Live from LTMOOC: Input, Output, and Effectiveness

Today, as part of the course work of the second week of LTMOOC, I joined a Google hangout where we discussed different activities language learners can do. The first two tasks asked us to

1.       Identify whether each is an input or an output (or both)
2.       Place them in order, from most effective to least effective.

I see a couple of problems with a task like this. First, does it make sense to talk about input or output in the case of drills? Yes, you have some input (e.g., the infinitive form of a verb) and some output (e.g., the first person singular indicative form of a verb), you read something (a word), you write something (a word), you click a button or choose from a drop-down menu. I wonder, though, if it really helps us understanding teaching and learning if we apply the terms "input" and "output" to every linguistic information perceived or produced. I'd suggest adding another category, such as "drill" or "exercise" (as opposed to "task"), for activities that are limited to the manipulations of linguistic form, even if this might involve reading or writing, listening to or speaking, small, decontextualized bits of language.

Second, I think that "effectiveness" is a very complex thing to judge. What is the actual learning outcome we aim for? Translation work, out of fashion since the communicative turn, can be a very effective task if the intended outcome is related to the ability to mediate between different languages, for example. What group do we teach? Grammar drills might not work as well with elementary school kids as with university students, project based learning might be difficult to realize with learners who assume that good teaching is strongly teacher-led and dependent on a textbook. A song might be comprehensible input for one learner, and meaningless though nice sounding gibberish for another learner. And any form of extensive learning might have a sad, sad learning per second ratio, but be a great learning activity anyway.

So, my answer to "how effective is this activity for language learning" will be, as it so often is: It depends.

Non-university MOOCs

Today, I've enrolled in my second ever MOOC. The first MOOC I took was Learning and Knowledge Analytics in early 2011. Back then, MOOCs were an concept entirely new to me, and I joined mostly because I was interested in the format, not so much because of the specific content (which I enjoyed anyway, though).
The MOOC I have just joned is called LTMOOC, and has a focus on language teaching.

I can already tell that the two MOOCs differ significantly from each other. Learning analytics had a stronger theoretical focus, while LT uses a lot of project work. And while Learning Analytics was organized by university researchers, LTMOOC is organized by two individuals employed by the co-founders of Instreamia, a company that sells a virtual learning environment (VLE) for language teaching.

I wonder how this combination - practical focus and closeness to a specific company - will influence the learning experience. As far as I can tell, most tasks during this MOOC will involve the product sold by Instreamia. Is this focus on one product an advantage, since all participants will share the experience of having used these tools? Or would it stimulate discussion more if people used different tools for similar tasks? What of what I will learn here will be transferable to Moodle, OLAT or Ilias? Will the facilitators succeed in presenting a balanced view of the product? What about the theories presented? Have they been chosen to represent the different challenges and opportunities of blended language teaching, or to make the product look good, highlighting its strengths and ignoring its weaknesses?

I realize that this is not necessarily a "university vs company" thing. A university professor suggesting MOOC participants buy his/her textbook also can have commercial interests at heart. Which notions are included, which guest lecturers are invited, which reading assignments are included - these are never "neutral" choices. Also, by asking "Cui bono?", I do not necessarily mean to imply that it is bad if people profit from their MOOCs. Why shouldn't they? Increased reputation, increased book sales, they aren't a bad thing. I just wonder how we can best balance these specific individual or company interests with the interests of the learners. If MOOCs are to become a stable part of the edu-scene, this is a question that will need to be answered.

Using Twitter for teaching, part 2

Last week, I taught a seminar on web 2.0 tools for pre-service teacher training students. I had prepared a list of topics I wanted to cover, from the uncontroversial use of OERs, to more ambitious projects using wikis, up to the crazy-crazy non-mainstream idea of using Twitter at school.
I didn't even consider demonstrating a 'live' Twitter learning arrangement. Twitter isn't really fun if you haven't built your own network yet. So, I limited myself to showing how you can use Twitter in your teaching without being a Twitter user yourself, and then moved on to paper-Twitter.
Yes, you read correctly. Paper-Twitter. Inspired by blog posts detailing paper blogs and paper Facebook, I created a paper-based Twitter simulation within the workshop. We created three "accounts": @rot (red), @gelb (yellow) and @weiss (white) were 3-4 students seated around one table. They had color-coded question cards that they could use to send messages to other groups - of course with a limit of 140 characters. Groups, in turn, could respond with their own response cards. The task: Find a way to teach your subject matter this way :-)

Yes, it's a bit silly, but it was fun, and it was a good way to demonstrate the "joyful anarchy" of the Twitter stream. With the students' permission, here's a nice example of a dialogue initiated by @white:

Using Twitter for teaching, part 1

Personally, I‛m a big fan of microblogging – as a quick look at the number of tweets I‛ve written so far will prove. I love to 'think aloud' on Twitter, share resources, keep in contact with all kinds of interesting folks worldwide, learn about interesting new papers or ongoing events. Yet, I find it difficult to integrate it into my teaching. Microblogging has never been a major part of my teaching, but attempts to add a little bit of twittability to my (already technology-rich) classes were not met with much enthusiasm. I assume that there‛s a magic line people cross once they reach the age of 25, when Facebook loses much of its appeal and Twitter suddenly gets really sexy. Since most of my students are on the Facebook-half of the age-distribution, Twitter just doesn‛t create much cheer.


Here‛s one little experiment that worked out, though: As part of our outreach project Schülerkolleg Pädagogik, groups of highschool students visited our campus in Duisburg. During their visit, we also gave them a tour around our learning lab, a classroom with plenty of fancy technology, both up-to-date and long-time classics. One group had excellent equipment at their own school, though, so that our standard tour would not have been quite as impressive as we were hoping for :-) Enters Twitter: Participants were very young, 7th grade, so I did not ask them to create their own accounts, instead tweeting in their name (of course I asked for permission to use their first names in my tweets). I collected their questions about university, the Duisburg campus and about studying, and sent them out into the twitterverse. In total, we did this activity with two groups of around 15 students each, and both groups visibly enjoyed it, waiting impatiently for responses. It was quite interesting to see the questions they came up with! During their tour they had had plenty of opportunities to ask questions already, but they still came up with extra ones when they realized that these would be published online. Seeing their posts displayed live on a smartboard certainly helped as well.


I have to admit I asked a couple of colleagues to have an eye on my tweets that day, just to improve the chances for responses. While you usually get plenty of responses on questions like ours, we couldn‛t wait for an hour or two for reactions here. So, a tiny bit of cheating on my side :-)


Quite some time ago I tried something similar with a group of university students, during a regular seminar session, with much less success. I assume it was the mix between fairly young students who considered Twitter to be a kind of "Facebook for adults" and the event-like nature of the visit that made this work.


Some examples of student questions and answers provided by the twittersphere (in German, of course):

JudithBK: Alend fragt: Was kann man an der Universität Duisburg-Essen studieren?

an_dt: @JudithBK um die 100 Studiengänge: uni-due.de/studienangebot…

sj2915: @JudithBK Englisch :-)

darktiger666: @JudithBK Ziemlich viel. z.Bsp. Medizin, Lehramt, Ingenieurwissenschaften, Mathematik, Physik, Englisch, Deutsch, Geschichte, Pädagogik, ...

mschiefner: @JudithBK schaut mal hier: uni-due.de/de/studium/

JudithBK: Ali fragt: Wozu ist ein Universität eigentlich gut?

mwefelnberg: @JudithBK @Ali: Und an der Uni wird gelernt, damit man seinen Beruf später gut ausüben oder sogar selber forschen kann.

JudithBK: Danil fragt: Warum ist diese Uni so groß?

an_dt: @JudithBK weil es hier sehr viele Menschen gibt, die etwas lernen wollen und die Unis Essen und Duisburg 2003 fusionierten..

darktiger666: @JudithBK Weil wir so viele Fächer und Studis haben :-)

Le Blogue est mort, vive le Blogue!

My main research interest is blogging.
This doesn't mean I'm blind to anything else. You cannot understand the 'ecosystem' internet by looking only at one tool, just as you cannot understand language learning by studying only vocabulary acquisition. Still, blogging is my main interest, and whenever I study other tools, I have, in the back of my mind, questions like "How does this relate to blogging? How is this different from blogging? Could this be learned through blogging?"
Now, blogging is really old-school. I mean really, really old-school. Pre-web 2.0: I like to call it web 1.5. When I read older research, especially on blogging by teenagers, it's a bit like reading reports on ancient Mayan culture. "Wow, this is how people used to do Facebook before Facebook!" Blogging is still alive and kicking, there are active blogging communities from the professional to the hobbyist, on everything from home-schooling to university management. Anybody interested in knitting super-cute stuffed animals? Language learning as a form of extreme sports? Vegan mountaineering? Don't worry, there will be a small but active blogging community on this topic.
At the same time, when I look at the statistics on blogging in Germany, I can see clearly that few teens blog, and even though there are plenty of German blogs, the actual percentage of the population that blogs is fairly low. Honestly, blogging in the sense of "writing a blog" (as opposed to just reading blogs) is a niche activity. A large, active, happy niche, but a niche nonetheless. Let's do the "Mom-test". Ask yourself: "Does my Mom do ####" and "Does my Mom know what #### is?". My Mom's on Facebook, but I doubt she'd recognize a blog if it showed up at her doorstep unannounced. Chances are, your Mom isn't that different. (Or your Dad, or Grandpa, or younger sister...)
So, why do I study a technology that is, some people may claim, past its prime? How do I justify studying it? Why not Facebook? Why not potentially post-Facebook tools?
There are a number of reasons.

First: The hype cycle isn't always your friend.

Hype cycles are FUUUUN! But when you're at the height of the hype cycle, research is often tricky. When I read older literature on blogs, this is often quite visible, especially in the unbounded optimism many of these articles have in the power of blogging. The later stages of the hype cycle mean that people will have more experience with a tool in different settings, also meaning that there will be more reports about negative aspects of that tool as well. We must not ignore the bleeding edge of technological development (lots of cool stuff happening there!), but we shouldn't, as (a) discipline(s), obsess about this (But feel free to obsess about it as much as you like as an individual or individual researcher!).

Second: Principles are more important than tools.

The more changes, the more stays the same. We don't re-invent learning or social interaction by introducing a new tool. In the end, the introduction of writing, book printing, the internet may have changed many details about how we learn and how we interact, but we're still humans and we still have pretty much the same brain, the same social needs as we used to have. Learning with tool-so-and-so may be different in many ways from learning with tool-this-and-that, but many things will be similar.

Third: Knowledge management and learning to the forefront.

I'm not interested in blogs as technology. I'm interested in how we learn about language, about content, in the process of blogging, viewed both as acts of writing and as a form of social interaction. Of course, we write on Facebook, we interact on Facebook. And I guarantee that there's plenty of learning going on as well. But if you're interested in contrasts between formal, nonformal, informal learning processes, you'll have trouble finding examples of all three on Facebook. There are attempts to use social networks in formal learning context, but they are still fairly rare and I have the impression that they are often a bit... forced. When you look at blogs, you have the whole bandwidth of blogging, from just-for-fun or to-keep-in-touch-with-friends to sharing-what-I've-learned-about-cake-decorating or documenting-my-trip-around-the-world. There's students documenting their learning inside and outside of class. There are be blogs by elementary school students and by university graduates. A wonderful wealth of data!

Fourth: Hello baby!

Blogs have influenced many other tools. When you try to understand blogging as genre(s), people will often talk about the "ancestral genres"* of blogging. You can turn this around, too, and talk about the "offspring genres" or the "sibling genres" of blogging. Putting text out there quickly and easily. Reporting about current events or ideas, ordered in reverse chronological order. Adding meta-information to short texts. This isn't specific to blogging anymore, it's also something that you find in many other forms of CMC, from microblogging to use of social networks.

In short: Studying blogging doesn't make you a super-cool researchers (unless you've been one right from the start), but it doesn't mean you're a museum piece either :-) For me, studying blogging is a way to understand blogging - and learning through writing online more generally.
*McNeill, Laurie: Brave new genre, or generic colonialism? Debates over ancestry in Internet diaries, Genres in the internet: issues in the theory of genre, John Benjamins, 143–161, Eds: Stein, Janet Giltrow, and Dieter, 2009

Mainstream

I’m sitting in the ICE from Cologne to Berlin, with shaky internet and my own extension cord (the number of electrical outlets in German trains is depressingly inadequate). On the other side of the table sits a young woman, reading “Chill mal, Frau Freitag”, a popular book grown from a blog about teaching. A good opportunity to think about how mainstream blogs have become.
Sherlock Holmes blogs. Frau Freitag blogs. Julie of Julie & Julia blogged – back in the day when blogging was still somewhat unusual. I blog. Many of my colleagues blog. At conferences, people mention their blogs.
On Tuesday, I will give a presentation on code-switching in language learning blogs at Sociolinguistic Symposium. A couple of years ago, I would have started with an explanation of what constitutes blogging. I would have prepared a slide or two on that topic, and might even have referred back to the “ancestral genre” of the diary in my attempt to make my object of study intelligible. Today, I’m not so sure what to do. I haven’t included any slides. I certainly won’t dedicate a whole section of my talk to discussing blogging. But how well is blogging established? Can I assume a sufficiently complete understanding in my audience so that none of the features needs to be made explicit? Should I just comment on differences between ‘normal’ blogging and language learning blogging communities blogging? Do I need to explain blogging through reference to its “sibling genres” of Facebook and YouTube channels? Should I ask beforehand and then adapt my presentation? Should I just observe the audience and adapt in case I notice rising confusion about the intricacies of blogging?
When I ask my students whether they know what a blog is, they usually answer in the affirmative. They also explain that they themselves (with very few exceptions) don’t blog, and that they do not read blogs. 9% of German teens report regularly perusing blogs, only 4% maintaining a blog themselves (JIM 2011). Blogging isn’t the “new thing” anymore, but is isn’t mainstream either – at least not in the the general population. On Wednesday, I’ll find out whether it is mainstream among sociolinguists.

Conference tweeting

At Scicamp, I gave a presentation based on work I’ve done together with Annabell Preußler. The topic, in itself, sounds innocuous: Twitter conflicts. The focus lay on conflicts that can arise when people are in a physical space together, and one ore more participant(s) tweet about the shared event while being, at the same time, engaged in the ongoing event. And while I was discussing potential conflicts arising from such a situation, I was, of course, engaging in the very same situation, since conference tweeting is endemic at barcamps.
There are events where I would interpret the fact that everybody stares at their smart phone, tablet or laptop, or happily types away, as a lack of interest. Especially if these staring and typing activities are continuous. When people interrupt their staring and typing to ask question, nod, shake their heads, laugh, or debate, I do not have this impression.
Since we didn’t have a twitter wall in the seminar room this panel took place, I spent some time during the next coffee break to check tweets to see if any questions or points criticism had come up to which I wanted to respond. This was not out of concern about what might have been tweeted (I expect basic courtesy at conferences – we’re adults and can phrase criticism in an appropriate way), but I consider this to be part of my presentation. Just as I respond to questions from the audience, I respond to questions posed on Twitter, even if with a bit of delay. If tweeting about a presentation is part of listening to this presentation, then responding to these tweets (if necessary) is part of presenting.
Looking back at my own tweeting during other panels, I’d say the more I’m interested, the more I tweet – unless it’s so interesting that my live engagement in the discussion clashes with my tweeting. I enjoy tweeting key questions posed that I consider worthy further consideration (these aren’t questions to the presenter, rather questions to myself or my Twitter stream) or summarizing key ideas. I comment on other participants’ tweets, tweet resources that were mentioned that I consider of interest for my followers, or tweet additional resources, mostly of interest to co-present participants (especially when I have mentioned them in a verbal comment), and I occasionally voice criticism concerning a specific point made. Usually, I like to add literal quotes, but this is more difficult at a barcamp, where you cannot consult a printed schedule to look up the presenters’ names :)
What I find interesting in all this is that I seem to constantly switch my intended audience. Some of my tweets are for people in my Twitter stream (tweets of general interest), other for those who are specifically interested in the hashtag #scicamp (e.g., summaries of key ideas), others are aimed at other conference participants (individuals, addressed via @, or just anybody co-present), or specifically at those attending a parallel panel. One moment, I may want to engage “outsiders” in the debate, the other moment, I’m focused totally on the co-present participants. Communication is just so wonderfully complicated, I sometimes wonder how we cope :-) No surprise, then, that Twitter & co can cause misunderstandings and conflicts.