Life, Language and E-Verything

What language is your internet? Part II

2012-01-09T16:24:00.004+01:00

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

2011-12-16T09:13:00.004+01:00

'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!

2011-12-05T06:58:00.002+01:00

The final chapter in my MA ODE story :-)

What language is your internet?

2011-11-10T10:25:00.003+01:00

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

2011-07-02T10:48:00.006+02:00

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+?

'Free range' blogging

2011-06-30T19:53:00.005+02:00

Free range eggs are (ideally, though not when produced on a commercial level) eggs laid by chicken that “roam freely instead of being contained in any manner”. It are eggs laid by chicken that can dustbath to their hearts’ desire, eat a worm, nest in their favorite tree, and steal all ripe tomatoes from the gardener’s favorite tomato plant. In short, they are laid by chicken doing chickenish stuff in a chicken-friendly environment.

Battery cage eggs are eggs laid by chicken that are not allowed to behave like chicken in a not-chicken friendly factory environment.

This metaphor can easily be adapted to blogging, or to blogging-assisted learning. There are many reasons why people blog: to express themselves, as part of their personal knowledge management, to build networks, to market themselves and their services or products. These are bloggers doing bloggish stuff and profiting from a blogging-friendly environment (where instead of worms and comfortable spots in trees you find comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, and other blogging-crowd-pleasers).

But there is a dark side to blogging. It’s using blogging software in an entirely unbloggish way. ‘Free range’ blog posts follow generic rules, just as comic books or soap advertising does. ‘Battery cage’ blogs also follow generic rules – just of the wrong genres. ‘Free range’ blog posts are written for real (micro-)audiences. ‘Battery cage’ blogs are written for the teacher. ‘Free range’ blogs discuss content that interests the blogger or his/her audience, while the content of ‘battery cage’ blogs might be of interest to neither blogger nor audience. ‘Free range’ blog posts can be written for all kinds of purposes, but fulfilling detailed assessment criteria is not one of them.

The comparison has one major weak spot. While there is absolutely nothing positive you can say about battery cage eggs, non-free range (or not entirely free range) blogging might sometimes be justified. We might want to reap some of the benefits of blogging while at the same time having to make careful allowances to the educational system within which we work, for example. Just, please, let’s not confuse the two, especially not in research. If a certain range of benefits has been demonstrated for free range blogging, we cannot assume that the very same benefits translate directly into more regulated forms of blogging. It might be – but we cannot assume it does without further research. And, as a practitioner: If in doubt, go as much free-range as you can. The more free range, the more worms.

Letter to the Open University

2011-06-26T16:37:00.006+02:00

Dear Open University,

We've gone through a lot together: H808, H807, H800, D843 and H809, with all their TMAs, ECAs and exams. We had our ups and downs, from glowing thank-you notes to my tutors to formal complaints, from having fun doing assignments to moments of despair. No, it wasn't always an easy time, but who would expect that? It took me some time to really understand how you work. My first year or so, I had serious culture shock. But I adapted. And I grew.

Today, I'm not the same person I was before getting to know you. When we started out on this voyage, I was a linguist who suddenly found herself in a situation where she had to design e-learning, and do it well. I knew enough to realize I didn't know enough. And then you came along. Promising to teach me the ropes, and luring me into your sweet trap with the promise of a degree on top of that. I was hooked.

I learned the basics, and a bit more than the basics. At first, you only changed the way I approached the design of e-learning. Then you changed how I use the internet. In the end, you changed how I look at learning more generally, and even how I approach doing research.

Today, I submitted my last examinable component. There'll be a lot of waiting, and a bit of paperwork involved, but with all likelihood, I'm "done" now, and we will part ways.

We're both grown-ups, we'll cope. I'll get along without you, and you, well, you have so many students, you probably won't even notice I'm gone. Still, I'll certainly miss you, and perhaps, one day, I'll find a good excuse to come back :-)

Thanks for all the good times,

Judith

Publish or perish, part 5

2011-06-22T18:23:00.003+02:00

How many books on academic writing do you need?

Well, good question :-) I guess I just enjoy reading these. I actually reread some of my books on writing on a fairly regular basis (such as Silva's and Johnson and Mullen's), and I keep others at hand for looking up this fact or that idea (such as Belcher's), but I’m constantly on the outlook for others to add to my collection. For one, I like to learn about the different academic genres and about the writing process more generally. But on top of that I find many of these books highly motivating. Reading about writing makes me want to write even more.

Murray’s book, Writing for academic journals, while serving the first purpose, isn’t really good at the second, at motivating. She seems to assume that people don’t actually want to write, but write because they have to. And while Silva acknowledges the fact that there may be a few things that – at times – may be more enjoyable than fixing your references, she lacks the acute sense of humour that fills Silva’s book. Writing seems to be a dreary duty, imposed by evil outside powers. That’s not what academic writing is to me.

Also, Murray recommends a very structured approach to writing. One that doesn’t just plan texts on the level of chapters or sections or paragraphs, but down to the individual sentence. Reading the chapter on “3rd level outlining” made my toe nails curl. I am willing to acknowledge that outlining is important, but I don’t think I could cope with her system of approaching outlining. Nor do I find writing to prompts, another key method discussed in the book, inspiring.

This is not a bad book. Murray gives lots of solid advice on how to understand reviewer feedback, how to match your text to the journal you are aiming at, or on how to write abstracts. But overall, the negative view of the writing process and her extreme defensiveness about basically all suggestions she makes leave me unmotivated. For purely technical advice, I’d suggest Belcher's book instead, while Silva and Johnson/Mullen would be my best bet for a good kick in the ***.

Awkwardness

2011-06-14T18:17:00.003+02:00

Tomorrow, my university celebrates its yearly dies academicus (a traditional academic feast day). Students are given a 'day off' in order to attend, and university employees can attend dies academicus during their working hours if current projects allow that. The program caters for different tastes, there's a concert, speeches, the works.
The first item on the schedule, though, is a "non-denominational" (=Christian) devotional. When you design an event, the first element and the last element are emphasized. Starting a celebration with a religious service of sorts is a statement. It feels different than just having a religious item on the programme as one option between many. And when your university's student body represents the multi-cultural and multi-religious Ruhr region, choosing a Christian devotional is not a 'neutral' choice. There is, of course, no event during the dies academicus that caters specifically to Muslims, or to members of any other religious or areligious groups.
This is not exactly scandalous, after all, there's a long tradition of including religious rituals in formal academic events (from first day of elementary school to graduation celebrations), but to me, this feels awkward nonetheless.

Don't make me think - well, OK, please do!

2011-04-17T15:33:00.003+02:00

My current Open University course, H809, is quite a surprise, and a pleasant surprise at that. It's an introduction to research methods, but unlike anything I have encountered before. Instead of studying bits and pieces of this research method and that research method, we look very closely at the relationship between theory and research practices, between target audience and the presentation of research, or between scientific communities and their cultural expectations regarding what topics are "worthy" of study. It's a quiet course, consisting of a fair amount of reading, a bit of discussing, and lots and lots of thinking. Here, the different backgrounds of students (scientists and practitioners; people from education, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences; people from different countries) is a real resource, even more so than in other MA ODE courses.
It seems that my last MA ODE course will turn out to be my favourite one. That is, if I stop procrastinating now and return to work on my TMA :-)

False false friends

2011-03-05T09:12:00.003+01:00

I fulfil the linguist cliché, or at least I do so to a certain degree. While I don't exactly speak many languages, I enjoy studying languages tremendously. Currently, my focus lies on French, which I learned a bit at school, but never got very far with.
Reading simplified books in your target language is en vogue in Germany at the moment (which will, certainly, please Krashen and other representatives of the comprehensible input hypothesis). It's so much the fashion that the local Aldi's sold simplified French and English novels last month. Yes, exactly. Aldi's. Books. In foreign languages.

All right, I bought a copy of "Tout un fromage", a detective novel about a guy, called Lucien, working at an insurance company. The following dialogue takes place between the detective, who's French, and an American visitor.

"Moi, euh, c'est dificile. Jusqu'ice, je ne connais pas beaucoup de gens", dit Jack. Votre chef..."
"Le patron", corrige Lucien automatiquement. "Le chef est celui qui vous prépare le dîner." (Profijt, n.d., p. 19)

In this little dialogue, Jack, the American, makes a typical German false friend : "Chef" (German "boss") vs. "chef" (as kitchen chef). Only problem: Why should Jack, the American, make GERMAN false friends? Generally, his French language skills are impeccable. I guess the wish to teach the (German) audience a piece of vocabulary trumped all considerations of likely and unlikely errors.

A question of perspective

2011-02-14T18:32:00.005+01:00

For week 2, Open University’s H809 has set an impossible task: "Think back over the past 25 years or so, and try to agree in your tutor group upon a timeline of the available digital technologies in education." Now, my tutor group consists of practitioners in a number of different countries. Some of them live in the better-off parts of their countries, others live in cities or towns with more restrained budgets. People work with different populations: school, university, etc. Now, I’m fairly certain I can find out when a specific technology became available for secondary schools within Aachen – as long as I am willing do define "available" as "they have this stuff in one or several of their classrooms" instead of "it’s regularly used" or "it's used sensibly" (a much more difficult question). I don’t think agreement is in any way possible. Are interactive whiteboards "available" now? For elementary students in Tokyo? For grammar school students in the rural Eifel region? For girls as well as for boys? For teens taking biology classes as well as for those who prefer physics classes? For those at private or those at public schools?
No clear-cut, timeline-friendly answers here, I'm afraid.

Congrats, folks!

2011-02-06T06:52:00.004+01:00

At my job at Duisburg, there have been many "firsts". Last week, I assisted in my first ever oral exams. Thanks to well-prepared students, it was a true pleasure to keep a protocol of these :-)

Another "first" was advising MA theses. Students had been working on their theses in 2010 and had handed them in shortly before Christmas. So far, they only knew they had passed, but last week, they were told their actual grades. I had assumed that advising MA theses would be a great way to learn about content (which I certainly did - reading theses does that to people :-D), but in the end, the process was an excellent way for me to learn and reflect about methods.

Now, you can do the maths: Seven MA theses + seven oral exams passed = seven new MA grads. Congratulations, folks!

Back to OU study

2011-01-28T13:55:00.007+01:00

I love studying at the Open University, but I don't love paying its course fees quite as much (if you think the UK fees are stiff, check out the continental prices...). So, after paying back the student loans incurred for my undergraduate degree, I had to take a hiatus from OU study. Sorry folks, food first, OU second :-) Finally, though, I have scratched together enough money to pay for H809 "Practice-based research in educational technology".

The course material went online yesterday, so I'm currently feeling like a child in an (educational) candy store. So much interesting stuff! Ah, good to be back :-)

OU courses tend to start very slowly. All courses within MA ODE can be taken in any order, so the course designers can make basically no assumptions about existing knowledge (such as simple statistical concepts) - or even about whether students know the basic online tools and can find their way around StudentHome and the (virtual) university library. Also, students find themselves in a new tutor group with every course they take, so there's always some time spent on getting to know your fellow students and your group's tutor. After a couple of repetitions, this gets a bit tiresome, but I imagine that a mixed group - more experienced MA ODE students and total MA ODE beginners - helps a lot with the "socialization" of newbies. If you cannot imagine how to e.g. do academic work through blogs and forums, you can gain a lot by studying the interactions of those who are used to this approach. Still, what is a steep learning curve for first-semester students can be a bit boring for continuing students. The course designers do make an effort, though, to mix enough content in right from the start, to keep old-timers happy :-)

International? International!

2011-01-23T07:21:00.004+01:00

International students aren't anything unusual in distance education - as a German student at the Open University, for example, I feel decidedly mainstream. The University of Duisburg-Essen's MA in Educational Media as well as the Certificate in Educational Media have seen plenty of students from neighbouring countries as well. Still, when you offer a program in German, the overall international appeal is somewhat limited. So is our experience with international students from outside Europe.
Tomorrow, the first "English edition" of our Educational Media certificate is launched, with students from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and South America.

One question remains: When does the first student from Antarctica or Australia register for our program?

My part of the internet

2010-12-31T14:01:00.008+01:00

A map of my preferred communication + collaboration tools. Inspired, of course, by XKCD.

Have a happy new year, wherever on the intertubes you may dwell!

Blogging about AAVE: a student project

2010-12-13T09:14:00.003+01:00

If you're interested in African American Vernacular English and enjoy reading blogs, Word: The Online Journal on African American English might be for you. This blog is maintained by Renée Blake (New York University) and a group of her students who blog, organize guest bloggers, moderate comments, etc. What a wonderful way for students to meaningfully engage with sociolinguistic topics!
I had the opportunity to listen to some of these students discuss their work at this year's AAL2 - their enthusiasm was quite infectious :-)

NaNoWriMo - a postmortem

2010-12-07T09:01:00.005+01:00

It lies in the nature of a challenge that you can fail it. NaNoWriMo is a challenge - and, alas, I failed it. Doesn't mean I hadn't lots of fun trying to write a novel in a month, just means I didn't finish. Ah, well, I didn't even get close to finishing :-)

I've done four NaNos so far (one of these was a rebel NaNo, i.e. contained a rule violation, but I count it in anyway), of which I completed two. Yay! So, what's the difference between those I completed and those I didn't?

NaNo1 - the rebel
I just loved this NaNo. I didn't just get the word count, I actually finished my novel in a month. Oh, and I basically fell in love with my main character :-) I had done a lot of pre-planning and was drowning in little pieces of scrap paper with notes on it. Looked messy, but worked like a charm.

NaNo2 - my first offical NaNo
I had done very little pre-planning for this one. I had a basic story idea, knew what genre the text would be in, and that was it. No character planning, no plot details, no real structure, nothing. I won NaNo - completed the word count - but I did not complete the novel. Basically, once I hit 50,000 words, I stopped writing. I've never touched the story since - I find it BORING. Ugh, terrible word to use when talking about a victorious NaNo.

NaNo3 - utter failure
What had I been thinking? Picking a genre I don't even like to read? Eek! This NaNo died, quickly. Let's be thankful for the small blessings.

NaNo 4 - good idea, but...
I had actually done some serious pre-planning. I had five acts, filled with plenty of scenes already planned out, I had character sheets, character names (I hate picking names for my characters, I usually do this very late in the process), bits of character backstory, etc. My main story was planned out as well - and I had no problem writing these parts. I had several subplots though that I hadn't planned at all, and this is where my writing fell apart. Also, I had a "detective", but the character background of my "detective" meant she couldn't be anywhere close to the scene on six days out of seven. So, lots of action was going on - but without my "detective" having any chance to detect. This was The.Big.Flaw of my plot. And it was a flaw I should have been able to identify if I had planned out these sub-plots.

So, what do I learn from this? I am a "I'm-totally-boring-and-write-my-novels-according-to-a-detailed-plan" kind of a person. Plotting is fun (Ah! Did I really type that?). Plotting makes writing easier + faster. Plotting means I write about action instead of having people sitting around chatting (Hello, NaNo2!). No plot bunnies for me, I'm afraid :-(

AAL2

2010-11-04T17:57:00.007+01:00

At some times, I think conferences are the best part of a scholar's life. At other times, I believe they are the worst part. It kind of depends on the conference :-)
Overall, AAL2 fell into the first category. It was a fairly small conference, I've heard the number of 40 participants mentioned, but that guaranteed a strong overlap of research interests. The presentations were all well prepared, and they provoked genuinely interesting debates that often continued long after the actual presentations. One downside was the amount of program - presentations began at 8:00 am and continued till 8:30 pm - and I'm not including the more social parts of the program in that count. It just wasn't humanely possible to attend everything - caffeine can only do so much! :D
So, this conference alone was certainly worth the trip to San Antonio - that it is directly followed by the NWAV and that it took place in a beautiful town were nice extras, though :D

PS: Does anybody know where AAL3 will take place? Just wondering :-)

NaNoWriMo

2010-11-01T20:51:00.004+01:00

Hurray, it's NaNoWriMo!

Birthday Research Project

2010-10-18T06:37:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, I celebrated my 30th birthday. I used this opportunity to conduct a little impromptu research project.

Now, a small caveat first: The data is severely skewed because (a) my birthday fell on a Sunday (no mail on Sundays), and (b) my birthday party is a week later, so that my "physical co-presence" ratings will be lower than expected. Also, the number of individuals usually wishing me a happy birthday is not really a good sample of all human beings. Please keep this in mind when interpreting this data.

Congratulations per different media:
Twitter - 6
e-mail - 2 (spam e-mails congratulating me were not counted)
physical co-presence - 1
telephone - 1
Xing private messages - 1 (spam PMs were non counted)
Skype - 1

Now, there are two interpretations:
(a) there's no digital gap anymore
or (b) if you're not into digital media, you just won't congratulate me on my birthday :p

"Good speech for good Americans"

2010-10-03T12:59:00.002+02:00

"This is a good slogan for all of us. We are not good citizens of America if we do not speak the language of our country the right way. When we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States we pledge ourselves to be true Americans. True Americans speak their country's language truly and clearly. We need to be very careful to speak in the right way because there are many people in our land who have not learned our language well and we hear many words used incorrectly. We must show that we are true Americans every time we speak."
(Parkman, Mary R. 1934. Guide book for language: grade four. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, pp. 186f)

There's so much you can learn *ahem* from old school books...

Sign language blogging

2010-09-08T05:38:00.003+02:00

This morning, I read a paper by Adrian Miles on blogging and audio/video. He argues that much of what makes blogging bloggish isn't possible yet (well, 2006 -- I'm very much a text-person and don't closely follow any video/audio blogs at the moment, so I may have missed some developments here.) with audio and video content. His examples were easy quoting (today, it's fairly easy to embed content shared via YouTube on your blog and thereby "quote it" in toto, but as far as I see, partial quotes are still difficult) and automatic trackbacks (how do I get to know somebody quoted a snippet from by video blog if they do not add a link in (written) textform?).
I agree that many audio blogs/vlogs are "little more than distribution mechanisms for audiovisual content" (p. 218) and don't recognize "the formal material properties and affordances of the network that have been fundamental to the development and construction of blogging as a different writing practice" (p. 218).
I directly asked myself: How do bloggers with a strong preference for video content deal with these differences in affordances for video vs text? Do these differences constitute a problem? Are there "workaround" strategies bloggers use?
Would there be a better suited testing field for such questions than sign language blogging? If I had sign language skills to speak of, I'd be severely tempted :-) But as my German Sign Language is barely enough to allow me to introduce myself and inquire about the way to the closest coffee machine, this isn't really an option. But I'd love to hear if anybody else tackles, or has tackled, this question. If there's any literature on this topic, please let me know!

Research and teaching

2010-08-21T07:53:00.005+02:00

Educational research has its pitfalls. One of it is that whatever you are currently researching is also something you might use in your teaching. Well, not sure it is a pitfall :-)
Anyway, I work on blogging, and blogging is a very interesting tool to use in academic teaching. So, last semester I suggested to students in a media project class I was teaching that we use a course blog to collect notes, ideas, decisions throughout the semester. My students were willing to try, and actually actively used the blog beyond the "mandatory" ("introduce yourself"-style) posts, e.g. to ask for assistance from fellow students in between classes, or to note down important technical decisions during class for reference later on and to keep students current who had missed this session.
Well, this semester I'm co-teaching a (distance education) class on media pedagogy. I knew our MA students all had blogs (and, of course, was following their blogs), but I hadn't considered using blogs in any formal way. Now, this week we had our introductory voice chat, and when we asked our students whether they had any special wishes or expectations for this class, they told us they'd like to blog more :D Guess what: I do think we can arrange that :D

Publish or perish, part 4

2010-07-22T19:42:00.005+02:00

Or: Looking for a redeeming feature.

This is book number 4: Robert Boice's "Professors as writers". If you've read any other book on academic writing/publishing, you'll have heard of it, since it's quoted basically everywhere. People quote it because it contains a nice chapter presenting research on how many pages people write/how many ideas they have if they write according to a schedule/write whenever they feel like it/don't write at all. Unsurprisingly, if you write regularly, you get more writing done. Pfrrr. I could have guessed that much :-)
And, I'm very sorry to have to say this, this is the only useful section of the book at all. Because, evidently, this book is written for people who are so afraid of writing they believe they are going to die if they force themselves to sit down and try it. I'm not kidding. The book assumes you are seriously panicky, and therefore introduces you to some nice, as non-threatening as they are unproductive creative writing tasks.
Nothing against creative writing - but creative writing is not going to get me to write more academically (rather the opposite, as I can observe every NaNoWriMo). Perhaps I didn't enjoy the book because I'm just not afraid of writing - sorry! All I'm looking for is a bit of pep talk to get me going, and perhaps a hint or two on practical aspects of the writing craft.

PS: I can't find the exact page, but somewhere in there Boice mentions that today, more and more people use computers to write :-)

Publish or perish, part 3

2010-07-22T19:13:00.005+02:00

Any reasonable person would have bought two books on academic writing/publishing and be done with it. Luckily, for Amazon, I'm not a reasonable person in regard to books :-)

So, here's review number 3: Wendy Laura Belcher's "Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: a guide to academic publishing success". I'm lucky it was available in paperback, otherwise I'd have needed a weapon's permit to buy a copy of it. It's 300+ very large pages. And these 300+ pages are crammed full with content. So full that - I'll admit it upfront - I haven't read them all. I took a hiatus around page 200. But I guess I've read enough to have formed an opinion on it :-)
The basic idea is that you have 13 chapters, and read a chapter every week (chapter 13 is a kind of bonus chapter, so the whole book would take you 12 weeks to finish). The book assumes that you have some horrible first draft lying around in your cupboard or hiding under your bed and that you want to beat it into shape over these 12 weeks. With each week and each chapter you work a bit on this draft, till, in week 12, you submit it to a journal.
The book very much feels like a textbook accompanying a seminar. A reading-intensive seminar, that is. Belcher tries to be nice and supportive, but her nice, positive cheering up routine at the beginning of every chapter didn't quite work for me. And, while it is a rich source of information and advice, it's also something of a boring read. There are fantastic sections, e.g. on how to pick a journal, what to put into a cover letter, the art of abstract writing, or what constitutes a "good paper" in different disciplines. I loved those parts. But there are also pages over pages on style, argument structure, and similar stuff that, if you haven't learned it through writing, you probably won't pick up through reading either. Sadly, in some weekly chapters the less-than-interesting topics conspire to bore you out of your wits... That's why I got stuck 2/3 through the book. Oh, and since I wasn't editing at that point but writing something from scratch, I didn't follow the strict weekly regimen anyway. So "giving up on the book" fortunately didn't mean "giving up on the paper".

Well, sounds like I wouldn't recommend the book, right? Nope. I very much recommend getting a copy. I just don't recommend reading it as a textbook from first page to last -- as I tried -- or following the editing schedule. Pick out those sections truly relevant for you, and you'll greatly enjoy the book. And definitely check out Belcher's website, both her download section with important forms, and her monthly newsletters.These are nice additional resources.

Conference fail whale

2010-06-26T06:06:00.003+02:00

On Twitter, you get a fail whale image when too many people try to use the service at the same time and the servers can't cope. On conferences, it's the other way around: You get into problems when too few people are interested.

As it seems, that's what happened to Blogtalk. Even after a deadline extension, they had only a minuscule number of contributions. I won't mention the number, but it truly was dramatically low. They got only one third of the contributions they got in 2009...

How does something like this happen? Was the 2009 conference so disappointing? Is social software not "in" anymore? Do people dislike Galway? Was the conference system not user friendly? Did people have problems with the requirement to submit the abstract a week before the (original) deadline for the full papers? Did they advertise too little?
I have no idea.

How do you react in such a case? Add another extension? Invite your highschool friends? Ignore peer review and simply accept every paper to fill the slots? Just accept two or three papers and have a snug little conference? Blogtalk decided to cancel the paper track. There will be keynote speakers, and that's it.

I'm concerned that the next conference fail whale will have to do with registration numbers :( Honestly, I don't think I'll travel to Ireland for a conference without paper track...

I wonder if things like this happen frequently. It's certainly the first time a conference for which I had submitted a paper decided to cancel the whole paper track, and so far, I hadn't even heard rumors about problems like this. Is this unusual, or do I just miss out on the more interesting water-cooler conversations/hang around the wrong part of the internet? Help a n00b: What's going on here?

Good bye student loans!

2010-06-18T07:39:00.002+02:00

Sometimes, getting rid of things can be quite enjoyable :-)

Blogging - quick and dirty writing - NOT

2010-06-14T17:22:00.004+02:00

I've just read Gill Kirkup's paper "Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity' (London review of education, 2010, 8.2, 75-84), in which she describes the blogging behaviour of academic bloggers. One of the bloggers in her study, Dr K, discusses the amount of time that it takes him to write a blog post: Two. Hours. Per. Blogpost.
My first thought was: No way! My second thought was: Interesting question!
I've never even considered that some people may put that much effort into a single blog post. For me, blogging is more of a "quick and dirty" way to publish my ideas. Yes, I put a bit more effort into a blog post than into a tweet, but that's because blog posts involve more typing :-) I've never stopped the time it takes me to write a blog post, but I would guess it is way less than two hours. Twenty minutes feels about right to me.
So, what are your thoughts on this? How much time do you spend on a blog post? Do you think that's much/little time to spend on blogging?

PS: If you aren't into commenting, here's an online poll on this question:

One, two, three, foursquare

2010-06-08T07:47:00.005+02:00

Time.com lists Foursquare under "The 50 Worst Inventions", using nice terms such as "creepy" or "narcissism" to describe it.
All right, the educational uses of Foursquare are decidedly limited. Beyond student orientation week and an excursion or two, a piece of social software that tells you where to find the nearest photo booth and who else is having a coffee at Starbuck's might not be too useful.
But it's fun. Yeah, it's creepy, narcissistic fun, but it's a wonderful way to geek out anyway. My only problem: I'm slowly running out of university libraries, but I guess I can switch over to public libraries...

Publish or perish, part 2

2010-04-29T07:42:00.004+02:00

Silvia's "How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing" assumes that writing is something you don't like and just have to do. So schedule time for it. W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen take another position here: Writing is, or should be, your passion. So schedule time for it.
"Write to the top! How to become a prolific academic" is everything Silvia's book isn't. It is dead serious (no list of funny quotes here) and it is strongly emotional (fear and passion, anyone?). The basic recommendation boils down to "schedule time for writing, then schedule some more time for writing, then plan a writing retreat, and don't you dare not write while waiting for the bus - and if this isn't your style, get another job". It acknowledges that if you write too much, this can reduce your writing efficiency, and that healthy eating, having fun, etc. can be a good thing - for you, and for your writing. But most of the time, this doesn't ring quite true, doesn't really fit with what has been said before. "Write all the time, but, hey, don't forget to have a life!" Johnson and Mullen succeed in showing a conflict that rages in many academics, but they do not succeed at doing anything in reducing that conflict.

Actually, I don't know what's worse - a mechanic "just get over with it" approach to academic writing - or a "love it or quit it" mentality. Can't I love it - and still need to just get over with it sometimes? Can't I have a passion for academic work, but still believe in having a life in which I don't constantly carry a laptop around?

In Günter Grass's Blechtrommel there is a scene in which the main character steals pages from different books and reassembles them to a new book. That's what I would recommend here. Get both books, and a big blender. And then mix "Schedule boring academic writing so that you have time both for work and play" and "Develop a passion for your work, so that you don't mind it being your life" to your personal liking.

Publish or perish, part 1

2010-04-24T08:11:00.008+02:00

Let's get the confessional part out of the way first: I haven't published as much as I should.
Good. That being said, I've started having a look at the different books available on planning academic writing. You know, it's like second order procrastination: I'll write more, but first I've got to read a couple of books about writing more :-)

The first book I've read is "How to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing" by Paul J. Silvia.
The book has originally been written with psychologists in mind, but for the biggest part, that doesn't make it any less useful for non-psychologists (perhaps with the exception of the chapter on writing journal articles - and I skipped the section on style, so no idea whether it's useful). It's a quick read (which greatly reduces its secondary procrastination factor) with quite a bit of humour.

Now, what do I think about the advice given? Silvia argues that the key to writing more is to schedule time for writing. He argues that you shouldn't wait for inspiration to write, but to just develop the habit of writing and then sit down and write.
His notion of writing is fairly broad, so that, actually, he could have said "schedule time for research" instead of "schedule time for writing" - every step you have to take in order to be able to write (like reading a journal article or analysing your data) is subsumed under the header "writing". I can honestly say that I have a fairly strong reading-articles-and-analysing-data habit, I just don't write as much as I want to. So, for me, this very broad notion of "writing as writing-related activities" doesn't work that well.
His personal nemesis is binge writing. For me, binge writing isn't a nemesis, more like a bad habit that I know isn't exactly good for me, but that I don't want to get rid of entirely. I have very fond memories of a week spent in a hotel finishing my dissertation. Yes, this definitely was binge writing - but it also was great fun. For a week, I had nothing on my mind than my dissertation - fun, fun, FUN! Yes, I shouldn't do this too often. But from time to time, in addition (not instead of) scheduled writing? Come on, I need SOME bad habits, don't I? I think you run into trouble if all writing you do is hectic weekend-before-the-deadline-writing, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily a bad idea to, occasionally, write in big chunks of time instead of in small chunks of time.

Instead of a nice, clean summary of the different points I have addressed above, some of my favorite quotes form "How to write a lot":

"As academics, we're not creating high literature. We don't have fans lurking outside the conference hotel hoping for our autographs on the recent issues of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin." (p. 26)

Hmm, what's the going rate for signed first editions of "Language and the inner city"?

"Complaining is an academic's birthright." (p. 49)

<complain>How does he DARE to claim that? </complain>

"To write a lot, you should rethink your mental models of rejection and publication. Rejections are like a sales tax on publications. The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive. Following the tips in this book will make you the most rejected writer in your department." (p. 100f.)

Sounds like a great goal :-)

My first Open University exam

2010-04-24T07:06:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, I had the big honour to write my first exam with the Open University. Which, accidentally, was also the first time ever I met an employee of the Open University or, for that matter, a student. Now that I've met a good dozen of male OU students I'm looking forward to meeting a female OU student some day in the future :-)

I had expected something more prestigious looking than the "international testing" rooms the Open University had booked for that day, but that was only a matter of "looks", not of functionality.
The rules were fairly strict. You were not allowed to eat during the three-hour exam. Any drinks but water were forbidden and were, in a very friendly way, confiscated (those whose drinks got confiscated got water bottles from the Open University in exchange). You were not allowed to bring any paper yourself. Whatever you wrote down in your answer booklet would be marked, so they recommended crossing out your notes afterwards if you didn't want to get a grade for them. And you had to fill in so many numbers in so many forms, that this was a challenge of its own right :-)

The exam questions were in keeping with what we had been prepared for (we got one sample exam paper and could buy old exam papers from the student association). There were two blocks of three questions each, and you had to pick one question from each block. If you worked through the sample papers, you had a good idea of what to expect.
Overall, the exam was a close match to the content covered by the study materials. It didn't ask for anything that hadn't been covered thoroughly. So, to put it simply, it was a very fair exam.

In the end, writing an exam seems to have been way less work than handing in an extended essay for the examinable component as I did in previous courses. I had to revise a lot, of course, but revision + 3 hours of exam are still less work than the average ECA essay :-) On the other hand, I believe that the ECA essays in previous courses were always a great learning opportunity, it was where you had to draw on basically everything covered in the course, reflect about your own teaching practice, and bring it all together. I somewhat missed this in D843. Well, it WAS way less work, so I'm not going to complain :-)

D843 - Discourse analysis

2010-04-19T12:09:00.005+02:00

My current Open University class, D843 "Discourse analysis", is coming to an end, with the final exam looming ahead on Friday.

From an e-learning perspective, this class was a rather poor experience. The "experimental" wiki group activities didn't yield much response from students, there wasn't a forum for my tutor group, and I could identify only one other student of D843 (AND from another tutor group!) active on Twitter. Even the telephone tutorials were ~~horrible~~ less than helpful as regards fostering discussion among students.

From a content perspective, this class was way more successful. I had done some reading on discourse analysis before, but, somehow, many discourse analysts like to propagate their own traditions only and forget to mention that there are other approaches as well. I found it very difficult to get a general overview over discourse analysis that way. D843 has certainly solved that problem for me :-) The reader focused a lot on presenting different approaches and highlighting similarities and differences between them.
I also got to know a tradition within discourse analysis that would allow a totally different perspective on the topic of my linguistics thesis. Wish I had heard about this earlier! While I'm not going to rewrite my doctoral thesis at this point, I hope I'll have the opportunity to delve a bit deeper into discursive psychology at some point in the future.
Also, I got a lot of general background knowledge useful in many different branches of the humanities. Bakhtin, Foucault, Goffman, etc. are researchers that get quoted over and over in the humanities. Having a little bit of extra knowledge on their work will certainly come in handy.

All in all, I'm happy I took D843 and would certainly recommend it to anybody interested in discourse.

Mobile learning, 1987

2010-04-12T07:28:00.004+02:00

Recently, while sorting through my grammophone records, I stumbled over an article in a local newspaper. That is, a 1987 newspaper in which the records were wrapped.

"French grammar on the tracks: language classes during the morning train trip on the Intercity Aachen - Cologne."

Nothing new under the sun :-)

All right, when I begun regularly commuting from Aachen to Duisburg, I also set out to experiment with mobile learning. Mobile learning was discussed in some detail at one of my Open University classes, but I didn't quite see the advantages of some of the more convoluted learning designs presented.
Well, I've had sufficient time to experiment. These are my preliminary findings:

Podcasts work better than expected. I don't fancy much listening to podcasts at home, but on the train, their slow pace and often repetitive nature actually worked fine. Especially during the afternoons, when I'm tired and it's fairly noisy on the train, listening to a podcast can be easier than reading a book.

Laptop and netbooks - ugh. I tried, I really tried! The limited battery life of my laptop might easily be remedied, and the netbook was less of a hassle to carry with me all day than the laptop - but they both shared the same major flaw: In order to work with them, I need space for my elbows. And if the train is full, I don't get this space. I just can't type with my arms pressed to my sides! I kicked this idea pretty fast.

Smart phone - better. Not suitable for essay writing, but for browsing a website, listening to podcasts, perhaps even reading a PDF, they work fairly well. Better, that is, than laptop or netbook.

Vocabulary cards: These worked remarkably well - even if I didn't catch a seat and had to learn while standing.

And the winner is: Most of the time, I just grabbed a book, some xenoxed articles, and a notepad. Writing by hand was less than convenient, but still easier than using a laptop in a crammed train.

What Discourse Analysis taught me about conferencing software

2010-04-08T10:03:00.009+02:00

Well, the title of this blog post is a bit imprecise: I'm not talking about Discourse Analysis the academic discipline here, but about the "D843: Discourse Analysis" class at the Open University.

Before D843, I had taken a couple of classes at the Open University before, but all of them where from the "Online and Distance Education" core curriculum. I have extensively blogged about each of them, I think :-) A lot of my blog posts where rants about stuff that didn't work as expected - the students of Online and Distance Education often serve as guinea pigs for new software, so I actually HAD a lot of stuff to rant about :-) One of the topics I was quite passionate about is online conferencing. None of the software I tried seemed to "make the cut".

Now, enter D843. D843 is a bit old-fashioned. You get books. I mean: books. These things printed on paper. And even though there is a wiki, participation is voluntary, and if you don't want to post anything yourself, you can e-mail it to your tutor and she will post it for you. But this blog post isn't about books or wikis, it is about.... telephone tutorials!
Let me repeat this: te-le-phone tu-to-ri-als. Via telephone.
I've struggled through two of these, and now I'm a big fan of conferencing software. Because, honestly, ANY conferencing software is SO MUCH BETTER than telephone conference calls.
- there is some way to manage turn-taking besides overly rigid moderation
- you can see who else is online, and often also who is talking at that moment
- you can meet without a tutor (as an international student, I had to be called by the tutor to be able to get into the conference call)
- there's a lot of communication going on besides the "official" voice chat; I like to make a comment or two via text chat even if these aren't important enough to interrupt an ongoing voice chat discussion; I also like the option of sending messages to individuals, instead of the whole group

Well, I still don't get happy-fluffy feelings thinking about conferencing software, but I finally understand why many people consider it, in all its imperfection, an improvement over traditional telephone tutorials!

April educational review

2010-04-02T06:06:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, a couple of announcements were made and products were released that might, no, that certainly will, change the face of education. Time for a short review of the current developments - it would be irresponsible to take any longer than a full day for a simple in-depth scientific evaluation of developments.

Starbucks has finally realised the importance of caffeinated beverages for education, and decided to introduce new, sensible cup sizes: the micra (for kindergarten and elementary level) and the plenta (for junior high up to post-doc).

Everybody knows it's boring to read books, but what exactly makes books so dull? It's because text is printed in old-fashioned 2D. Google Books has now revolutionised reading by updating text to 3D! Just think about the ramifications! "Professor, can't we just read the cool 3D book instead of having to do this boring project-based learning?" Yay!

You want ubiquitous, immersive learning? Try moodINQ, the programmable tattoo system. Great for revision work, to do lists, etc. For an even more powerful learning tool, combine moodINQ with GPS - the possibilities are endless!

Bücherbucht reports about plans for a new attendance management system at RWTH Aachen University. Why did nobody introduce clock cards in tertiary education before? Once again, RWTH Aachen University is at the cutting edge of educational innovation!

Of course, with all the new developments I had to select the most important ones for this short review. Some just didn't make the cut. Hope I didn't leave anything important out.

Literature review

2010-03-25T17:50:00.003+01:00

Some people start off on a new project by looking up their key terms on Wikipedia. That, of course, is not the recommended approach. I very much prefer more serious sources, such as webcomics.

Blogging
a preliminary literature review

Blogs are for intellectuals and focus on real life.
Source: XKCD

Blog is a buzzword, but not all buzzwords are created equal.
Source: PHD Comics

The term blog is not yet fully conventionalized.
Source: XKCD

Thank you for time-travellling with Deutsche Bahn

2010-03-17T19:25:00.006+01:00

I always knew the German rail service was ahead of its time...

Juvenile non-fiction

2010-03-11T07:19:00.003+01:00

A trap!

2010-03-08T07:11:00.006+01:00

Last week I did the paperwork for the removal from the register of students at RWTH Aachen University, the key element of which was the completion of the "Antrag auf Exmatrikulation".

Can you imagine my surprise in finding out that I actually couldn't complete this form? This is why I couldn't:

The text under the line says "Signature of the student". They succeeded at picking a gender-neutral word for "students", but failed in the end by picking a male form of "the".

Luckily, the person processing the form was as oblivious to the details of gender-equitable wording as the people involved in producing the form in the first place. So, in the end, I was able to finish the process without sex change.

Is this just a stupid oversight, or a mean trap that allows male students to leave university, but keeps women on the student register, thereby boosting the statistics? *lol*

Lack of language skills?

2010-01-25T08:08:00.003+01:00

I've been reading Ulrich Ammon's 2006 article "Language planning for international scientific communication" (Current issues in language planning Vol. 7, No. 1), which contains a number of stunning statistics. One of them kept me thinking:

Even for scientists of languages closely related to English, the extra costs of language learning and text production can be considerable. Only a small percentage of them are, it seems, able to acquire a level of skill that would make them independent of native speaker support. Thus, only one in 20 German professors of English (!) chosen at random claimed to be able to produce publishable texts in English all by themselves; the others, the great majority, confessed the necessity of native speaker assistance. (Annon 2006, 13)

I was shocked by these numbers - at least at first. It took me some time to stop finding these statistics shocking at all. Because, I slowly realised, I ALWAYS depend on native speaker assistance - even if I'm writing in a language I'm a native speaker of myself. Every time I handed a carefully crafted text written in my native language to another native speaker, he or she could find little errors: some typo, a nonstandard construction (which is, per se, not wrong, but may not always be appropriate in the most formal of genres), a sentence difficult to understand for people not as deeply involved with the matter at hand as the author, etc. I wouldn't be so reckless to submit a text for publication without asking somebody for this favour - no matter how confident I am about my native or non-native language skills.
Asking for native speaker assistance - in whatever language you are writing - is not necessarily a symptom of lacking language skills. It is an acknowledgement that sometimes a second pair of eyes makes the difference between an OK text and a great text.

Twitter in Education - revisited

2010-01-21T08:29:00.007+01:00

In the past, I've written quite a few posts on using Twitter in education. Now, since I've been using Twitter in my own education quite a bit, I thought it were time I have a second look at some of these ideas.

How to use Twitter in education I

Twitter can be used for micro-writing prompts, for example as part of a seminar or of an exam prep group. In academia, being able to summarize something is an important skill. "Explain the methodology of the paper you are planning" or "Why are your findings relevant" can be answered in 140 characters. Challenging, but possible.

OK, but I believe 'authentic' writing prompts in the form of genuine questions by other Twitter users may be even more interesting (see below).

My second idea: If you can use Twitter to tell the world that you've missed your bus, you can also use it to explain to your classmates that you're having trouble with page 12 of the reading assignments, or disagree with author x on point y. If your library allows cell phone use, you can do this even directly from the library. To a certain degree, students may be able to help each other. In addition, the teacher will know in detail where problems lie and can address them in class.

I actually do that, even though I don't expect any responses from teachers (I once had an Open University tutor follow me, but she didn't really interact with anybody on Twitter). I do, though, try to follow fellow students of my current Open University class, and, even if I don't get any direct help, I usually get lots of solidarity ("Yeah, don't get it either. But the next reading assignment is much better."-kind of tweets).

How to use Twitter in education II

As a tool to support mobile learning, e.g. sending students outside of class to look for authentic language samples (e.g. shops with names using elements from several languages, etc.), then letting them report findings through twitter.

I'm undecided on this one. I'm not too big a fan of complicated mobile learning scenarios. Does this approach have any major advantage over just letting students collect data and discussing it in class? Never experienced anything like this from the student perspective, that makes it more difficult to judge whether the coolness factor is worth it.

Suggest students follow interesting authors/linguists/specialists on Twitter.

Yes! Nothing beats a grammar discussion with a fellow language geek! A couple of days ago a linguistics student currently learning German (UFLinguist) threw in a question on German capitalization rules. Spent hours thinking! Loved it! Trying to answer a genuine question is way more fun than writing that standard assignment that has been answered by a good dozen of student generations before. Also, I love the constant links to interesting blog posts, articles, the 140-characters book reviews, etc.

Twitter account for your class that you can use to dissipate information on room changes, etc. if your Virtual Learning Environment doesn't have a function for such things.

Do you read every single tweet every day? Or do you skip some of them from time to time?
Use the right tool for the job. 'Nuff said.

How to use Twitter in education III

In this post, I discussed official university tweeting. I still think this has a certain 'coolness'. But I see, as well, that I unfollowed the Open University, because they got just TOO annoying with their constant TV program announcements that were of no interest for the big bunch of non-UK students. Neither RWTH Aachen University nor Siegen University tweet. I DO follow the Technikkommunikation (technikkomm) department at RWTH Aachen, though, even though I never studied with them. Their tweets don't provide a feeling of belonging, but they provide information.
Current judgement: Well, don't expect too much. And content beats fluffy identity-stuff any time, at least for me.

Schülerkolleg Pädagogik

2010-01-14T07:21:00.006+01:00

Yesterday, the first round of the "Schülerkolleg Pädagogik", a cooperation between University Duisburg-Essen and three schools from Krefeld (BMMG, Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz) and Meerbusch (Maria-Montessori Gesamtschule), started 'for real'. Up to now, school students from 7th to 12th grade worked with their teachers on material delivered by us. Yesterday, we actually got to meet the load of them :-)

The day basically consisted of two chunks, a "lecture" format in the morning, and a workshop format in the afternoon, with the "secret highlight" in between: Eating at the university's mensa ("The fish tastes way better than the stuff they serve at our school!" I learned from one of the participants.). The younger participants interviewed each other on their media use, the results of which will be published as podcasts. The older students analysed the opportunities and risks of different media in school and out-of-school contexts, and compared their own media usage with data from the current JIM study.

It was a lot of fun, and, on top, it gave me a better idea for whom I am creating the material I'm working on, what catches their attention and what doesn't. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the project!

The Denkwerk Symposium

2009-11-15T17:34:00.010+01:00

Last night I returned from the Denkwerk Symposium, a two-day event organised by the Robert Bosch Stiftung for scientists, teachers and students involved in their Denkwerk program. Denkwerk is about bridging the gap between universities and schools. Scientists and university students work with teachers in order to give (mostly highschool) students a first glimpse at university life, research methods, and content knowledge from the humanities. I'm part of the team at the University Duisburg-Essen that is preparing a Denkwerk project on media use, so I was looking forward to learn about what other Denkwerk projects are working on.

During the two days I had many opportunities to learn from scientists and teachers with more experience in 'Denkwerking' than me. I've learned about the most frequent problems and the most popular fixes, and the exchanges were certainly useful. But what impressed me most during the symposium were the student contributions.

Yeah, I know. Most projects are voluntary, so that only the most motivated and dedicated students participate. And the students sent to represent their project are likely the most talented and hard-working among those. In no way should we take the work presented on the symposium to be 'average' results. But I can't help but be impressed. Laura H. (I abbreviate her name since I'm not certain about her age) for example presented the work done for "Pommern on tour" (University of Greifswald) in a way that would have received good marks in any undergraduate seminar. Other school students gave hardly less impressive presentations. I had somewhat dreaded the lengthy student presentation panels, but they turned out to have been the best part of the symposium! They not only showed what young people are able to achieve in projects such as these, but also the enthusiasm and fun involved.

Education - it's urgent!

2009-11-10T08:22:00.004+01:00

Please note the little slogan at the bottom right of the box.

First month on the job

2009-11-05T08:21:00.005+01:00

I've started my new job at University Duisburg-Essen in October. The best part of your second month on a job is that you have finished all the nasty paperwork and can finally concentrate on the fun parts of your job :-) In my case, this means concentrating on developing teaching material for teens who want to explore the link between learning and technology/media.
My only problem so far is that I have way more ideas than can reasonable be stuffed into a single project. Let's be honest, that's the kind of problem you like to have :-)
Yesterday, I had a chance to meet the teachers who will participate in the first round of this "Schülerkolleg Pädagogik". I have been warned by them not to underestimate the motivation and enthusiasm of their students, a warning I'll happily take to heart :-)

Duisburg has, compared to Aachen where I used to work, one big disadvantage: It's a somewhat lengthy commute. I'm truly grateful for the invention of earplugs, which makes sitting in a compartment full of people who never realised that they can switch off the annoying beeping sound their cell phones make whenever they press a button somewhat less stressful. In addition, I try to take my commuting time as a real-life experience in the feasibility of mobile learning. So far I have learned that using a laptop in a crowded compartment is a bit of a challenge, and that books don't come with a limited battery life. Oh, and you don't have to read the manual first to use them without annoying beeping sounds :-)

Yay! November!

2009-11-01T00:17:00.002+01:00

November = NaNoWriMo. 'Nuff said.

Me (now with extra paper)

2009-09-25T15:19:00.003+02:00

A science fiction lesson on using Google

2009-09-20T12:41:00.003+02:00

I'm currently reading "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. Basically, it's about a group of science monks saving the world (or failing to save it, I haven't yet finished the book). One of the social groups in this book are the ITAs, people servicing all things computer for the science monks (who are not allowed to handle computers themselves). There's a beautiful scene in it where one ITA explains the difficulty of finding information on the internet:

Sammann [= the ITA] raised his eyes from the screen of his jeejah [= cell phone] and gazed interestingly at Crade. He let a few moments go by, then responded in a calm and matter-of-fact tone: "Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what's on the Reticulum [=www] is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of the Reconstitution [= the last 3 1/2 millenia]. They are to us what the Mynster is to Fraa Erasmas and his kind [= science monks]. When I look at a given topic I don't just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering system learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute - they are avout [= science monks]. If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend," Sammann continued, nodding at a tearful female on the speely [=TV], "the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute. When I look up the excavation of the Temple of Orithena on the Island of Ecba, the filtering system informs me that people of very high and very low repute have been posting on this topic, slowly but steadily, for seven centuries."
Sammann's explanation had failed if its purpose had been to settle Crade down. "What's an example of a person of high repute? Some fraa [= male monk] sitting in a concent [=monastry]?"
"Yes," Sammann said.
"And what would a low-repute resource be?"
"A conspiracy theorist. Or anyone who makes a lot of long rambling posts that are only read by like-minded sorts." (Stephenson 2008, 406f)

Even if you are not interested in the difficulties of teaching responsible use of Google and Wikipedia in academic settings, the book is still a good read. More philosophy than in "Sophie's World", around the same amount of monks and books as in "The name of the rose", and enough ramblings about mathematics and physics to please most geeks.

Me and my Ubuntu, we want mobile internet

2009-09-18T17:36:00.003+02:00

Since the new job I'll start next month will involve a rather lengthy commute, I finally decided to go ahead and get myself a mobile internet flatrate. All right, and so the story begins...

I first went to an O2 shop to ask for their prices and whether their package had any difficulties with Ubuntu Linux. The customer in front of me gave me little hope - he terminated his contract because the software constantly crashed on his mac laptop... The lady working there didn't know whether there were any problems with Linux, but went to ask a colleague who knew it didn't work on Linux laptops.

Second telecommunications shop I went to belonged to Base. Same here. Nope, doesn't work with Linux.

Third one was a Vodafone one. The salesperson was highly confused. I don't think he quite got the "operating system" concept, because he continued to ask me if I really needed this program... He also suggested I could just take their special "free netbook" offer, and I would get a nice netbook, with Windows, for free. Nope, thanks. I don't need a second netbook, not even if it's 'for free'. On the other hand, he was the first guy to actually ask: "Have you got your netbook with you? We could just try!" Fifteen minutes later we knew: Yep, no problems with Linux. No expertise, but good service mentality - better than what I had experienced so far. Unfortunately, Vodafone was twice as expensive as the cheapest offer I had seen so far - that's why they can afford to give you 'free' netbooks, I guess. So I continued my quest...

Second 02 shop. "Erm, I don't know, but my colleague, he's the technology guy here, will know." Technology guy: "Linux? Only under Ubuntu! But you would want our special manual for Linux users, the installation is a bit tricky!" Perfect!

Second Base shop: Same reply as in Base shop 1: Nope. Plus "Ubuntu? Never heard of it before!"

Well, it will be a 02 contract, I guess.

Letter to my doctoral thesis upon leaving home to enter the world outside

2009-09-13T14:52:00.006+02:00

Dear thesis,

You are four and a half years old now, that's quite a good age for a thesis. You've had your fair share of brainstorming and first drafts, of edits, deleted chapters and of last-minute additions. Over the years, you've turned from a teensy-weensy idea into 201 pages filled with data. It's time that you leave home and discover the world outside the computer on which you were created.

You are about to enter the sphere of academic discourse. It's a big world, full of people with different opinions. Some will agree with you, some disagree, and most will do both at the same time. That's OK, you're still my thesis, even if people offer points of critique or think that you are just plain boring.

I'll miss the time I've spent with you - it were fun years. You were a lot of work, but the good type of work - I enjoyed creating you. Now that you are grown-up and on your own, I'll dedicate my time to other research questions. But, dear thesis, don't worry, I'll never forget you. And, more likely than not, I'll take up a couple of questions you created and turn them into research articles.

Dear thesis, you don't come in a fancy full-color hardcover edition like other theses, which may make you sad at times. These theses look much nicer on a shelf than you do, I admit. On the other hand, the creative commons license you are published under will give you a chance to travel to places that you could not have visited as a fancy but expensive book. In the end, isn't being read the most important thing for a young thesis?

Well, it's time I come to an end with my musings, and time for you to start out on your travels.

Good luck,

Judith

PS: If you ever get lost, this is were people can download you: RWTH Aachen university library

Musings on writing a TMA

2009-08-02T10:53:00.004+02:00

I hate being micromanaged. And this is something the Open University is really good at.

In MA ODE, we are given a lot of freedom in designing our on learning, in selecting our sources and in choosing between different activities. Except in TMAs (tutor-marked assignment) and ECAs (end-of-course assessment).

I always considered essay writing to be a creative act. It stops being a creative act when you are told which texts you have to quote, in which section you have to quote, and how many words you may quote. Nope, I'm not kidding. I'm not only told how many sources to use, but also exactly what kind of sources (so-and-so-many journal articles, so-and-so-many blog posts, etc.), and also from what year they have to stem. I cannot structure my essay myself, but am told exactly what subheaders to use for which section of my text, and which problems to address in these sections, how many words to devote to these sections, etc. It's so bad I nearly expect to be told what kind of clothes to wear and which caffeinated beverage I am to drink while writing. Oh, and this isn't “essay writing 101” – it's postgraduate course work!

Alright, I know. The exacter you define a task, the easier it is to rate the work. If you get 2 points for quoting 200 words from two journal articles from 2009, then determining whether or not you get these 2 points is a simple yes-or-no question. Quoted articles? Tick. Two? Tick. From 2009? Tick. Right number of words? Tick. The examinee has been awarded two points. Makes exams 'fairer', I guess.

On the other hand, this encourages the student to make stupid choices because these stupid choices are rewarded by the graders, to write a worse essay to get more points. I HATE that.

At MA ODE essays, word counts are always very tight. You have exactly enough words to cram in everything you need to address all points mandated by the task. So, if you find a great article that supports the points you make, and a mediocre one that fits more or less, the first article being from 2008, the other one from 2009, you are more likely to make space for a couple of words from the weaker 2009 text, if that's what you get points for. Also, you are likely to stop your literature search once you've completed the required number of sources, since more work is not going to give you more points. It's tough to ignore this, to write an essay that represents the facts as you understand them and that fullfills the requirements of good scholarship that you normally apply to your work, instead of writing something that you hate but that gets you the points. While I safekeep some of the essays I wrote at the Siegen University and at RWTH Aachen University because the intense work I put into them resulted in pieces of writing I love, I submit and and then forget the work I do for the Open University's TMAs and ECAs. It's stuff to get over with, not stuff that inspires me so much I dream about it at night, or that makes me smile years after having finished the degree I did it for.

Dear OU course designers: I appreciate the fact that you try to make grading fair and fast. But I would also appreciate it if you found a way to do this while keeping essay writing real essay writing, instead of turning it into 'follow-the-recipe' tasks. Yeah, I know, I'm asking a lot here. But the rest of the course material doesn't create the impression that you are aiming low, so I guess it's fair enough to expect the same level of excellence from the exam design as from the overall course material :D

Been there, done that, got the hat, part II

2009-07-22T07:29:00.005+02:00

Perhaps you wonder why I carry a salad platter on my head? Well, traditions... In Germany, the mortarboard isn't a soulless mass product, but created by the colleagues of the doctoral candidate to reflect the interests and personality of the student. I guess, I'm just a salady kind of person :D

(Photography by Ha Khong)

What a difference a PC makes...

2009-07-19T11:24:00.003+02:00

What impact did IT have on you, your work, your private life? Could you imagine a life without PC, without text processing, without internet or without web 2.0? Well, if you actually spend your free-time reading blogs like this, the answers to these questions are probably "a big impact" and "no".

For me, getting my first PC was liberating. It was a miserable cheap thing, no internet, of course, no audio output (except a threatening "beep" before something awful happened), no CD-ROM drive. It came in a big box, filled to the brim with floppy disks and dozens of 1000-page (printed!) manuals. I loved it! Not because of Solitaire (the most fancy game installed on that thing), or because I could write my own code (which I, at twelve, could not). I loved it because I could finally create a text that looked like a text, instead of a messy jumbo-mumbo. Now, I have awful handwriting, and when I say "awful", I mean "awful". Everybody-making-jokes-awful. Not-being-able-to-decipher-it-myself-awful. Thanks-I'll-ask-somebody-else-awful. Awful-awful. I loved writing texts, but who would read them voluntarily? I had an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter that I used a lot, but on these things, a typo meant you had to begin all over again - and I made many typos (though my spelling was not quite as awful as my handwriting). My first computer meant I could produce texts that could be read easily, and that, for 1992 standards, looked professional. I LOVED it!

For me, the computer is the tool that allows me to express my thoughts in writing, and to be taken seriously when doing so, instead of getting feedback that consists of little less than commentary on my handwriting. In contrast to this liberating experience, all else that followed, like e-mail and the ability to write my own programs, etc., were only minor improvements on something already dear to my heart.

Been there, done that, got the hat.

2009-07-17T18:28:00.003+02:00

Using delicious for research

2009-06-21T10:21:00.003+02:00

This week (that is: last week, I'm catching up :D), the Open University class I'm taking required us to use social bookmarking service delicious to look for websites on a specific topic. Well, no problem, done in a jiffy. Been there, done that, off to the next task. But why did this activity leave a funny aftertaste?

Delicious can be a useful tool for keeping bookmarks, that's a given. But when I research a question I'm truly interested in (and not a questions I'm only looking up to fulfill a course requirement) I do not want to limit myself to those sources tagged on delicious. The internet is a big, big place, and searching on delicious feels like limiting yourself to only a small segment of it. It's a bit like starting a literature search by searching only through the books that are available from your own university library, without looking at the books that could be ordered from other universities via inter-library loan. If you're in a hurry, it may be a good place to start. But it would, indeed, be a bad place to conclude your search!

AAVE, AAE, BEV - WTF?

2009-06-20T10:07:00.006+02:00

When you work about a language/language variety, little things like the term you use to refer to that language/variety can be quite political. And I'm not only talking political correctness here!

There's a whole bunch of different terms used to refer to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) - as I like to call it. I've compiled a small list of them in my Magister thesis - I'm certain it's not complete:
”African American English” (AAE), ”African American Language”, ”African American Vernacular English” (AAVE), ”Afro-American English”, ”Afro-American Speech”, ”Black English”, ”Black English Vernacular” (BEV), ”Black Idiom”, ”Black language”, ”Black slave language”, ”Black speech”, ”Ebonics”, ”Negro Dialect”, "Negro English”, ”Negro Non-Standard", ”Nonstandard Negro English”, ”Spoken Soul”, ”Substandard Negro English”, ”Vernacular Black English”.
Please, mind you, these are only the terms used in scientific discourse (though some are, I admit, a bit dated)! If I started listing popular terms as well, this list would get longer - and R-rated.

By picking one or other of these terms, you basically subscribe to one school of thought or another. It does matter whether you label something as a "language" or a "dialect", for example, or whether, in the name itself, you make clear that you consider it to be a variety of English or consciously refrain from making such a claim.

In the end, whatever term you pick, there will be somebody who will disagree with your choice. And you can only hope that this choice - even if it contradicts their own beliefs about the linguistic status and origin of AAVE - will not stop them from considering the rest of your work.

And, what's it about?

2009-06-20T08:55:00.003+02:00

I love blogging and this definitely includes blogging about linguistics. Interestingly, I hardly blog about my actual research. I guess because it's difficult to pick out a "fun fact" or "anecdote" out of ongoing work :D
This excuse doesn't work anymore for my thesis, which I finished - for all practical measures - a couple of months ago. Nor does it apply to by Magister thesis, which is, I guess, semi-historic by now!
So, I've decided to blog a bit more about my actual research speciality: Attitudes and African American Vernacular English (AAVE for short). That might be a neat way to revise some content for my upcoming defense, and perhaps a few people 'out there' might actually be interested in that stuff, too ;D

Happy nerd pride day!

2009-05-25T08:28:00.003+02:00

It's nerd pride day - reason enough to celebrate our nerdiness!

What I love about being a nerd:

- Since I am a nerd, I can do what I enjoy most (reading, studying, debating, writing, collecting Austen movies), instead of feeling compelled to do stuff that I 'ought' to find interesting.
- Only nerds have romantic dates at their favorite book shop.
- Only nerds think it's cool to spend Friday evenings with colleagues and students studying R.
- As a nerd, I can feel mainstream at any Mensa event.
- Nerds can wear glasses and feel sexy doing so.
- Nerds don't need complex interior design - the presence of an overabundance of book shelves solves most problems of that kind.

And, last but not least:
- Only nerds (and a few geeks, perhaps) can have nerdgasms.

I'm too old for that...

2009-05-13T07:22:00.004+02:00

Stereotypes, just as attitudes, are powerful little things. They shape how we see ourselves and how others see us, thereby influencing the expectations we hold for ourselves as well as those held by others. Being x years old gets turned into being too young or too old to do something, having xx or xy chromosomes reappears as a job too tough for a woman or unsuitable for a man.
Time.com has a nice article on this topic, outlining how just being reminded of e.g. your age and the stereotypes associated with it can influence your performance.

Where's the presenter?

2009-05-10T09:26:00.005+02:00

I took the following picture at "Us and Them - Them and Us: Constructions of the Other in Cultural Stereotypes - Perceptions, Challenges, Meanings" in Szczecin. It shows an ongoing presentation. Where's the presenter?

Sometimes, it is a bad idea for people of only average stature to put their laptop on top of the speaker's desk!

Comic generator

2009-05-03T17:28:00.006+02:00

I'm currently coordinating the e-learning component for a class on different theoretical approaches to linguistic description. In this class, students work on a group project that they present on-line and off-line at the end of the semester. In the task description I wrote - jokingly - that they could pick any format for their presentations they liked - even webcomics. Well, I've just found out that if any group should indeed pick this specific format, there would be an online tool to help them: On Make beliefs comix, you can create simple comics by dragging and dropping and clicking and without any artistic talent at all.

Now, the only question that remains is: How can you turn a linguistics project into a webcomic?

Usability

2009-05-03T08:34:00.003+02:00

Honestly, was it that difficult to foresee that using mice as pointing devices for computers might pose problems for cat owners?

Bad puns, badly delivered

2009-04-29T08:38:00.005+02:00

I suffer from chronic punitis. And, what's worse, I make my husband draw some of the especially awful ones. Awful ones such as the "Mail Whale":

Don't get me started on the topic of mail delivery. It's one of the things I can beautifully rant about :D

PS: The shape of the whale reflects that of a post horn, the traditional symbol of mail in Germany.

Accessibility

2009-04-29T07:10:00.004+02:00

I believe in accessibility. If you do something, why not do it right? In most cases only a little more effort is needed to increase the numbers of students who can use your material or the number of customers who would consider buying it. Integrating accessibility features into a finished product is expensive and takes time, designing it in a way that includes major accessibility features does not.
I've never received any feedback, though, that any of this was appreciated by our students. My university has just started compiling statistics about accessibility needs of students and there is definitely no tradition of asking whether anybody has any specific needs concerning class presentation or study material. Basically I tried to create accessible material just because I consider this 'good style'.
This week, for the first time ever, a student commented that she appreciated the e-learning components since they were much more accessible for her than traditional printed material. This, certainly, is one more reason to keep up with our attempts :D

Open letter to my online tutors (past, present and future)

2009-04-28T08:20:00.002+02:00

Dear tutors,

Thank you very much for your work. I admit that I take most of what you do for granted - making sure important information reaches us, setting up the tutor group parts of the VLC, coordinating activities. The fact that I can take this for granted is a sign that these things work very well and smoothly, otherwise the lack of it would make me notice the occasional presence of it ;D
Dear tutors, I really cannot thank you enough for making sure we know what is required of us in exams, so that we can focus on studying instead of guessing what will win us points and what will loose us points.
I also want to thank you for grading my papers carefully and providing detailed feedback. This is very much appreciated indeed. Constructive feedback on a bad paper keeps me going, and feedback on a good paper makes me want to excel.
I am equally grateful that you answer my e-mails promptly. I wouldn't e-mail you if my question weren't urgent, so that getting a reply the very same day or at least the day after is very helpful indeed.
I guess I should also thank you for your occasional attempts of 'pastoral care', which I, I have to admit, either ignore or acknowledge just to be polite. I'd rather have you skipped that part of tutoring, but I expect that some students may find it helpful.

Your online student.

PS: Yeah, I know, there are occasional glitches. But, honestly: Unless I send letters of complaint to the course chair, I really don't mind :D

Best practices, worst practices, and the fail whale

2009-04-26T11:44:00.006+02:00

Unfortunately, there is little learning from mistakes in education. There is little scientific research on educational mistakes. Research in the area of educational mistakes is notoriously difficult. Documentation is hard to access. Key figures disappear or refuse to be interviewed. Access to vital sources is denied. Where government use of taxpayers’ money is involved the secrecy is even more pronounced. (Keegan 2007, p. 63)

We all are happy to share our successes, to talk about what worked well and how others can implement our ideas for their own teaching. We may be a bit more hesitant in discussing what didn't work out well, and what errors other teachers may want to avoid. Both aspects are important, though.

If somethings goes wrong - and no, it does not have to be an 'epic fail' like the United Kingdom e–University - making these things public may be a good idea. It must not always be turned into a research article - or even a blog post :D But sharing these problems among colleagues working on similar projects would be nice, wouldn't it? :D

My personal trick: It feels less bad to admit in public that something didn't work out as planned if you already have an idea on how to improve it :D In that form, you can even talk about failure during best practice workshops: "Last year, we did this-and-that, and it didn't work. We talked to stakeholders to find out why it didn't work. This year, we have changed our plans accordingly and do this-and-that instead."

A little fail whale now and then won't harm any of us. After all, as Twitter produces fail whales when traffic is high (which is a good thing), e-teaching practitioners can only get their fail whale if they are willing to take risks in order to improve their teaching.

Happy Birthday, Open University!

2009-04-23T15:26:00.004+02:00

I love them and I hate them - but, anyway, I cannot imagine a life without OU courses anymore. How lucky I wasn't born more than forty years ago, or I would have had to try a life without TMAs, ECAs, tutor groups and personal identifiers :D

Image by Pickersgill Reef. Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

"My dear, you're just too young to study semantics!"

2009-04-22T06:26:00.005+02:00

Well, my parents should have warned me. Or at least some professor should have stepped up at some time and given me some advice on how inappropriate it would be for somebody of my age group to study semantics. Since nobody did that, I was quite at a loss yesterday when I tried to borrow Saeed's "Semantics" from our university library. That's what the computer system told me:

The sentence in red print translates as "Ordering this book is not possible. Minimum age: 85 years."

Of course I couldn't simply accept that. I walked over to the library and persuaded the friendly folks working there that I indeed possess the maturity required of a person who wishes to study semantic theories.

To blog or not to blog, this is the question

2009-04-19T11:37:00.006+02:00

I started this blog originally because I was required to keep one for one the the courses of the MA in Online and Distance Education that I'm currently pursuing. Obviously, I enjoy blogging, or I would have discarded this blog with the end of H808. This does not mean, though, that I necessarily liked the course activities connected with blogging.

Kerawalla et al 2008 describe five types of educational bloggers:

blogging avoidance (well, just don't do it)

resource network building (providing resources for readers)

support network building (motivating each other to keep up the work; blogging in a close-knit support group)

self-sufficient blogging (using the blog to keep notes, store links, etc.)

anxious, self-sufficient blogging to meet perceived course requirements (posting only what you believe you are required to post - and not enjoying it at all).

Now, these are all legitimate ways to approach blogging (including not blogging). The problem lay with the tasks built around the blogging activities: In one TMA (mid-semester exam), I had to write an essay in which I had to quote the blog contributions of other students in my tutor group. Unfortunately, my tutor group seemed to consist almost entirely of blogging avoiders, self-sufficient bloggers and the anxious self-sufficient type. Students had blogged about what was important to them or blogged about those things they did not consider threatening: links, summaries, more links, more summaries. Very few comments, opinions, pieces of criticism, etc. Links and summaries can be valuable, but it was extremely difficult to use such blog posts in the context of the strongly regulated essay task. Here, students' blogging behavior and exam tasks where at a mismatch.

Secondly, I was sometimes required to blog about specific topics, including topics I just found unbelievably boring. Now, since I am the author of my own blog I decide with what - and with what not - I'm going to bore my audience. In several cases I refused to blog about required topics, striking a deal with my tutor that I would discuss these topics in other revenues (i.e., the course forum). In a way, I became a partial blogging avoider, not because I disliked blogging, but because I insisted of remaining in control of my blogging.

Blogging is great. It's a fun way to share your thoughts and ideas. But it's tricky to use it in educational contexts. Tricky, though potentially very rewarding.

"You can't quote Wikipedia!"

2009-04-19T09:14:00.006+02:00

This week's unit on H800 discusses, among other things, the "citability" of Wikipedia. A popular topic indeed :D

Most students seem to have learned that "you don't cite Wikipedia". That's a good thing - and a bad thing. Because, for some mysterious reason, some of them seem to believe that as long as they don't cite Wikipedia, everything else is OK. Why not quote a general interest online dictionary for your definition of a scientific term? It's not Wikipedia, after all! Or just quote the personal homepage of somebody that popped up on Google? No, you don't know the author, nor the homepage, nor did it include any references - but it ain't Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is a fickle friend. You need to assess every article individually. You need to look up the references, read the discussion tab, and you need a good bit of background knowledge and loads of common sense to decide whether the text makes any sense at all. You need, in short, to do everything that you should do with any material you use in your work.

In the end, Wikipedia is likely to be better suited as a starting point of your research than as the end point. But if you quote an exceptionally good page on a topic for which better resources might not be easily available (popular culture, anybody?), and if you are ready to defend your choice of quoting wikipedia as you should be able to defend any other choice of sources for your work - go ahead.

"MUST REVISE FIRST-SEMESTER LINGUISTICS ARRRGGGG"

2009-04-15T08:18:00.005+02:00

The above sentence may be uttered by quite a number of first-year linguistics ~~zombies~~ students who have survived their first semester and are now off to more advanced ~~brain munching~~ linguistic study.
The Narr Verlag offers on its website companion material to Meyer et al.'s "Descriptive English Linguistics", including an extensive glossary of linguistic terms. It was written specifically with first-year students in mind and is a great resource for revising your linguistic A(llophon), B(asilect), C(homsky)s.

Since I helped develop this glossary I was of course keen to find out whether it was helpful or not for our students. I asked in one of my classes whether anybody was using it and got the following response: "Of course, I couldn't do it without the glossary!" Well, I guess this means it is, indeed, helpful :D

And the gold medal goes to...

2009-04-12T10:00:00.003+02:00

There are many challenges out there, but few compare to trying to win olympic gold. Now, curling is great, and there's a good reason why synchronized swimming and snowboarding should be olympic disciplines - but what about those of us more linguistically inclined?
Well, if you're young and clever and know your verbs from your nouns, why not train for the International Olympiad in Linguistics? The tasks will make you sweat, that's for sure, and if you aren't carefully when riding the escalators at the airport you might actually break a bone or two - sweat and danger are therefore guaranteed!

Shit happens

2009-04-12T09:46:00.003+02:00

Bad things happen, even to ~~good~~ neutral good people. Want an example?

My cat peed into my laptop case. No, there wasn't a laptop in there at the time. Just my pocket diary and all three USB sticks.

At least I now know that Moleskin books are worth their money. And that sanitary wipes are great for cleaning USB sticks. I just don't think I really wanted to find out this way. Eek!

There was a turtle by the name of Bert...

2009-03-24T18:50:00.004+01:00

If you are a fan of historic films, or of propaganda films in general, you'll enjoy the Propaganda Filmmaker. It provides film snippets, photographs, story cards, graphics and music - in short everything you need for a 1940s U.S. war propaganda flick. Within minutes you can create stuff like this:
Great fun :D

"When I grow up, I want to be a communications officer on board of a starship"

2009-03-21T07:31:00.006+01:00

The list of movies with linguistics themes on LinguistList has now been extended. Science fiction rules :D
(Don't even like Enterprise that much - but can't let such a list miss a linguist-as-main-character Star Trek series.)

Psycholinguistics goes music

2009-03-20T08:27:00.002+01:00

Have you ever felt sorry that nobody celebrates your linguistic discoveries (or lack thereof) in songs? Well, if you work in the field of psycholinguistics this may change. At least there is a precedent now: Bud Petal's song about the Nim Chimpsky study.
Read it here or listen to it here or buy it here.

I have to admit that I don't share his assessment of this study, nor do I share his music preferences. But it's cool nonetheless, isn't it :D

Could somebody go ahead and write a song about the effect that contact with linguistics has on ambivalent attitudes? PLEEEAAAASE!

"When I grow up, I want to be a linguist!"

2009-03-20T07:41:00.003+01:00

If you want your children to say the above sentence, you should start by replacing their pony, princess and pirate movie collection by something more suitable for early indoctrination. LinguistList has a list of suitable flicks.
Well, I have to admit the only two movies from that list that I know are science fiction movies/episodes. "Enemy mine" is a beloved favorite, and "Darmok" - well, there's a small Darmok-and-Picard diorama on one of the book shelves next to my desk.

Their list isn't complete, of course. You can count in basically all of "Enterprise" thanks to linguist Hoshi Sato, who had to be lured away from her teaching responsibilities on earth with promises of many new interesting alien languages. There's also "Atlantis", with linguist turned caretaker Milo Thatch (didn't watch that one yet).

McLuhan

2009-03-13T11:12:00.006+01:00

The H800 course team introduces the section on Marshall McLuhan the following way:

McLuhan is an elusive character best understood for the thoughts he provoked rather than as the source of a consistent and coherent body of ideas.

Somehow, this doesn't make me want to read any of his works :D :D

PS: Half an hour after first posting this, I've ordered "Understanding media" and "The Gutenberg Galaxy" from the university library. Darn it! Can't I just decide not to be interested? I try, but it's difficult to ignore the work of the person who has popularized the terms global village and Gutenberg Galaxy. Blasted academic curiosity!

Gunman or gunteen?

2009-03-12T09:25:00.005+01:00

Yesterday, a 17-year old killed a number of students and teachers at his former school and then left school to continue killing people throughout his home town. The first news on CNN.com labeled him as "man" or "gunman". That made me wonder: Does CNN refer to under 18-year olds regularly as "man" or "woman" instead of "teen" or some other label indicating the youth of the person?
Today, with his name known, he is referred to mostly by his name (which is given as "Tim K." in German media and used in unabbreviated form in US media) or by "teen gunman" or "teenaged gunman".

I'll keep an eye on CNN's system of referring to young people :D

Watchmen

2009-03-12T08:29:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, my husband dragged me to the cinema to watch "Watchmen" with him. I like Vendetta - both the movie and the comic - so that it wasn't implausible I'd like a movie based on a graphic novel by the same author.

Well, it's a wonder I didn't leave after the first five minutes.
Please don't misunderstand me: I'm happy I didn't leave. It is a wonderful movie. But I'd rather not have seen it.
The amounts of graphical violence are excessive. It's not unmotivated violence. It's both part of the plot and lets you understand the main characters better - both those that seem to enjoy to kill and torture and those who look the other way when their colleagues go rampage.
If you can stomach the amount of violence depicted, it's an excellent movie with expressive shots, great actors and special effects that wow you. And it's a movie based on a great graphic novel by one of the masters of that art. It's just - beyond what I would normally voluntarily watch.

If you enjoyed "Pan's Labyrinth", you would enjoy this movie too. Both are beyond what one can endure, but I guess that's part of the essence of these movies.

Why would anybody demand a slump?

2009-03-12T08:03:00.003+01:00

That's what I asked myself when reading the headline Consumer demand slumps in China. The missing -s should have answered the question for me :D

Library - I love you!

2009-03-11T07:41:00.003+01:00

I discovered yesterday that the coffee bar at our university library not only sells coffee, but also freshly made juices *yummi* I guess the eternal battle library vs Starbuck's has just been decided. Library rules! :D

Stupid, ain't it?

2009-03-09T06:35:00.002+01:00

Yesterday evening, I've advanced the clock one hour to reflect the change to summer savings time. Clever, right? Yeah. Really clever. If I lived in North America. In Europe, Summer Time begins later this month. *arrggh*

Correlation

2009-03-08T14:33:00.004+01:00

Me and my parents correlate, because without them I wouldn't be here.

Brown, Collins and Duguid 1989 use this quotation from a student who was taught the term correlate through dictionary work to demonstrate that de-contextualized learning doesn't work. While I agree with some of their other statements, I do not think that this is sufficient evidence. First, even terms that that have been learned in context, e.g. through reading, TV, interacting with other people, may be over- or underextended by the learner (children do this all the time during first language acquisition - and their learning is purely contextual). Secondly, it must be a truly crappy dictionary that fails to mention that this term belongs to the domain of statistics!

All right, why did I post this? Because this short discussion of "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning" gives me an excuse to link once again to my favorite webcomic :D XKCD wouldn't be XKCD without its jokes on statistics :D

NaNoEdMo

2009-03-04T09:21:00.002+01:00

Well, we're already in the middle of week one of NaNoEdMo, the National Novel Editing Month. NaNoEdMo, unfortunately, doesn't have all those fancy gadgets that NaNoWriMo has. You get raw numbers instead of beautiful bar diagrams. Need more eye candy!

Want to play?

2009-03-04T09:14:00.002+01:00

I am an ardent non-player. I don't even have a version of solitaire on my computer. But the Detecon Mobile Award may change my opinion for the time being :-) It's a simulation game where you manage an event magazine gone web 2.0. Sounds like fun :D

News on my love affair...

2009-03-03T07:38:00.002+01:00

with R., my favorite tool for statistical analysis.

It seems that R., according to a link a colleague has sent me, gives me good reason to be jealous....

I should have known that free software is a bit licentious...

Wonderful language learning website

2009-02-27T18:15:00.005+01:00

I don't enjoy taking language classes. They are necessary, but I don't consider them much fun. I prefer learning languages in meaningful contexts, and doing grammar exercises is not exactly 'meaningful'.
Once I have reached a certain threshold in a language, I start reading in that language like a maniac. It's meaningful in so far as I pick books I'm genuinely interested in, and it is a wonderful way to extend your vocabulary and to entrench grammar. But what do you do if you can't read authentic literature yet? And how do you practice writing if your skills are too low to enable you to interact normally with speakers of that language?
For Web 2.0 fans Lang-8 is the answer. You write blog entries in the language you are learning, and receive corrections, general hints and comments on what you have written from native speakers. You, in turn, correct the contributions that learners of your native language(s) have written.
It's fun! I enjoy correcting a couple of German sentences now and then, especially if the blog entries themselves are interesting. I can write about things that interest me and native speakers help me getting my posts right and chat with me about what I have written. The response time is fantastically fast - I haven't waited more than a few hours yet, and have received feedback within minutes at some instances. I'm blogging in French and Japanese, and it's just the right amount of challenge! I love it and can only recommend it to all language learners out there :-D

Library cat is watching you!

2009-02-26T21:03:00.002+01:00

Hey! You! Yes, I mean you! I've seen you! Put that book back where it belongs!

Jane Austen horror movies

2009-02-25T18:02:00.003+01:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single alien in possession of a good appetite must be in want of a human victim.

I thought that my husband's obsession with zombie books was only another facet of his general geekiness. It seems I was mistaken. I've married a trendsetter! EEK!

Austen Meets Alien in ‘Pride and Predator’

Please, somebody tell me that this is just a joke?

How to use Twitter in education III

2009-02-25T16:21:00.003+01:00

You might also use Twitter for public relations and to increase student identification with your university or department.I'm not quite sure, though, whether this would work or not. I currently follow the Open University on Twitter and no, daily Twitter messages about which OU program is running at what time on what channel are not going to change the way I feel in relation to the OU.The number of tweets seems to be quite right, but they are totally irrelevant to me. Didn't anybody ever consider that many (international) OU students don't get UK TV channels?
There's a "RWTH Aachen" account, but I have no idea whether this actually IS my university or whether it's some student's account - there have never been any tweets. Perhaps it's because the RWTH doesn't produce any TV programs...

Distance education in Germany

2009-02-23T18:27:00.003+01:00

If you ever considered registering for a degree at a German institution for distance education, the Fernstudientag 2009 might be of interest for you. Many institutions offer all kinds of events, including online events such as chats with experts, etc. They will take place on Friday, 2/23/09. If you wanted to check out your options anyway, this week will be a good one to actually do so :D

Spring's on its way...

2009-02-23T10:38:00.003+01:00

So views like this (that's what I see outside the window at my desk) will soon be a thing of the past.

How to use Twitter in education II

2009-02-23T08:26:00.004+01:00

Some more ideas :D

As a tool to support mobile learning, e.g. sending students outside of class to look for authentic language samples (e.g. shops with names using elements from several languages, etc.), then letting them report findings through twitter.

Suggest students follow interesting authors/linguists/specialists on Twitter.

Twitter account for your class that you can use to dissipate information on room changes, etc. if your Virtual Learning Environment doesn't have a function for such things.

Plagiarism

2009-02-21T08:19:00.002+01:00

A student at the University of Münster was caught plagiarizing at his Diplomarbeit (something between a BA and an MA thesis) and thrown out of university (without the degree, of course). He went to court and the ruling is out now: Yes, it was legal to thrown him out for plagiarizing.

WDR has an article on this. What is more important than the article, though, are the comments people made. You'll find everything there, from "cheating is OK, everybody does it", to "cheating is generally OK, but not in your Diplomarbeit" or "it's the fault of the professor, he/she should have monitored the student more closely". You'll also find people who are shocked by this act of plagiarizing. 14 pages of comments in total - seems to be something that gets emotions up.

My stance is: We need to teach, and teach well, what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, and what consequences it has to commit plagiarism. At the same time we need to have legal option to sanction academic dishonesty.

Take this, manuscript!

2009-02-20T12:52:00.004+01:00

Countdown has started for this year's NaNoEdMo.Time to get ready to edit this b**** of a novel! One month - one crappy manuscript - 50 hours of editing.

What a horrible man!

2009-02-20T12:28:00.004+01:00

Pas de bibliothèque, pas de livres, qui eussent été sans utilité pour Mr. Fogg, puisque le Reform-Club mettait à sa disposition deux bibliothèques, l'une consacrée aux lettres, l'autre au droit et à la politique.(Jules Verne. Le tour du monde en 80 jours)

As if this were a reason not to maintain a private library! *shutters*

MUST EAT BRAINS!

2009-02-19T14:54:00.006+01:00

Or, better: Must cuddle brains.

I've just received the cutest ever plush brain cell as a "thank you" for my volunteer work at Mensa Germany. I love it! You can never have too many brain cells :D