who have set their sites on creating “the world’s largest community of language learners”:”MochaTalk(Livemocha is live today! Come join us in our language cafe)”:http://blog.livemocha.com/2007/09/24/livemocha-is-live-today-come-join-us-in-our-language-cafe/ 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:”LiveMochaTeam()”:http://www.livemocha.com/pages/team , 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.”:”MochaTalk(Livemocha is live today! Come join us in our language cafe)”:http://blog.livemocha.com/2007/09/24/livemocha-is-live-today-come-join-us-in-our-language-cafe/ 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

Also filed in PLE | | Comments (0)

Putting a Face on Social Bookmarking

Friday, September 21, 2007

It seems that Google is jumping into the social bookmarking market:”Google Wants You To Share Stuff(TechCrunch)”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/20/google-wants-you-to-share-stuff/ 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:”My PLE(:I use Google Reader, Gmail, Google Documents, and iGoogle on a daily basis.)”:, 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.

Also filed in Collaboration, PLE | | Comments (0)

Social Networking for Educators

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

The fact that social networking sites are popular with students is obvious, but what I did not realize was how popular they have become with educators. One of my recent goals has been to work more on entering in discussion for professional development, and this blog is actually one of the first steps. I first learned of the motivating force of online discussion firsthand through my past experience with a personal blog. The discussions that began there led to interesting insights, wonderful tangents, and even a few good friends. The old personal blog has now faded away, but I want to now apply the same principals to professional development. Enter Ning, Facebook:”Facebook(My Facebook profile)”:http://www.facebook.com/p/Stephen_W_Henneberry/678357752, LinkedIn:”LinkedIn(My LinkedIn profile)”:…

I have been a member of LinkedIn for a while now, even though I was pretty sure that there was not much focus on education there, but I have found the experience interesting. Even though many of the discussions there are not related to education, I found that I was enjoying the process of the interaction. After all, even though as an educator I may be tied to one discipline, as a teacher I am not. I have long felt that being a teacher is not a job, but a lifestyle, and LinkedIn has helped to remind me of that again. I like to help. I like to teach. This is why I am a teacher, and this is why I find the discussion so interesting. Armed with this experience with a general social networking site, I decided to create my own focused social network using Ning.com.
Ning is a site where you can create your own social networks, and would probably be a pretty good tool for managing classes as well. I quickly created a network for myself and my fellow MA students, and the discussion began. Now we have our own “walled garden” style network for discussion and sharing. The reason I felt that we needed this is that we are all distance students, we simply cannot meet down at the local pub or student union to tip a beer and talk shop: Ning is now our pub. And our pub is not the only one on the block. I have already come across other groups of educators in both Ning and Facebook and joined in with them. So social networking for educators? Yes, most definitely. Although I would not say that I have made any “real” connections as of yet, the discussion and learning is happening…

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