Edu-Blogging and Via.Gra: The problem of building networks

Imagine a lone figure standing in the middle of the internet, screaming: “Hey people, I’m here, look at my cool blog!“ What is going to happen next?

With all likelihood, another person, looking perhaps a bit bot-like, will come along and scream back: “Via.Gra! Best prices! Order now!“

This describes the problem many bloggers in educational settings face. At school, a blogging project may last only a few weeks, not enough to gradually build an audience in the same way many 'free range' bloggers do.

In my interviews with teachers using blogging in their teaching, some suggestions where made, e.g. that teachers could heavily advertise student blogs in their own networks. Quite a few student blogs may actually be of interest to, lets say, fellow art teachers or biologists, since they may allow them a glimpse into a colleague's classroom. Another idea was that students could use their own networks to advertise their blogs through other media, such as social networks or Twitter. Even if friends and family may be less interested in expressionism or mammals, they may find it interesting to see how their friends or family members spend their time at school. In the first case, I would expect friendly encouragement as well as feedback on content, in the second case, I do not expect much feedback on content. A third idea was to use the classroom itself as a micro audience. Here, students can be advised on the kind of feedback expected, or can discuss how useful they found the feedback received and how this compares with the feedback they themselves have given.

I'm thinking, though, whether other models may be possible. In the context of language learning, there have been experiments with two classes of students, from different countries, blogging together, e.g. documenting an exchange program. Could such models also be adapted to subject learning? Different student groups mean that each group might have learned content in a slightly different way, may provide different examples or have done different experiments, read different texts, etc. Also, the social dynamics would be very different from what happens during in-class commenting (though I do not claim that they would necessarily be better).

How do you create an audience for your blog? How do you help students do the same?

What language is your internet? Part III

Normalerweise blogge ich ja auf Englisch, but perhaps I’ll make an exception today, parce que je veux discuter code-switching en-ligne.

I’ve been reading Gumpertz' classic on conversational code-switching, and been thinking about how it can be applied to language use on-line. The most obvious place to look would certainly be chatting. Chatting resembles (informal) conversation in so many ways that it would not be surprising to find evidence of conversational code-switching here. I’m not much of a chat person, though, and, anyway, plenty of research studied code-switching in chats, so I won’t focus on this here.

But let’s look at Twitter. Twitter resembles chats in some regards. Users write short contributions and may do so in fast succession. They can direct their tweets to other users or they can address anybody reading along, as they can in chat rooms. They also have a fairly exact idea of who is reading – while, in principle, everybody can read any public tweet, most readers will be followers, unless, of course, your tweet is retweeted or shared in some other way. Now, what does this mean for code-switching?

Intra-sentential code-switching is fairly rare in conversations, and, according to Gumpertz, usually more acceptable (in the linguistic, not in the social sense) in longer than in shorter sentences. 140 characters may not be much, but I guess it’s sufficient for most of Gumpertz examples of intra-sentential code-switching. I have to say I don’t remember having seen any – aside of obvious examples of borrowing – but maybe I have missed examples, or I may just be following the wrong folks :-)

One may claim, though, that several people in my time-line do something akin to inter-sentential code-switching: One sentence is in language a, the other sentence in language b. But here the methodological problems begin. Because tweets are short, many have only one sentence per utterance. So if we were to observe inter-sentential code-switching, it would most likely be from one utterance to the next. But do separate tweets form a unit, like a conversation? If they do not, is this still code-switching? After all: If you change language from one conversation to the next, that would hardly be called code-switching. But while the delineation of an utterance is fairly straightforward at Twitter (1 tweet=1 utterance), where do conversations stop and new conversations begin? Of course, we sometimes have very active exchanges between a small number of users, @-ing each other, or signaling in some other way with whom they are currently engaging. For a few minutes, or perhaps an hour or two, they turn Twitter into a kind chat room. These would be fairly clear-cut cases, but, alas, they are rather rare. So, let’s look at the more frequently occuring scenarios: If I tweet in English on Monday and in German on Tuesday, is this code-switching? If I tweet a complaint about bad service at a shop in German and, ten minutes later, tweet a link to a great journal article accompanied by an English comment, have I code-switched? Or has one conversation been finished and a new begun? Do I tweet for the same audience? Or do I ‘really’ have another audience in mind with my first tweet as compared to my second?

What are your experiences? What kind of code-switching behavior have you observed online?

What language is your internet? Part II

Language choice online seems to depend on a number of factors. Our audience is certainly one of these. But what do you do if you and your audience share several languages? Does the medium influence which language you pick?
Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou reports an interesting case: An Australian (native speaker of English) and a Japanese (native speaker of Japanese) who kept contact through two different social networks - and used (mostly) English on one of those (Facebook), and (mostly) Japanese on the other (Mixi), even though they discussed the same kind of content in both contexts!
On Twitter, I use mostly English, even with my German speaking colleagues (thanks for indulging me, folks!). Now, do I do this because I perceive Twitter to be an English domain, as Pasfield-Neofitou suggests, that is, because I strongly associate use of Twitter with English, or do I do so because the messages I exchange with colleagues are also intended for a secondary audience of "Twitter bystanders" who may not speak German (overall, most of my Twitter followers tweet in English)? Fascinating question :-)

Library love

'Tis the season... when book shops are so crowded that only the bravest dare enter them. Me, I don't fall into that category. Instead, I just add a couple of books to my library list.
Reason enough to spread some good old-fashioned library love.

Cookie monster goes to the library
What's better than books? Books plus cookies.


Study like a scholar, scholar!
Some people, it is rumored, actually use libraries to study. Gosh!


When I grow up, I want to be a librarian
You want full library action wherever you go? Get your own, personal librarian action figure. Makes a great holiday gift for the bibliophiles in your life :-)

The dark side of the library
Not all library books are created equal... Some of them are just a tad bit more awful than they should be.

Yay!

The final chapter in my MA ODE story :-)

What language is your internet?

I blog in English here, but I also maintain a French/Japanese blog within a language learning community. I tweet in English and German (and keep a separate Klingon Twitter account, though I haven't updated it in a while). I've edited German, English and Klingon wikis. I've been an active member in English and German forums. I write instant messages in more languages than I actually speak.
Online, you can be any language you like. How do we chose which one we are going to use?
Some of my choices were made in specific biographical contexts. I started this blog as part of an Open University course. People from a wide variety of language backgrounds were studying on that course, but all shared English as one of their languages. Choosing English meant choosing to communicate (potentially) with all of them. Still, I've finished my studies at the OU and here I am, still blogging away in English, though many, if not most of my readers are native speakers of German.
Sometimes, I have chosen a language specifically to improve my skills in that language. The exercise factor explains most of my activities in French, Japanese and Klingon (OK, the geek factor may also play into this, especially in the case of good-ol' tlhIngan Hol). Of course I am also able to reach a different audience when blogging in Japanese than when blogging in English, but with fairly rudimentary language skills that neither allow me to really build relationships with readers or to express ideas worth expressing, I am not sure how important this is for my choice of language. Writing for an abstract Japanese micro-audience is different from writing for an audience of English-using fellow students that I already know.
In some cases, my choice of language has also followed from the need to get specific information. While there is no lack of German online forums, the more specific your interests get, the bigger the chance to find something in English. There may be two or three German forums to choose from, but dozens of English ones available, each with their own focus, culture, traditions, and often with a larger number of contributors or active threads. I won't deny, though, that the sheer fun of writing in English and experimenting with different language roles also plays into this.

So: What languages do you use online, and why?

Google+ in education: Some thoughts

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are great things. Moodle, for example, opens up a whole world of teaching and learning opportunities. Social networking sites cannot stand up to this.
But, let's be honest, they do not need to. Who uses all the tools and gadgets that their VLEs provide? I'd warrant most teachers use their university's or school's VLE to upload files, send announcements, and give students the opportunity to ask questions. Social networking sites can also do all these things. Plus, students often already know their social networking sites well, but may need an introduction to the VLE in use.
Up to now, the major hindrance in using social networking sites for formal learning were privacy issues. Do you want to "befriend" your linguistics 101 prof? Do you want your Latin teacher to have access to last night's party photos?
Google+, with its systems of "circles", avoids this problem. You don't just befriend people, you add them to circles, and for every content you add to Google+, you get to decide which circle will be able to see them. You can keep your teachers away from your personal stuff, and you can spare your true friends from accidentally participating in math talk.
So, is Google+ the new cool thing in education?
It depends.
Some people like to mix spheres. Let's call them "mixers". They work and play at the same time, they hang out and study simultaneously.
Other people try to keep their life compartmentalized. Let's call them "compartmentalizers". They study at the library instead at their living rooms, and they rather stay a bit longer at work than taking work home with them.
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Mixing, for example, can easily lead to multitasking and being constantly distracted by one thing or the other, but it also encourages thinking outside the box and using synergies between different spheres.
If you put a mixer into a VLC, he or she will just open Facebook or ICQ and, at worst, be slightly annoyed at having to add his/her new contacts into other systems by hand. What does a compartmentalizers do, though, when you ask him/her to add a study circle to Google+?