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Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

2009-11-03T19:27:00.014Z

I'm filling in this placeholder with links to my presentation at the AVEALMEC/ARCALL online conference on Social Networking, November 5-8, 2009, http://avealmec.org.ve/.

The complete schedules and PDF promotional documents for this conference are here: http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/
This link gives a good overview of presenters with links to their presentation recordings http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

My presentation is entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks. The presentation took place November 6, 2009, at 18:30 GMT.

The writeup is here:
http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09
The presentation recording is here: http://tinyurl.com/vance091106wiziq
The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference

As the presentation was on knowledge dissemination and sharing throughout networks, it naturally touched on Creative Commons, so I took care to license the presentation with the attribution 3.0 license. I selected jurisdiction to be USA but I could have left it "unported"; anyone know what ramifications that would have?

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks by Vance Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at advanceducation.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vancestevens.com.

If you have any comments on the presentation, you are most welcome to make them here.

AVEALMEC Conference on Social Networking November 5-8, 2009

2009-10-19T03:47:00.007Z

In the picture you can see a group of people I'll be joining in early November at a conference with infinite heart but no walls. But I'm having a heck of a time getting the slide show done for my presentation there because I'm so distracted. I'm up before dawn. I was looking for graphics till late last night searching Google Images and Flickr and Creative Commons for images I can use in my presentation. This alone could take hours wandering through other people's flights of fancy, which they have elected to SHARE; to allow me to put online if I will only acknowledge their hand in their own work, to pay forward to the community (Mireille's term on Webcast Academy). Creating a slide show for a respected audience is a journey where every step takes you halfway there; you never arrive!

I stop to reflect here, how did I KNOW about Creative Commons, and what it means? How did I know I could find CC images at Flickr and the Creative Commons website, and turn the license filter on for Google Images? Did I read that somewhere or hear it word of mouth? Yes, I did, but not in a book or in any traditional media. As we speak, Twitter is constantly bleeping my radar, and even my Gmail is flooding me with messages on the latest SCoPE seminar, The Art of Teaching (looks to be a great one). I just joined the Educator's PLN Ning ... now that's kind of a mirror within a mirror, messages are coming through for existing participants to Twitter in more (yet another layer of mirror within mirror).

I'm not sure what's going on with George Siemens's and Stephen Downes's CCK09 at the moment but I heard on EdTech Weekly that it had only a few hundred participants, not bad for a free online course, but down from its mega-status of thousands in its initial rendition. I know that Alec Couros is giving an interesting Open Course at the moment (which I had every intention of joining but never did), and Leigh Blackall is starting one as well, both of these inviting participants from anywhere, for whatever reason or benefit they hope to gain from it. I've never met either Alec or Leigh, but I've invited both to give keynote talks at WiAOC free online conferences, and both readily agreed. Why? Heike Philp has offered to try and set up a live synchronous discussion online with anyone her PLN suggests. Someone said, ok, I'd like to talk with Noam Chomsky. So she asked him, he agreed, she set up the discussion, and now anyone can replay the recording. News about all these events reaches not just me but everyone in my extended social network in ways we didn't have available last year, last month, yesterday even ... how about tomorrow, Google Wave anyone?

These events and courses have a wonderful dynamic, one that I apply instinctively to the EVO Multiliteracies course I'm about to moderate again. I don't really have time for any of these courses, nor for preparing for my ALVEALMEC presentation for that matter. My professional development cup runneth over with creative juices that spill in all directions. Matt Montaigne is one of these teachers who seems to be everywhere at once, pushing people forward in their learning with this project and that (Earth Day webcasts, for example, on the Worldbridges Network). I was surprised to hear him say on a recent EdTechTalk shows that these efforts were chaos, he gets them started and then they just surge this way and that and leave messes that no one sees and no one mops up, but enough energy reaches the target that the impression is one of sustained and directed effort. Why am I surprised? I'm like that. I imagine many creative people are, minds as cluttered as an artist's atelier. It would be interesting to sound some of the other presenters at this conference on social networking out on exactly that topic.

This is how energy is harnessed and channeled in a PLN. It's messy. And while trying to focus on meeting an arbitrary deadline to prepare slides for a presentation to be given two weeks hence (if it were two days, I would be genuinely focused; there's nothing like a real deadline!) I am moving all over the network that brought me to this point. If not for the network, I would not have been given the opportunity to make the presentation. If not for the network, I'd be able to actually put this presentation together in a timely manner. But you can't have the upside without the downside, so we need to get used to it, and revel in it!

Seth Godin has introduced the notion of "tribes" as being groups of people who congeal around an idea that some dominant figure within that tribe leads. Switching conventional notions on its head, charisma he says, is not what the leader needs to attract followers, it's what the leader gets from the act of leading others, or better said, moving to the forward position where the leader appears to be at the head of where the tribe was going in the first place. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully a tribe is something that can be subsumed in the framework of the talk I'm giving at AVEALMEC.

In this brief posting I've again taken a step leading me only halfway to my destination. But each step needs to end (even as the destination shifts like an amorphous paradigm. Wasn't it just there? Where is it now?) so I'll wrap up this thought. Where have I arrived in this step? This posting has been about the role of a network of peers and their peers which is constantly channeling us information which we can use to convert to the knowledge that makes us interesting enough that others will invite us to speak at gatherings ranging in formality from conferences (online or face to face) to ad hoc discussions (again, online or face to face).

If you follow this out to its logical end, it means that any of us in the network is potentially interesting enough, and therefore no better than, anyone who is speaking to them at a conference. I say potentially, because the information is there, but it has to be aggregated and processed into knowledge, and then be communicated effectively. Some people are better at that than others, or simply have more time. The network provides the information but the better the network the more time it consumes. Those of us who are getting used to that reality are reveling in it, and exuding an energy that makes us want to share our passion with others, like those who created and shared the graphics that I'll put in my presentation, as part of the scaffolding on the launching pad I am trying to create for the talk I plan to give at AVEALMEC.

The more I learn about this conference, the more I see of the buildup and the accumulation of artifacts on the web, the more I anticipate being a part of it. I'm looking forward to savoring the aggregation of content and hearing what the speakers have to say. This conference has a very appealing look and feel. It's being done right. Congratulations to those putting it on! For more information: http://avealmec.org.ve/

Personas and the multiliterate curriculum vitae

2009-09-26T11:13:00.009Z

I just posted this to YouTube:

"In a multiliterate society as it is emerging in the 21st read-write century, it may be that curriculum vitae in formats such as this one will replace the paper-based versions prevalent in the 20th read-only century. The distinctions between centuries were made by Lawrence Lessig, and Personas is an M.I.T. project from http://personas.media.mit.edu/ designed to reveal anyone's webpresence."

(Incidentally, I'm fortunate to have a unique name; all the output shown in this screencast is about me, but it doesn't work like that for everyone ;-)

Another interesting site that will aggregate content on your name is http://addictomatic.com

To make the screencast, I used Camstudio to produce an almost 400 megabyte AVI file. I then used VideoSprintLight (reviewed here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/convert-video-files-to-dvd-mp4-vcd-mpeg-windows/) to create an MP4 version of only 77 megabytes.

It was crucial to do the conversion on my PC because I was having trouble (facing 4 hours upload time, not counting timeouts and retries) to upload the AVI directly to YouTube, and I figured I'd have the same problem sending it to Zamzar, or ConvertFiles, or Media Converter.

Social Networking for students and teachers who only know Facebook

2009-08-27T19:14:00.014Z

Struggling with my muses on a challenging project, I confided in a Facebook update: "I'm trying to write teaching materials to explain social networking to students and teachers who know little about the topic beyond Facebook. It's difficult."

To my surprise my off-the-cuff remark brought numerous comments (my social network in support; thanks, social network :-)). I decided that these responses deserved more elaboration than would be possible in a comment on my own status update (hence, this blog post).

Basically I'm trying to update what my colleagues and I have been teaching as "computer literacy" for the past several years. Our students' sophistication with computers changes year to year, and what seemed reasonable five years ago as an introduction to computing might seem simplistic and outmoded today.

I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to revise some of the materials we introduce to students as "computer literacy" and thus articulate some of the concepts which I think our students should be aware of in order to consider themselves technologically literate in the 21st century, where there is general agreement among educators who concern themselves with such matters that a new skill set is emerging to prepare young people to be able to adapt to “jobs that haven’t been invented yet.”

My materials include a lesson on Google Docs (a popular example of doing in the ‘cloud’ something we have till recently been doing almost exclusively on our PC’s). This lesson also gets the students into the Google system, which they’ll need for the lessons involving Google Reader.

Google Reader is one of the topics in my lessons on Social Networking. These lessons focus on three key concepts: RSS, tagging, and aggregation.

The first lesson has us taking a look at aggregation, an excellent illustration of which can be found at http://addictomatic.com/. I have our students put in ADNOC and OPEC as these are safe and also could lead to a discussion of how this works (if students explore some of the aggregators used, which reveals a lot about what aggregators there are and how they work).

In the second lesson we have a look at blogs, but as observers only. It seems unreasonable to require teachers to themselves create blogs in such a short time, though this could be a technique any teacher could use to work with students on these materials. As observers we follow blogs through their RSS feeds, so I’m suggesting some blogs I hope will intrigue our students. I also have some practical examples of RSS at work (RSS is a KEY concept, absolutely essential).

Another key concept is that of tagging. For this I use Delicious, adapting materials I've already created some time ago.

This brings me to the last lesson. I was thinking of a lesson on how to develop a network of worthy peers. Social Networking is much talked about, I heard the term repeatedly on mainstream TV news just this morning, on both Al Jazeera and BBC. So I think students and teachers might be primed to learn more about it, but the hurdle for most people (the trick, or the hard part) is seeding that network in such a way that it develops into something that will feed you the kind of information that will transform your learning (which is what some people say it does).

One web application that’s having a great impact on information dissemination is Twitter. I’m thinking at the moment to create that final lesson on Twitter. Again this would iinvolve students as observers (in illustration of concepts introduced here). It wouldn't be necessary for our teachers or students to create their own Twitter accounts but they would be able to see other people’s Ttwitter streams and follow those in RSS and tag them in Delicious.

In both blogs and Twitter you can see where people who have interesting things to say are getting their information. This is in fact how you leverage your own network, since you can find others whose blogs and Twitter feeds you can explore. My post just previous to this one (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html) described how Twitter Mosaic could be used to plumb the networks of other respected colleagues, who could in turn plumb yours.

I published this post on August 27, 2009. Meanwhile I got this from my Twitter stream, which I can't possibly absorb in its entirety but which I pop into now and then for whatever pearls have been cast before me and frequently emerge with something spot on. This is an article published September 1 in Times Higher Education on exactly the topic I'm getting at here. As Russell Stannard explains, "The idea of Twitter is to network with other people who are working in the same area as you. You send 'tweets' of interesting articles, websites and the like, and you receive similar tweets from the people you follow. Soon your Twitter account becomes a constant flow of interesting information from people who are plugged into your area. So how do you create these networks? It’s probably here where most people stumble. The easiest way to build up your contacts is to 'piggyback'. You search for well-known people who are working in your area then click on all their followers. You can guess that most of the people who follow them will be interested in similar things to you." http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407984&c=2

I couldn't have said it better myself! Thus your network is seeded, and it flourishes when you start interacting with it (going from passive to active would be the next step, but is outside the scope of my too brief introduction).

Icing on the cake: I see from my Twitter feed Sept 2, 2009 that colleagues in my network are actually reading this article. Thanks Cristina, and others re-tweeting!

And finally, this late-breaking addendum (Sept 10, 2009)

I've published the materials I alluded to here and I'm ready to share the URLs.

Basic Computer Literacy: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/computer_literacy_2009_lessons_1-3

Social Networking: http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3

I'd appreciate any feedback, but keep in mind that they are pitched at my work context of EFL students just entering college. The materials are meant to be used in a classroom context where video media cannot be counted on to function, and pitched at students AND teachers who are only slowly emerging from a paper-based and teacher-centric pedagogical environment. That latter stipulation means that for the teachers themselves this is their first contact with some of the concepts here and they can't be made to feel that they are fish out of water when 'teaching' to a class of students who are in general have not embraced web 2.0 and social networking. So for people already learning through social networks, it's scaled back a bit, but I'm sharing in case you have a need for such materials, and also in case you might give me ideas for improvement.

Also I was working on a 4th lesson in social networking, "Starting your own network," when I ran out of time (I needed to get the materials into teacher and student hands AND realized teachers would run out of time in the 3 weeks allocated to the course originally). However, I plan to add that fourth unit at a later date. An inkling of what is to come can be found here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-webheads.html

The New Webheads

2009-08-22T08:36:00.012Z

The Webheads "gallery" (the one here: http://vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads_evo.htm) has become well-known within certain distributed learning networks. Webheads arose in a Web 1.0 era and its webmaster-maintained artifacts have long been overtaken by Web 2.0 ones.

I stumbled on Twitter Mosaic http://sxoop.com/twitter/ via one of Hala Fawzi's blogs: http://englishonlinects.blogspot.com/.

Voila! The new Webheads gallery (happily most of those spam followers seem to have been filtered out when their accounts were suspended; I wonder if this updates live :-). Incidentally if you don't want someone appearing in your mosaic you can click on that person's avatar to delete it from the final result, simple.

This visualization has allowed me to see my personal learning network in a new light. This is the first visualization that I've become aware of where I could picture my network so clearly. Each thumbnail has a mouse-over that not only reveals a Twitter user name, but lets you click on the user name and pull up a Twitter profile. At that profile I can have a look at the follower's posts and if I think I'd like to see more posts like that, I can conveniently follow that person right then and there.

Anyone can do the same. That is, you can pull up my network in this way (you don't need my password) and I can pull up yours. So if I want to see who is in your network I can generate a mosaic like this and I can click on people and follow them if I have that much respect for your network that I would go to that trouble (and I just did that with someone in my network to test it out, respect!).

A final comment, I've discovered that at least two people in my network are no longer of this world. That's sad on one level, but on another, there's more respect again in networks where people can remain virtually after they have gone, where the work they have accomplished lives on in a sort of immortal online presence.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Proposed chapter on Online Distance Training for ESL/EFL teachers: Case Study of a Community of Practice and its Distributed Learning Network

2009-08-03T01:59:00.008Z

Have you ever submitted a proposal for something and sent it off and then forgot where you'd put it, so when your proposal was accepted and it came time to act on it, you couldn't retrieve it or remember exactly what you had proposed?

I have just submitted a proposal for a chapter which might appear in a book on teaching ESL online, assuming the book proposal itself is accepted.

In writing the proposal I realized that it answers succinctly in 300 words what people frequently ask me, how did Webheads come about, and what is Webheads anyway, and how does it fit into a framework of professional development? I have referred to this 'fit' as 'teacher autonomy' in this post here, for example, and also in the Slideshare presentation embedded below.

So here's the proposal. It would be useful if it attracted feedback, but apart from that, since it's here, I'll be able to retrieve and remember it later, and in case anyone asks me again about Webheads, this will be a convenient place to point them.

============

Webheads started in 1998 as an online community of EFL students and teachers learning together how technology facilitates language learning through computer-mediated communication. By around the turn of the century it was being dominated by teaching practitioners who in 2002 came to see themselves as a community of practice (CoP) known as Webheads in Action (WiA). As communication over the Internet expanded rapidly into voice and video, and with Web 2.0 making it possible for many users to create content online and share it in cyberspaces promoting social networking, many such communities arose and began overlapping in multiple memberships. This paper explores the concepts of groups, communities, and networks, and relates how WiA evolved from a group to a community (specifically, a CoP), and how this CoP developed contacts with others to function as part of a much wider distributed learning network (DLN) of teachers training one another.

The case of WiA models professional development through connectivism. At each node in the DLN, there is a person who is passionate and knowledgeable (and wants to learn more) about some aspect of teaching through technology. Collectively the nodes comprise the knowledge-base to which each member in each overlapping community has access. Connectivism provides a framework by which the development of pathways of access to that information is of primary importance to the information itself. Professional development then becomes a matter of educators blazing pathways to create channels through which each other's knowledge can be shared and made to flow in all directions, creating a dynamic system conducive to informal, just-in-time learning.

This paper describes how members of WiA utilize such connections to maintain conversations that enable everyone to learn about and practice with latest innovations in educational technology, and contribute to innovative and transformative teaching practices.

Let's start with teacher autonomy: Multiliteracies and Lifelong Learning

View more presentations from vances.

SpeedLifing

2009-06-08T04:00:00.006Z

Webheads in action have once again invented an online phenomenon. SpeedLifing is an offshoot of SpeedGeeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Geeking, which Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht mentioned in their excellent presentation at WiAOC http://webheadsinaction.org/node/364, and in this blog post: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2009/04/05/take-your-faculty-speedgeeking/

This got Webheads thinking we could try the technique, so we decided to do it in Elluminate http://tinyurl.com/y3eh starting at 13:00 GMT June 14, 2009. There's more information at our wiki http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/SpeedGeeking

SpeedGeeking is where a lot of participants show up and move at a signal from one presentation to another. The presenters keep repeating their presentations. In Online SpeedGeeking as Webheads will attempt it we will rotate presentations through our Elluminate presentation room at http://tinyurl.com/y3eh. Elluminate has a countdown timer. We'll set it to countdown 5 minutes. The SpeedGeeker's task is to present cogently and concisely on a topic of choice (non-commercial of course :-) in just 5 minutes. Anyone can present. Scope of topic is up to individual presenters, as long as the topic is covered in 5 min. Anyone interested can sign up at the wiki.

At our usual Webheads Sunday noon GMT chat on May 31 , someone had some questions about Second Life, so we decided to meet in SL the following week June 7

It gradually dawned on us, why not try a similar format in SL? We put the event down on our wiki page and invited people to show us their favorite places there, with the caveat that each tour would last 5 or ten minutes. We thought we could get people into SL, exchange friendships, and teleport each other from place to place. And guess what? It worked, and it was F.U.N.

On the day of the event, we had only two presenters who had signed up.

13:00 GMT, Webhead Link (Vance),
Landmark to be visited: Webheads in Action, EduNation III (72, 36, 21)
Next up: Ruta Maya, Mexico, Nina Liakos/Zaytsev

But it turned out that a lot of webheads appeared at http://tappedin.org/ between noon and 13:00 expecting the event to take place.

Doris Molero had come online for another reason and wanted take some pictures of me in Second Life to accompany an interview that she had conducted (and which I blogged here: http://tinyurl.com/090522molero). I said fine but in return she had to show us her favorite places in Second Life.

She took us to the Great Wall of Mao (85, 85, 36) and then to a Japanese village with the name Kansai in it (looking for it now, can't seem to relocate it, one of many builds containing the name Kansai). In Kansai Doris found a lovely kimono but the guys in the group could find no clothes, so we went off in search of men's clothing elsewhere, and ended up at Amity Island (116, 95, 23).

By then we had attracted a crowd, including Nina who conducted us to Ruta Maya, Mexico 2 (187, 25, 21). This turned out to be a charming place where we could 'rent' horses (for free) by touching them and then 'wearing' them. So we rode horses around the build, the beach, and the old ruins there.

The charm was somewhat compromised by a villain who appeared by name of Lucianopt Vita. This character first disrupted our outing with a confusing holodeck which scattered our avatars. He followed us to the ruins where he created storms and grey-outs, and then wrought a tornado that blew trees and telephone poles crashing around us. He can be seen in the picture above conjuring up his next episode. (I wonder if it was he who killed Mike Marzio's horse?)

Fortunately no one got hurt and we all escaped to Webheads Headquarters at EduNation III (72, 36, 21). There the tour ended. But it was interesting, all aboard enjoyed it, and we must do it again sometime.

Vance is interviewed by Doris Molero

2009-05-31T04:05:00.009Z

On May 22 at the start of the recent Webheads in Action Online Convergence, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Doris Molero, who had requested an interview as a part of a project for her degree program. Doris was under close time constraints, but with WiAOC09 close on our heels, I was too. The constraints appeared so insurmountable that I suggested Doris conduct the interview as a session of WiAOC. She agreed and set up an event at http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/May22. It happened to be the second event in the 74 hour online conference, and it was recorded here: http://worldbridges.info/wiaoc09/audio/WiAOC09-May22-0200GMT.mp3 (link updated Aug 2009)

A minor hiccup however was that Doris had connectivity problems right at that time and did not appear for the interview. Jeff Lebow was there as were some stragglers from Doug Symington's EdTech brainstorm just ended. Afterwards Jeff remarked that I had done a good job at interviewing myself. I can only assume he was being complimentary.

Meanwhile, Doris sent me a pared-down version of her original 30 questions and on a car journey between Abu Dhabi and the dive spots on the east coast of the UAE I managed to address them in writing. Here then is the somewhat delayed interview between me and Doris Molero, a glimpse at how it might have gone on May 22 :-)

Doris: What’s your opinion about teaching English as a foreign language in the university?

Vance: It’s been a great career for me. Lots of travel opportunities and good vacations, pays the bills while allowing me to interact with a great community of online educators. I like working with language learners.

2. What do you think about teaching a second language with the help of the Internet and computers?

Language is about communication. For most people, there is no purpose to learning a language apart from a desire to communicate in it (not counting theoretical linguists who might wish to study a language for other purposes). Since this is most people's goal, it is awkward and inefficient to study a language in a context where communication is not done purposefully. By purposeful, I do not include exercises that a student might do on instructions of a teacher which put the student in communication only with the teacher. Communication with others in the class is also possible but I have been a language learner in classrooms where the teachers did not exploit this potential, dominated the class with student to teacher interaction, and spent class time on exercises with printed materials which were not at all communicative.

Properly used, the internet opens a world of communication to language learners. They can blog and get comments, they can collaborate with others worldwide, they can engage in live voice conversations, and do constructive language play with real people behind avatars in Second Life (just as a few examples). No student needs to study language in isolation any longer. Teachers who have developed skills in productive use of Web 2.0 can model use of appropriate tools with their students and put them in touch with language learners in collaborative projects. Teachers who reflect on the results of such projects report remarkable gains in motivation to write and hone ideas for peer critique. Most importantly language learning becomes FUN and meaningful for all concerned. Communication is clearly restored as the true purpose of learning the language in the first place.

3. How have your students changed compared to the ones you used to have when you first started teaching?

I started teaching in the mid 1970’s and everyone has changed. I would say that the most significant recent changes, apart from going from questioning the efficacy of using computers in language learning to general acceptance of technology in all aspects of life, have to do with the ubiquity of mobile technologies, especially with younger people including students down to the K-12 level, and the integration of social networking into transactions ranging from making purchases on Amazon and eBay through to so many people, especially students, congregating on Facebook and in other socially networked spaces. These developments are poised to make even more significant impacts on our profession. I have suggested that CALL is becoming an outmoded acronym. These days I encourage people to think SMALL (social media assisted language learning).

4. What does it take to be multiliterate? Are you multiliterate? Why do you think so?

Multiliterate means to be conversant with media as it develops in conjunction with technology. It means to be able to communicate appropriately in these media, that is to know what multimedia tools are available and how to use them, as well as to be able to search and access the communications of others in their various forms of technological enhancement. I teach courses in multiliteracies so I feel that I am moderately multiliterate myself and generally aware of the issues (see http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ for a last rendition of the course, and http://multiliteracies.ning.com/ for the Ning).

5. In your opinion, do you think that just using a textbook, a workbook and an audio program is enough to teach a second language at university level these days?

It could be enough depending on the motivation of the students to learn. I have met many people while traveling in foreign countries who had used such materials to achieve some competence in English and were grateful for the opportunity to meet a foreigner and have the chance to put their skills to use. However, as noted in question 2, the ability to learn a language well through communication with other learners and native speakers online increases the scope for language learning.

6. What do you do to teach the following skills: listening, reading, writing, critical thinking and speaking to your EFL students?

I taught EFL for 20 years but switched to computing and software development in 1995, so I can’t speak first hand about teaching EFL in the past decade. I have been working in teacher training since that time (online through webheads and other communities and networks) so I am aware of what others are doing. These people are blogging their experiences so my answer here would be to review their blogs and recorded experiences, but as the question relates to my personal experiences in EFL, I am not currently working specifically in that area.

7. What differences do you find between the traditional paper and pencil class and the class that integrated Web 2.0 tools?

These differences are those noted in my response to question 2.

8. What kind of text do you and your students use in your classes?

We use texts teaching computing written in-house by computing faculty.

9. How does participating in a community of learning help to learn more?

Peers in the community model the most productive behaviors to one another toward reaching the shared goals. They scaffold one another, support one another in collaborative projects, feed back to one another, provide encouragement, answer questions on a just-in-time basis, and provide a context for informal, social learning to take place. More importantly each ‘node’ in the network is connected with its own locus of other nodes, with the result that the knowledge contained in any one node is accessible throughout the connected networks to all the other nodes. In connectivist terms, knowledge can be defined not as what one possesses within one’s mind or the walls of one’s library, but in terms of ‘the pipes’ or how successfully one is able to nurture and access the nodes in the extended network. The knowledge contained in the network is the sum of its parts, and to be knowledgeable in multiliterate terms means to be able to incorporate this knowledge into one’s own Personal Learning Environment or Network.

10. How should we evaluate when we integrate web tools into the class?

This is a very good question, and my instinct is to say NOT how we evaluate traditional learning. To examine how we might evaluate alternatively, I refer to my answer in question 3, think SMALL. Techniques are evolving for measuring trust on the Internet. Examples are found in Google’s predominant algorithm for search, whereby trust is measured by calculating links from other trusted sites. E-bay, Amazon, and Couch Surfing all have trust systems set up whereby users rank each other according to expected performance. A system has been proposed for enhancing internet security whereby users might have a way of seeing who else has installed software that’s about to install on their machines as a means to helping them decide if they should authorize it (the information would come from tracking choices made by users as each made the choice individually). I think that these techniques could be adapted to pedagogical evaluation systems, whereby users were ranked on the quantity and quality of comments on their blog postings, for example, on measures relating to download and feedback on their podcasts, how viral their uploads to YouTube were, and other peer measures utilizing features of these so-called ‘trust’ systems.

11. What do you think about using project based approach as a learning tool to validate what has been learned in class?

Projects are the only valid thing to evaluate in a system described above. There would be little of this kind of feedback generated by user responses to a multiple choice test, these tests being designed solely for student-teacher interactions, nothing more. In a world where we are all connected to one another, peer evaluation, both by peers who knew and those who did not know the student in question, could become part of the evaluation matrix. Project based learning also lends itself to students' creating digital portfolios of inter-related artifacts which could be evaluated as yet another measure. These methods might produce a mindset whereby the answer to a question on history might not necessarily be 1492 (though a student could look that up if the exact date were required; as opposed to having memorized it) but something along the lines of, let’s see, Columbus was sent on a voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, who at about that time ejected the Moors from Spain, so this would have been toward the end of the 15^th century …

12. What do you think should be the role of the teacher that integrates web 2.0 tools into his or her classes?

I like what I hear from teachers who successfully integrate interactive whiteboards in their classes. What works, I understand, is for the teacher to move to the back of the room and guide the students in turn taking at the IWB. Similarly with Web 2.0 the paradigm of learning has to change. In writing that last sentence I changed what I had originally written to replace ‘teaching' with ‘learning’. The role of the teacher is to not teach, but to become a master learner who is simply the model for how everyone in that class learns. With regard to language teaching, the ‘teacher’ is a language informant in that the teacher ‘knows’ what is accepted as correct language, and the teacher can facilitate the learning process. But the idea that anyone can ‘teach’ a language is a spurious one beyond the most rudimentary levels. Language has to be learned; it can’t be taught. What we still call a teacher is actually someone who is more experienced in learning and who can model tricks and tips for students to apply to their own learning. This is where web 2. 0 fits perfectly with this conception of the role of guide on the side facilitator of learning in a classroom. Web 2.0 tools put control in the power of learners, or anyone who uses them. They enable users to communicate online, to record to online spaces, and to tag their artifacts so that others can find or stumble on them. They are ideal tools for constructivist, connectivist learning environments. The role of the teacher in such an environment is to introduce them to students, model appropriate uses, suggest or help learners conceive of ways the tools might be used in collaborative language development, and then step to the back of the room and let the learners get on with it.

13. What do you think should be added or changed in the EFL class in the university?

What is generally needed is for teachers steeped in traditional ways of learning, who have never had the new tools modeled for them, to become first aware of the tools available, and then to form communities where they can see and experience the tools modeled so that they can learn which ones are effective with each other. Only then will they be tentatively in a position to try some of the tools out on their own students.

The fact that this process is not a straightforward one is its biggest drawback. Some awareness of a number of fundamental paradigm shifts is required. I have elsewhere set out ten or 12 of these and many have been covered here (see http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/03/celebrating-25-years-of-call-forging.html). Essentially they revolved around a fundamental underpinning of multiliteracies, that the way that people communicate online is becoming less arbitrated and more populist. It comes down to how readily people can accept that people on the Internet will regulate one another, so that it becomes possible for example to produce an encyclopedia (for free!) that anyone can write on that is more comprehensive, more current, and arguably of better quality than a very expensive and ecologically unfriendly one produced through the tradition publishing process. Not until this essential concept is grasped, accepted, and understood, can one make sense of the rest of it.

So the people who need to be reached are those who have not yet grasped a functional conception of the socializing and interconnectivist forces at play in an appropriately configured learning network. This is where the concept of change agency becomes crucial. Teachers already attuned to the role of multiliteracies in 21^st century learning have crossed a rubicon and must build bridges to those still on the other side. This is difficult. Those on the left bank, as in the one left behind, are not convinced that there is anything better on the right bank, and think they are being talked down to when those on the right try and explain why this is the ‘right’ place to be. It makes little sense to someone who feels the left bank has been perfectly fine for their entire teaching careers to go to the trouble to move off that spot for something that might be just a passing fad.

There are still people whom I work with who tell me they will never blog, and wonder how anyone could be so self-absorbed. Many (sometimes the same people) will tell you that the blogs they’ve read are just nonsensical journals, not for serious readers. I came upon a post on a mailing list the other day that argued that we should carefully consider how we use computers in teaching because learning is social and computers are isolating. Clearly the author of that post is broadcasting ‘knowingly’ from the ‘left’ bank.

There is also an interesting bit of research that suggests that people who are incompetent are blithely unaware of how incompetent they are (not meaning to question anyone's competence in the present instance, concerning colleagues I don't even know - just that this is an interesting bit of research: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html).

But what I have just written is anathema to change agency. Successful change agents do not belittle the shortcomings of others or, more importantly, appear to (I didn’t mean to just then; I might have appeared to - anyway the incompetent could be me, or any reader of this blog, blissfully unaware of course :-). Change agents need to start by forming cooperative partnerships with peers who want to learn. The change that’s needed in teaching programs is that these partnerships need to be somehow encouraged.

Thank you to Doris Molero for giving me the opportunity to post this interview here and link it from WiAOC09. The tiny url for this post is http://tinyurl.com/090522molero

Countdown to 3rd bi-annual WiAOC May 22-24, 2009

2009-04-27T03:38:00.007Z

Webheads have been busy piling on the web artifacts for the upcoming 3rd biannual Webheads in Action Online (un)Convergence. The WiAOC site since 2005 has been http://wiaoc.org but links point to our current social network portals:

http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/
http://wiaoc09.pbwiki.com/
and the schedule of events at: http://wiaoc09.pbwiki.com/schedule
text chat: http://webheadsinaction.org/chat

Planning under way ...
From WiAOC planning session April 26, 2009 hosted by Jeff Lebow at Worldbridges on http://webheadsinaction.org/

Community pitching in ...
From Minhaaj http://www.archive.org/details/WiaocPromo, almost ready for prime time, needs a few additional keynote speakers added ...

LearnTrends in Earth Day April 22, 2009

2009-04-21T12:54:00.027Z

I needed a place to send people so I could explain what's going on here, and this was it. I was feeling like I had a lot of virtual balls in the air, like silicon sparklers being juggled in a holodeck in Second Life.

I agreed to participate in the LearnTrends conversation being sustained online for 24 hours April 21-22 by Jay Cross and friends. Jay is known for his Internet Time blog http://www.internettime.com/ and books/writings on social and informal learning. The event is based at the Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation Ning: http://learntrends.ning.com/page/april-2009-event or http://bit.ly/46G1Om. Jay said he wanted to feature webheads in this program so he gave us three hours, 1000 to 1300 GMT on April 22nd.
Meanwhile adjustments and tweaks were being made impacting plans I was making for use of this time, but when I saw that happening I managed to lock down 10:30 GMT to 11:30 GMT on the schedule here: http://learntrends.ning.com/page/april-2009-event.

The conversations were held in Elluminate: http://bit.ly/WPKGi. The idea was to stimulate conversations by pulling together voices, with a chorus joining in from around the world. It was hyped to be informal, no slides, or maybe just a few. One of Jay's ideas was to have a web tour up showing a Twitter feed aggregated on #learntrends. That could be F.U.N. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=@learntrends

The times I selected coincided with a second 24 hour conversation about Earth Day, being celebrated by the webcasters at Earthbridges all day April 22nd and streamed out on http://earthbridges.net/live. I managed to get Webheads down on the schedule here http://earthbridges.wikispaces.com/Earth+Day+2009 from 10:00 to noon GMT.

Meanwhile a third element was put in juggling motion when I informed student groups at Petroleum Institute where I work, that they could join in as part of their own Earthday celebrations. So a conversation with students at the PI about our environment has become a recorded part of the LearnTrends event, and was streamed worldwide live, as it happened.

And here's what was expected to happen ... this is what I wrote prior to the event, to help with planning ...

By 10:00 GMT I will go to a classroom at PI where I will likely be all alone at first, and and I will log on to Elluminate at http://bit.ly/WPKGi. There is no Skype at PI so I will be in the Elluminate chat and voice room, and in the chat room at http://earthbridges.net/live. I will also be checking Twitter, which you can follow at http://twitter.com/vances.

Jose Rodriguez and/or Doug Symington have agreed that at least one of them would be there to stream on http://earthbridges.net/live (thanks guys!! indefatigable!)

At 10:30 GMT, Sanja Bozinovic intends to bring 5 high school students (not sure from where in the world) to Elluminate.

At around 11:00 GMT some students from the PI might appear. We'll continue the conversation and stream. Michael Coghlan has also promised to be in the area.

Meanwhile in the real world, Dr. Nadia Al Hasani, director of the women's campus at Petroleum Institute dropped by to see what was going on and had an online conversation with Doris Molero, who showed her a social networking site she had created for engineering students in Venezuela. Of course, Dr. Nadia brought along a photographer:

The event was also mentioned afterward at the Petroleum Institute website. I'm not sure how long these links will remain valid, but for what they're worth:

At 11:30 we go to the next item in the program at LearnTrends, whose schedule is here: http://learntrends.ning.com/page/april-2009-event

I will continue as moderator of LearnTrends events until 13:00 GMT.

I'll report how it came out here. However it comes out, it should be F.U.N. All are welcome.

Recordings of the sessions from both LearnTrends and Earthcast09 will be linked from here when recordings are available (audio being edited, renderings forthcoming)

Earthbridges audio starts at minute 23 at this URL (I am told): http://samlab.com/earthcast09/earthcast09.unconf05_Vance23.mp3
LearnTrends audio is here http://learntrends.ning.com/page/april-2009-video-page - scroll down to "Earthday webcasters with Webhead Vance Stevens" or directly download from http://www.skillcasts.com/learntrends/LT14-webheads.mp4

Prensky on Interactive Whiteboards, should teachers be 'allowed' to use them?

2009-04-08T03:35:00.005Z

A comment I made on Twitter raised a small flurry of tweets recently. I had been watching the interview of Marc Prensky by Gavin Dudeney here: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/sessions/62/q-marc-prensky following Prensky's plenary at the 2009 IATEFL conference. I was multitasking at the time but I came alert when Prensky said that we shouldn't let teachers use interactive whiteboards, they should be the province of the students. Wishing to share the link to this interesting interview with my network (in only 140 characters :-), I tweeted:

#iatefl from Prensky interview: http://tinyurl.com/iatefl-p... - Teachers should NOT use interactive whiteboards, their students should!4:04 PM Apr 3rd from web

To which this reply appeared

carolrainbow@VanceS #iatefl IMHO An IWB being used well is an excellent teaching tool! Children should use as well but not have sole use :-)7:50 PM Apr 3rd from TweetDeck in reply to VanceS

To which I replied

@carolrainbow #iatefl I agree, but think value in Prensky's remark in reminding us to maximize active role of students in learning with IWBs9:15 AM Apr 4th from web

To which a flurry of tweeting followed:

So what did Prensky actually say? This took me back to the original interview at the URL above. Prensky was saying that pedagogy needs to change in order for technology to be effective. He pointed out that technology tends to hinder the sage on the stage, whereas it facilitates the guide on the side. Therefore, he thought we need to focus more on the pedagogy in order to bring technology into classrooms. As long as teaching is rooted in the old paradigms, then technology will make slow inroads, but once the teaching changes, then technology will start to appear quickly. As it is, he said, if you have a teacher in front of a class all on laptops, and the teacher isn't engaging the students via their laptops, then the students will all be on Facebook.

At time: 16:15 in the video ...
Gavin asked him how he saw interactive whiteboards, as a help or hindrance, because they tend to push people into a certain pedagogy which is teacher fronted ...

Prensky replied:
"Personally I don't think we should let the teachers use the interactive whiteboards. I'm not saying we shouldn't have them, but if we have them, they should be the province of the students. The students should use them, the students should present with them, the students should figure out the most engaging and important ways to use them." He went on to say (and keeping in mind the context of his remarks) until their pedagogy changes, teachers will use them in the old paradigm, like a blackboard (e.g. show pictures, show videos from YouTube, make a PowerPoint).

This got me thinking of another time I was multi-tasking on my feet, back in 1985, when I wandered into a plenary at the TESOL conference in New York city, just in time to hear Stephen Kraschen suggest to the thousands of listeners present in the huge hall that "teachers erase all their current language teaching software disks and use them instead for wordprocessing" (my memory was jogged by a Google search which led me to Richard Young's CALICO Journal article Vol 5, No. 3 (March 1988), Computer-Assisted Language Learning Conversations: Negotiating an Outcome, p.65: https://www.calico.org/a-380-ComputerAssisted%20Language%20Learning%20Conversations%20Negotiating%20an%20Outcome.html). As you can imagine, this remark was taken way too literally, with some jumping to the extreme conclusion that no CALL software was worth the mylar it was written on.

Kraschen has since been understood to have over-reached himself with his notions of comprehensible input, the idea of i+1, which was an excellent idea, and one that makes a lot of practical sense, but which was on examination found to have no actual research base (so?? it favorably guided the practice of quite a lot of teachers nevertheless!). Another such notion that had also got its author in difficulties was Chomsky's suggestion that there was a black box in our brains where language processing took place. Many autopsies later, when no such box could be found, this notion was raised by Chomsky's detractors, who had already carried the great man's ideas into transformational grammars and down essentially non-communicative garden paths.

Prensky too could fall victim to the great success of his notion of digital natives and digital immigrants. Some are now questioning whether people actually break down into such groups, leading Gavin to suggest in his interview that the native/immigrant distinction might be reaching its 'shelf-life'.

But here again, these are all marvelous notions, and whether or not they stand to scrutiny under close inspection, they all get us thinking. Whether they were literally correct or not is beside the point, I think. Prensky's role as a change agent is to move us all along the path of paradigm shift. For that to happen, for the pedagogy to change as he says it needs to, teachers have to change their practice, and for this to happen they have to reflect and internalize the many discreet shifts that will lead them toward some major revelation that invokes the change.

This then is one great affordance of our blog and Twitter network, a medium through which we can keep these ideas percolating, and move more and more of us over the chasm that will allow all teachers to become effective interactive whiteboard users, with fully engaged students.

Are you there yet? Are we there yet? What is holding us back? Let's think about it ...

Global and local visions: Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice (Denver TESOL 2009)

2009-04-05T15:28:00.016Z

This posting encapsulates my remarks at a colloquium entitled:
Global and local visions: Evolving communities of practice
Panelists: Vance Stevens, Suresh Canagarajah, Jane Hoelker, Yuko Goto-Butler, Takako Nishino, Perin Jusara, Golge Seferoglu, and Toni Hull, presented March 27 at the annual international in TESOL conference in Denver.

The abstract for the colloquium was:
Whether learning or teaching English in the EFL context, the model of Communities of Practice moves individuals and groups forward in their development. Examples of shared practices implemented in elementary, secondary and tertiary institutions as well as in programs of teacher professional development conducted on worldwide communication networks are discussed.

My contribution was entitled
"The Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice"

Abstract for my presentation:
In these times of globalization and worldwide communication networks, distributed communities of practice (e.g. any CoP that cannot rely on face-to-face meetings and interactions as its primary vehicle for connecting members) are becoming more common. The concept of distributed CoPs has been addressed by Etienne Wenger. This presentation discusses CoPs implemented for educational technology specialists, many particularly concerned with language learning, in ongoing teacher professional development, foremost through Webheads in Action and in various other communities and offshoots from these, such as TESOL-sponsored EVO (Electronic Village Online). How Wenger’s concept of CoPs has evolved after his encounter with the Webheads online will also be discussed.

In my talk I didn’t rehash a definition of communities of practice except to mention that they are most frequently understood, as defined by Etienne Wenger, to:

• promote knowledge of a domain
• revolve around a practice
• form spontaneously, voluntarily

Wenger further characterizes distributed CoPs as, among other things, having a particular space to interact in. Not many of Wenger’s writings are available online, but these include:

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice Learning as a social system. Retrieved April 22, 2005, from: http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
• Wenger, E. (2004a). Communities of practice: A brief introduction. Retrieved April 22, 2005 from: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm
• Wenger, E. (2004b). Cultivating communities of practice: A quick start-up guide. Retrieved April 22, 2005, from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/start-up_guide_PDF.pdf

The ostensible purpose of my talk was to explore where Webheads intersects with these characteristics of communities of practice.

Webheads in Action, http://webheads.info, formed as a 2002 session of EVO (TESOL sponsored 6-week courses given free each year via Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/). Webheads membership has since increased to hundreds of educators who engage in helping each other pursue lifelong, just-in-time, informal learning through experimentation in use of social-media and computer mediated communications tools. Among its accomplishments, the Webheads community has already mounted two free international online conferences, the Webheads in Action Online Convergences (WiAOC 2005 and 2007) with a third coming up this May 22-24, 2009 - see http://wiaoc.org and http://webheadsinaction.ning.com/

The question I addressed in my talk was, is Webheads a group, a community, or a network? In formulating my arguments I made a distinction between groups, communities, communities of practice, and networks, as illustrated on the diagrams in slides 6-10 in my embedded slide show: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-webheads-and-distributed-communities-of-practice

The Webheads And Distributed Communities Of Practice

View more presentations from vances.

Groups

A group is a gathering of people. It could be a mob or a friendly gathering at a pub. The impetus for its formation is chance or convenience; e.g. people walking near one another in a park, people who come together to observe a sporting event, or students who are grouped in furtherance of class logistics.

Downes makes further distinctions in a presentation anticipating my progression here of configurations from groups --> communities --> communities of practice --> and then to networks.

• From Stephen Downes’s slide show “Groups vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues” at http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/groups-vs-networks-the-class-struggle-continues;
• The slide cites his posting “Sudden Thoughts And Second Thoughts” from Stephen’s Web, September 21, 2006, http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=35839, where these points are contextualized.

Downes's slide show covers each of these dichotomies in more detail.

Communities

Communities have more cohesion and permanence than groups. A community could form around a place where people live, or other groupings might consider themselves communities as they develop social bonds and identity to distinguish themselves from groups.

When Webheads in Action was started in 2002 it coalesced around a Yahoo Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads. As people started to join the group they identified themselves as such until they started taking on characteristics that made them think of themselves more as a community than a mere group of teachers.

What would some of these characteristics be?

• Photographs and voice/webcam communications enable group members to see the human behind the text message and enhance bonds leading to a sense of community
• Not only helping one another’s practice by answering each other’s questions, but also showing evidence of caring, such as interest in personal vignettes, individual accomplishments and setbacks
• Developing and defining a group culture through various forms and modalities of communications

Communities of Practice

Shortly after its formation as an EVO session in 2002, participants in Webheads in Action were exploring their interactions and sense of cohesion in the framework of communities of practice, leading to an EVO session and two subsequent presentations at the 2003 TESOL conference examining the community in that light

• EVOnline workshop: Reflection through experience and experiment with a communities of practice online: http://vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/baltimore2003/copractice.html#workshop
• Colloquium: "Case study of a community of practice": http://vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/baltimore2003/copractice.html#colloquium

More rigorous examinations were conducted by several PhD candidates who sometimes joined Webheads in order to study our dynamics. Chris Johnson, who joined Webheads in order to study the community as a possible example of a distributed CoP, had Etienne Wenger on his doctoral committee. Johnson found that Webheads fit (all) nine characteristics unique to distributed CoPs except on one independent variable associated with “emergence with respect to boundary practices;” meaning, Webheads tended to neglect boundary members and expected them to bring knowledge into the community on their own.

Chris left some artifacts for us online here (and none of these three links work - Vance is writing Chris to see if there is a definitive link somewhere that can be shared):

• Johnson, Christopher. (2003). Annotated Bibliography: Web version. Communties of practice bibliography created for Webheads in Action EVOnline sessions, at http://sites.inka.de/manzanita/dissertation/biblio_COP.htm
• Johnson, Christopher. (2003). CoP Theory Overview. Retrieved February 12, 2004 from: http://sites.inka.de/manzanita/cop/
• Johnson, Christopher. (2005). Establishing an online community of practice for instructors of English as a foreign language. Unpublished dissertation, available for private distribution: http://tinyurl.com/cj-diss

Meanwhile Etienne Wenger agreed to be a keynote speaker at our 2007 WiAOC (Webheads in Action Online Convergence http://wiaoc.org). His keynote took the form of a conversation moderated by Susanne Nyrop. When Cristina Costa entered the conversation, Etienne asked her when she felt that she was a member of a CoP. Cristina replied that she realized this when her practice began to change. Etienne referred back to this later when, during the question period, I asked him whether his concept of CoPs had evolved after his encounter with the Webheads online. He said indeed it had. He said that the fact that Webheads met in so many spaces while clearly being a CoP was a revelation to him. He now realized he could relax his previous thinking on constraints on SPACE occupied by a distributed CoP.

Networks

Meanwhile I’ve moved in my own thinking beyond the CoP model, following on the work of Stephen Downes and George Siemens (whose writings on connectivism are cited in Downes, 2001-2008). Downes has written and presented much on the concept of diffusion of knowledge within distributed learning networks, and Siemens of course has long espoused the notion of connectivism, famously summarized as “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” Here, Siemens means that it is more important to nurture a system of connections between knowledgeable people (the pipe) than to be concerned with what these knowledgeable people know (the content within the pipe) since this content can be directed to anyone with appropriate connections with the pipe.

• Downes, S. 2001-2008. E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine, retrieved from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1
• Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Elearnspace, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Distributing knowledge is what communities and networks are all about. Downes has a simple illustration of what it means to ‘know’: Where’s Waldo? Once you know where Waldo is, you can’t not know. But these days it seems, there is too much information available, and it seems we need increasingly to get our minds around more of it in order to keep up with and ‘know’ how to perform competently in our work.

Wenger (2002:6) promotes the CoP model as an anecdote to the fact, as he puts it, that “increasing complexity of knowledge requires greater … collaboration; whereas … the half life of knowledge is getting shorter.” Dave Cormier suggests a rhizomatic model of learning to deal with increasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge. In this model, knowledge is seen as springing up wherever the tendrils, given its rhizomatic nature, are able to reach.

• Wenger, E. (2002). Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder. Cultivating communities of practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 284 pages.
• Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. Innovate: Journal of Online Education. http://innovateonline.info/?view=article&id=550

Downes often expresses himself in analogies, and one oft repeated is that no one knows how to get a plane from London to Paris. Engineers must design the plane, someone has to build it, pilots are trained to fly it, but they in turn need an infrastructure of crew working in the plane as crew and outside as mechanics, and all those who work in airports and weather and navigation, etc. No one can actually on his or her own take a plane full of passengers from one place to another; this requires a network and all the knowledge within that network.

What these notions, theories if you will, suggest is that connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a repository of knowledge. On a personal level we experience this when we turn to Google or Wikipedia to answer in minutes if not seconds a question that in the past might have sent us to a library, but more often than not would have remained unanswered due to the logistics involved.

Of even greater importance in this day and age, another available resource is direct (and indirect) contact with many people in one’s network, each possessing a reservoir of knowledge which contributes to the entire pool of knowledge residing in the network. This can be accessed through listservs or sometimes almost instantaneously through Twitter or RSS feeds, or instant messaging. Thus the knowledge possessed by any individual, or node, in the network, is the sum total of all aggregated knowledge within that network. It is to this that we ascribe the incredible power inherent in distributed learning networks which often comprise to some extent communities of practice.

• Downes, S. (2005). An Introduction to Connective Knowledge. Stephen’s Web, http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034
• Siemens, G. (2006). Knowing Knowledge. Ebook available via Creative Commons license: http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf

I conceive CoPs as bubbles overlapping in a Venn diagram. The total of all the bubbles would be the network as conceived in connectivist terms. The CoPs are themselves important to sharing of information within a community, but the fact that nodes within the CoP are connected with nodes outside the CoP in essence brings infinitely more knowledge into the community. I think it is something along these lines that Wenger is trying to accommodate in re-envisaging the notion of space in which distributed communities of practice work.

This has tremendous implications for professional development. Just before we held our colloquium, Jack Richards delivered a plenary address in which he touched on what teachers need to KNOW in order to practice effectively. He said research indicates that teachers often tend to revert to traditional methods rather than activate what they are exposed to in training curricula. Derick Wenmoth (also from NZ) mentioned similar research findings in his keynote at the K-12 Online Conference in 2008:

• Wenmoth, Derek. (2008). Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice. Keynote address given at the K12 Online Conference 2008, http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=181

This means that the key to success in keeping current is in expanding productive contacts within a network. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for the trainees.

The increasingly inadequate model of reliance on face-to-face exchange of knowledge is apparent in the way that many annual conferences are organized and structured. Many such gatherings do little to encourage connectivity for either presenters or participants. There was just recently a very interesting online conference, AACE's Spaces of Interaction: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/, which suggested that face to face conferences were falling ‘unacceptably’ short on utilizing networking potentials for participants.

This was acceptable in the past because participants who relied on having the opportunity to touch base with each other once a year traditionally might have only been able to exchange letters or emails during the intervening months between conferences. But the new dynamic suggests that connectivity where contacts only meet face to face falls far short of interacting with them in online environments as well. Fortunately there are many venues for doing just that, and for many practitioners these are taking on greater importance in professional development than interaction in face to face environments. At the very least, one could say that interaction in online spaces facilitates greater productivity when the interactants eventually do meet face to face.

The bottom line is that it does not hurt and most likely maximizes productivity to interact with colleagues as frequently as possible in online spaces, and this is where distributed communities of practice interacting with each other through greater networks is key to practitioners’ keeping current and confident in their level of competency at work.

Some means for doing keeping current are participation in:

• Social networks: Ning, TappedIn, EVO, WiAOC
• Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo
• Groups: YahooGroups and GoogleGroups
• Microblogging: Twitter, Plurk
• Instant messaging: Yahoo Messenger, Skype
• Blogging and podcasting: keeping currect via RSS
• Wikis: PBWiki, Wikispaces
• Aggregation: Pageflakes, Netvibes, Protopages

I finished my talk by asking which construct of knowledge distribution was more productive, communities or networks? I answered rhetorically that perhaps this was a matter of scale, where networks can handle an almost infinite number of participants. The evolution of Webheads is instructive. Seen as a community, members interact within the domain of practice. Networks imply more widespread, perhaps opportunistic, contacts, with looser characterization of domains and practices. So which is more productive? Given the spontaneous and voluntary nature of such constructs, the answer is ‘whatever works’ and therefore probably moot.

Update:
This article has been updated at the invitation of Jane Hoelker on behalf of the editors of the EFL IS Newsletter, who intend to publish a summary of the EFL Academic Session from Denver TESOL 2009. The article (October 2009) resides online at http://tinyurl.com/vance2009denver

Celebrating 25 years of CALL: Forging new pathways

2009-03-14T19:29:00.009Z

This posting regards my thoughts toward a session I am taking part in at the TESOL conference coming up in Denver. In this session I will be sharing a segment in a program with Roger Kenner and Deborah Healey, as indicated in the TESOL Advanced Program book http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/convention2009/docs/advanceprogram.pdf and here: http://colloqtesol09.pbwiki.com/.

Deborah and Roger are focusing on certain areas of paradigm shift tangential to ones I envisage. I have lately characterized how I see the shift over the past 25 years in ten aspects, shown on slide 33 here

http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences

These are spelled out more clearly near the top of this document http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddkc6v4f_163dkxh36d6

Here I suggest that educators must make at least these ten mind-shifts in order to be able to adapt to change in the 21st century

1. Pedagogy - from didactic TO constructivist
2. Networking - from isolated TO connectivist models; e.g. CoPs and distributed learning networks
3. Sharing - from copyright TO creative commons
4. Literacy – from print dominance TO communication that tends toward multiliteracies
5. Heuristics - from client/server TO peer to peer
6. Formality – from Trepidation, fear of being exposed as not knowing TO F.U.N. = encourage class to explore despite risk of Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense
7. Transfer – from lecture, sit/get TO modeling, demonstration
8. Directionality – from push TO pull e.g. RSS
9. Ownership – from proprietary TO open source
10. Classification – from taxonomy TO folksonomy

The above remarks were made in a talk given online at an online event put on by George Siemens et al: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/

This conference and much of what George organizes along these lines, and what Webheads attempt in http://wiaoc.org, are excellent examples and models of where I think these paradigm shifts are taking us.

So where I would be taking my 6-8 minute presentation would be to work from our early attempts to organize what we started back in 1983, doing the best we could in the paradigm available. For example I used to solicit articles for and cobble together an MS-DOS Newsletter and photocopy it at Sultan Qaboos University, where I worked, and send it out in department mail to a list of names I had collected, often by snail mail. These were the days where we would keep in a box in someone's house somewhere for 360 days a year all our disks of educational software which we lugged to each TESOL conference. Later we accumulated some of this on a CD that Deborah and Norm (right? or Elizabeth??) put together, and eventually stored on a server in Australia (who was the guy who hosted that?). Having to distribute our work on physical media and then post it entailed costs which got me in trouble at SQU when I felt the need to request compensation from recipients who needed an invoice so they could get money from petty cash from their institutes which I created and eventually got stung with accusations of commercialism, when all I and like-minded colleagues really wanted to do was share our stuff for free at no cost to me or to the recipient, which we can all easily do now that the paradigm has shifted.

So from our clumsy beginnings in CALL-IS with all the software fairs that ended in swap meets and hard copy newsletters and presentations at physical conferences which we sometimes managed to broadcast to the outside world (always the question, should we ask TESOL if we can do this? the edupunk answer, uughhh *bump foreheads!*) ... up through to EVO, which emerged through CALL-IS thinking and much effort over the past decade, and which I see as a model showing the right direction for us. Webheads has been a fixture in all but the first EVO session, and this is another model for interactions with one another, many participants in EVO being members of either and often both CALL-IS and Webheads. And when we model through any of these entities (EVO, CALL-IS, Webheads), we do so in such a way that we help anyone along who wants to follow the model.

This I think has always been what CALL-IS has intended and tried to do. It's people helping one another, since the days where as young people we would happily pitch in to all hours with no compensation beyond whatever support our workplaces provided in getting us to TESOL conferences in the first place.

Now we don't pitch in so obviously at annual conferences. I mean we do, but nothing as labor intensive as those who were not there cannot imagine (sleep deprivation but also commeradie). But the paradigm shift that I would like to focus on is the one which now allows us to treat our annual conferences not as The Cake but as a tasty layer of icing on a larger cake on which we sustain by ourselves throughout the year. That has always been what CALL-IS has intended to do, to provide people with a means to communicate and network not only at the annual conference but between conferences. We now have several models for doing this. To recapitulate, some of these which I have mentioned here are:

CALL-IS, which has always provided mechanisms for facilitating interpersonal interactions among members at conferences; e.g. the CALL Hospitality Room and after-hours gatherings, as well as for interacting during the year (newsletters, Moodles, sponsorship of EVO)
EVO (speaking of which) is an excellent model of sustained professional growth where procedures have been refined over the years for training new moderators in EVO culture and technique and for implementing quality control while involving as many as possible in free 6-week professional development seminars.
Webheads got its start in professional development as an EVO session (formerly it had been an EFL community focused on students). The growth of Webheads illustrates the distinction between groups, communities, and networks. Webheads started as a YahooGroup, and soon its participants were thinking of themselves as a community. But its members have branched out into so many spaces, and are drawn from so many, that it is fruitful to view Webheads as a circle on a Venn diagram that intersects with other circles which in turn intersect with each other, so that Webheads are obliquely connected to a huge network that is always feeding more knowledge into the community. One mechanism for doing this is Webheads in Action Online Convergence, a bi-annual free online conference whose third rendition is due to occur in May 2009 (http://wiaoc.org )
George Siemens has characterized this type of interaction as connectivism, whereby to paraphrase his words, the pipe is more important than its contents. By this he means to say that by configuring one's network so as to establish the right connections one can ensure that knowledge, or content, will flow through the pipe and be accessible as needed, when needed. George and others have implemented this concept through a series of free online conferences where everyone learns and benefits.

So, to get back to the question of where we have come in the past 25 years, and where we are headed, I have in all this time felt that CALL-IS has been helping us to come ever closer to achieving many personal and professional goals through proper utilization of technology in meeting these shared goals. Foremost among these has been to develop mechanisms to create climates in which personal and professional development are enhanced through interaction with sharing with empathetic peers. One major affordance of technology is where it facilitates communication, and facilitated communication is of prime importance both in bringing distributed communities together online AND as an important component in the practice of groups involved in language learning (the reason for CALL-IS formation in fact). Hence those who put these mechanisms in place 25 years ago shared a vision that we were embarking on a path that would prove its worth in time, despite many nay-sayers who did not share this vision and who saw no need to change tried and true ways of learning languages with infusions of technology whose great potential relatively few understood.

Today we find available a plethora of tools which help us to accomplish our goals both face to face and online for 365 days of the year. These tools allow those who see the educational potential inherent in web 2.0, blogging, wikis, Skype, webcasting, podcasting, YouTube, Twitter, Moodle, Facebook, the list goes on and on, to accomplish their goals almost apart from traditional structures such as face-to-face conferences and dues-collecting organizations. This is not to decry the importance of conferences such as the TESOL annual conferences nor of professional organizations such as TESOL. They play crucial roles in bringing together practitioners and making possible palpable connections, and TESOL plays behind the scenes roles in areas such as teacher benefits and professional standards.

However, much of what traditional publishers and face-to-face conferences offer and what professional organizations such as TESOL provide in the way of connectivism and networking is now available in substantial measure to practitioners for free at almost any time of the day or night, at greater convenience, and even in greater intensity (or less, it's up to the user) than what is possible through traditional entities who retain the baggage of logistics and expense for providing what people have until recently been willing to travel and pay for.

So my point is that traditional entities need to adapt, to shift with the sands of shifting paradigms so as not to be swallowed by the dunes. Those of us who have seen CALL-IS develop since the days when it was the most important means for many of us to flourish in our professional careers, for the most part would like to see TESOL and CALL-IS continue to be important fixtures in our professional lives. In fact, TESOL has often listened to CALL-IS advice (and sometimes not ;-) so one role of CALL-IS is to help TESOL adapt to these shifting paradigms in order that it retains its relevance to teachers of English to speakers of other languages throughout the world, recognizing that the most progressive of these practitioners are already sharing and organizing and networking constantly and spontaneously in productive ways that almost always circumvent any intrusion from any organizing body with a constitution, by-laws, and fee structure.

So how should TESOL and CALL-IS adapt? One way would be to capitalize on events such as EVO which attract people to TESOL without charging them money, giving them the impression that TESOL has something to offer and to share with no strings attached. Then if they want certification, let us say, they can avail themselves of certificate offerings available through TESOL for which there would be a charge. Another way would be to open conferences up to online participation. George Siemens says simply that it is "unacceptable" for conferences to not make allowances for people to network online in back channels with other conference participants and with the wider world not at the conference, by providing free wireless capability to all paid participants at a conference, and of course to presenters so they can model and demonstrate what they are talking about, and so the participants can try out and DO what the presenters are talking about at the conference.

For TESOL to get through THAT barrier either major hotels in the Western World are going to have to provide wireless connections throughout their facilities and stop charging exorbitant prices for them, or TESOL is going to have to stop using expensive hotels. For either of these things to happen, someone's business model has got to change. People are starting to realize that they don't need to pony up to other people's greed when this prevents them from accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, especially when they can do it better elsewhere, and for free.

The past quarter century has seen a group of people who had no other alternative take advantage of the connectivism offered by TESOL to come together and form a group which I think is one quite apart from other interest sections in TESOL. The next quarter century could see more of the same but I doubt it. This is my prediction: that CALL-IS will continue to exist a quarter century from now, but that

It might no longer be called CALL
It might be an entity apart from TESOL
TESOL will have moved to a means of interaction more inclusive of social media, or it might have ceased to exist
In the former case, TESOL will encourage and facilitate wider collaboration within subgroups such as CALL-IS within its Interest Section structure

Meanwhile, this just in over my Twitter network. Here's how a truly connected conference works. As I recall, Deborah has been involved in ISTE there in Eugene. ISTE's annual conference is NECC (correct me if I'm wrong here). Here's a URL for a blog posting that shows how a truly functional as opposed to dysfunctional conference should work with regard to networking:

http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/03/13/calling-all-twitter-users-going-to-necc-2009/

Here, Joe Corbett has set up a spreadsheet and embedded it in a blog post where those going to NECC can record their Twitter (and blog) addresses and can then follow each other at the conference. NECC has been Twitterfied for several years now, I think it was two years ago or three that NECC goers 'discovered' they could tweet throughout the conference and started using Twitter as the tool de force for networking there.

This happens only when there is connectivity available at the conference of course. NECC is a conference to watch to see how people connect with each other during the conference and with the outside world while they're at it. When the conference is in session, it is a truly international event with people following uStreams and other feeds from all over the world and interacting with the conference-goers. This makes NECC exciting. Participants are excited to go there. People all over the world are starting their build-up now and marking their calendars to spend some time online checking out what's going on in Washington DC June 28-July 1 2009 from wherever they happen to be online.

Twitter is used at TESOL but only effectively via iPhone. Do you recall that at our CALL-IS academic session last year, TESOL was able to get us an Internet connection only 15-20 minutes into our session? I had the Internet connected computer, went on to Twitter, and almost immediately received a tweet from Carla Arena via her cell phone from the audience. There should have been dozens of Twitterers in the audience operating from their wifi enabled laptops.

Afterthoughts
(Fine print for the record, I'm adding this perspective after the first three comments were posted)

It occurred to me as an afterthought to this post to refine further this perspective in light of the last 25 years and the next. It's probably hard for someone whose experience in this field is only in the past decade to appreciate what computer-based language practitioners were up against in 1983. Ours was a minority view, a small group of us, a couple dozen in Hawaii in 1982, a couple hundred in Toronto in 1983, and growing steadily thereafter, out of the whole membership of TESOL. We were constantly having to argue the case that computers were not only a way forward, but THE way forward. Those who saw the light were convinced that there was no going back on technology, but there were many in entrenched positions, peers and administrators, creating obstacles which disappeared only as people became gradually aware of the potential of computers, began routinely using computers themselves, and as computers started insinuating themselves significantly into day to day life, creating changes as fundamental as rendering almost extinct film cameras and VCRs, with impacts on education that were considered radical and revolutionary 25 years ago, but are simply taken for granted today. One dinosaur that didn't even EXIST 25 years ago was the fax machine, and now that too is headed for extinction.

This hindsight might help us in formulating a vision of our world 25 years from now, when it is understood a la Alan Toffler, in Future Shock, a book written almost 40 years ago, that change is accelerating as we zoom ahead, so that changes we imagine based on patterns unfolding over the past 25 years could conceivably happen in ten or 15.

Right now I think that we are essentially with social networking where we were with computers 25 years ago. Social networking implies being constantly connected. Increasing numbers of people are learning, and keeping themselves updated and informed, through utilization of many forms of social media. Many of these people are teachers and teacher-trainers, and they are inculcating these skills in a growing segment of a generation of young people. In other words, this is also a phenomenon that is not going to go away.

So my predictions with regard to TESOL and CALL-IS (while admittedly pure speculation and to be treated as such ;-) are based in a view of a world that was much different 25 years ago and will have changed again in the next 25 years, possibly acceleratedly more than in the past quarter century. I think that social networking will be as taken for granted by then as computers are today. I think that (free) Internet connectivity will be much easier to find and will be considered to be essential infrastructure, like TV or radio, or water, by then. Perhaps corporate hotels will have stopped placing significant financial blocks preventing connectivity and conferences such as this one, and institutions like TESOL will be able to connect their participants with each other and with the outside world in the course of evolution within the organization, without having to make internal changes.

But we are leaving the era where people feel that it is acceptable to pay big money to come to a conference where they are forced to leave their social network behind. David Warlick said essentially this in his 2008 K-12 Online keynote talk http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144, to wit that to cut kids off from their networks in schools (by filtering their networking tools) was an "insult" to them. David's description of his talk recapitulates what I have been trying to express with regard to teaching professionals: "Today, for the first time in decades (in generations of teachers), we are facing the challenge of changing our notions about teaching and learning to adapt to a rapidly changing world. We are struggling to rethink what it is to be educated, to reinvent the classroom, and redefine what it is to be a teacher and a student. There is much that has changed, and for much of it, we have responded to by attempting to ignore, filter, or to block it out."

I think that in the future people will do what they are learning to do through social networking, and that is to move into areas where they can accomplish their goals while remaining connected to their supportive and knowledgeable networks. People who are already doing this are finding that

they can learn from one another and from experts in their field throughout the year in ways that used to be possible only by physically attending major conferences
therefore annual conference with limited connectivity are of benefit primarily to people who don't otherwise constantly interact in communities of practice and distributed learning networks
UNLESS participants can leverage benefits of face-to-face attendance at major conferences with interaction with their wider networks

In this latter case such conferences can have great benefit to not only those at the conference, but to those in the learning networks of conference participants, who in turn learn from their online interactants when they attend their own face-to-face professional gatherings, and the circuit is reversed.

It follows that is only the latter kind of conferences that people will continue to pay to attend over the next 25 years. Institutions that don't cater to what they will find increasingly demanded will not fare well in this climate. Hopefully we as members of these institutions will be able to act effectively as change agents to bring about desired changes, as CALL-IS has to some extent been able to do within TESOL over the past 25 years.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/callis25years

Lifelong Learner Autonomy meets Electronic Village Online

2009-02-23T04:54:00.004Z

This article was prepared for an upcoming issue of the Learner Independence SIG Newsletter, of which this is an example: http://www.ilearn.internet-english.net/enl4.htm

The latest rendition of the Electronic Village Online (EVO 2009) was held this year in the six weeks between January 12 to February 22, 2009 <http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/>. This is the ninth consecutive year that these sessions have been held. Originally conceived as a kind of run-up to the annual TESOL convention, they are offered under the TESOL umbrella but are in fact a grass roots movement where educators volunteer their time to help others learn about each other's expertise. Participants don't have to be TESOL members, the courses are completely free, and they are an embodiment of the kind of program I had in mind for autonomous language teachers as put forward in Stevens (2007).

This year, session offerings included libraries for ESL students, teaching English through drama, using images, video, and Web 2.0 in materials development and lesson preparation, collaborative writing, digital storytelling, Internet for beginners, blogging, e-portfolios and digifolios, multiliteracies, and virtual worlds and language learning. This is a healthy menu for teachers wishing to upgrade skills in areas vital to their craft. Improvement is likely to be the outcome, as the sessions are mounted in a framework of comprehensive training of moderators and quality control throughout. Proposals for sessions are collected early, in time for aspiring moderators to go through a program of systematic introduction to EVO culture. The training ensures that all moderators actually develop materials for their sessions and get them online by the end of the year. Candidates having trouble meeting the benchmarks either shape up or wisely decide to defer their session until they truly have the time to meet the serious demands about to be made on them. When at the end of January the courses open to participants, they have been through a crucible and are therefore among the best and most accessible opportunities for professional development available at no cost to educators on this planet.

Although participant numbers tend to overwhelm moderators, I'm most surprised that relatively few avail themselves of this opportunity to upgrade their skills. It's possible that many are either unaware of them, or hesitant or too busy to try and adjust to an online environment. In fact, the session moderators and participants go out of their way to help each newcomer adapt to the new surroundings. Accordingly, the most interesting aspect to these courses is not to be found in the descriptions of the courses themselves. Earl Stevick said in one of his books that the quality of the learning that takes place when we focus our attention only on the items to be learned is different from (and probably inferior to) the quality of learning that is incidental to something else that we are trying to do (1982). I applaud David Warlick's concept of teachers being “master learners” (which he mentions in recent podcasts) and Stephen Downes's characterization of teaching being to model and to demonstrate, and learning being to practice and reflect (cited in Stevens 2007). In this respect, if teachers want to improve their craft, the way to do it is to engage in a cycle of teaching and learning with practitioners who model and demonstrate AND practice and reflect, because in reality, we are all at once teachers and learners. And THIS is what these sessions actually inculcate, how to interact socially online with people you've never actually met and in the process learn like you've never learned before. But in order to do this for the first time, you have to have an open mind and be willing to ACT on your potential as an autonomous learner.

Suzanne and Ron Scollon suggested that interactions mediated by computers tend to be patterned not as a conduit but more like a berry bush (1982). When that was written, the dominant metaphor in education and training was the conduit, and many trainers still operate under that premise. EVO models a berry bush approach to learning through technology, where users are presented with choices and encouraged to select the most appetizing ones, rather than expect to be taught stepwise, and feel they are behind if they missed the first few lessons. Teachers seeking to both be and coach autonomous learners would do well to become involved with these sessions next year. Participants emerging from them often credit EVO with having brought about true change in their approach to personal and learner autonomy.

References

Scollon, Suzanne & Ron Scollon. 1982. RUN TRILOGY: Can Tommy Read? Paper presented at the symposium Children's response to a literate environment: literacy before schooling, University of Victoria, October 9, 1982.

Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) . Available: http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf

Stevick, E. 1982. Teaching and learning languages. New York: Cambridge University Press.

SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences

2009-02-23T02:57:00.001Z

Feb 20, 2009 I gave a talk entitled "After a decade of inroads, SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences" at AACE's Spaces of Interaction: An online conversation on improving traditional conferences. http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/ - Speaker schedule: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/speakers/ - George Siemens's 4 min. introduction to the event: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/intro/player.html - Ning http://aacecommunity.ning.com/ for conversation and brainstorming before, during, and after the presentations.

My abstract: The presenter has been a long-time advocate and agitator for broadcasting online both into and out of on-site professional development events and conferences. The presenter describes inroads made during the past decade from 1999 to the present in making conferences accessible to many more than just their physically present delegates. Having debunked the myth that if conferences were open to online access on-site attendance would drop off, a case is made for the opposite scenario: that broadening channels for conversation at conference venues is a win-win situation in which everyone benefits, and conferences where these channels are blocked are the dinosaurs doomed to extinction.

You can follow the draft as it develops at http://tinyurl.com/aace-vance
The slides are posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences
The presentation was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences

View more presentations from vances. (tags: multiliteracies webheadsinaction)

Twitter: What's in it for education?

2008-11-01T15:39:00.006Z

I'm responding to another post today, this one: "Actually, I'm still a bit confused as to the educational uses of twitter/twemes, etc. Any useful tutorials you could suggest?"

Ok, Twemes is a mashup that aggregates tweets around a #hashtag. The catch is only that those tweeting have to put the #hashtag in their post somewhere. But if you are microblogging to a group, or microblogging something of interest to a group, then it's useful if your group has established early on that they will be following Twemes, so people have in the back of their minds that they can reach the group by tweeting and embedding the #hashtag in their post, and then anyone can go to the Twemes site and find all the posts to Twitter (tweets) containing that #hashtag. Another advantage to this system is that you don't have to be on Twitter to see the Twemes. You can see whatever has been #hashtagged simply by visiting http://twemes.com.

The more interesting question is why should educators use Twitter in the first place. For some time I've been using 'twitter' as a tag in my Delicious: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, so I had a look at the almost 100 links I've got stashed there and pulled out the ones most pertinent to education. Here they are:

If you want an educator's perspective on Twitter from the get-go, have a look at http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/twitter-guide/. If you want a more specific example of how Twitter helped one teacher, http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/767. There's also the inevitable Commoncraft explanation of Twitter: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

My personal awakening with regard to Twitter was when I heard Jeff Utecht's presentation at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference. Jeff solicited help from his Twitter network when he started recording his presentation, and when help arrived I was able to understand how such a network works and how it would be useful to ME. You can listen and see if it strikes the same chord in you: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205

I'm sure I came on this next one through Twitter. The author notes that SHE came on this article through Twitter and points to another article, but you can read hers first and then go there. The point I'm making is that none of us in our distributed learning network would likely have known about this article had we not been on Twitter, so this is an example of how Twitter put the network on to something that we would not have found out about otherwise. Here's the microblog "review" post: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/02/twitter-in-academics-this-prof-shows.html and here's the article about using Twitter in academia: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
This work was also discussed in SMiELT at http://dekita.org/smielt/forum/groups/microblogging/microblogging, and yet another writer has reviewed this work here: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2699 so this one made a big splash when it touched down.

If in further doubt, entertain yourself with this ditty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYP-wBaqQAI

Screencasting via UTipU

2008-10-22T12:25:00.004Z

I created my first UTipU video today. Thanks Nellie for the good tip, worked very well!

Voila:

I wanted to see the button that can be generated. That's it above, not that impressive. I wish it could say what it was. In any event, the video, about creating animations in PowerPoint (now I'll bet you REALLY wanna watch it !! ;-) is here: http://www.utipu.com/app/tip/id/4712/. That link offers you a download (free, and well worth the bandwidth).

Famous Last Wordles

2008-10-21T04:26:00.003Z

I've been meaning to do this for some time. It's a Worldle tag cloud from my Delicious feed:

Worldle is at http://wordle.net/create
My Delicious feed: http://delicious.com/vancestevens

Stop presses! This just in ...

2008-10-10T04:44:00.007Z

VANCE STEVENS has addressed at a distance delegates at a conference in Rasht, Iran. Originally planning to travel in person to the conference, Vance adapted a workshop which was never given in Sudan with intent to give it at the 6th International TELLSI Conference held at Guilan University on October 8 & 9, 2008 <tinyurl.com/web20iran>.

Until it became clear that permission to apply for a visa would not be granted by the Iran Foreign Ministry, Vance was listed in the conference program to deliver a workshop Thursday afternoon, just before the closing ceremonies <tinyurl.com/tellsi2008>.

Thanks to the efforts of MORTEZA BARIN, who was able to raise a wireless connection at the appointed time from the conference site, Vance was able to deliver his presentation from his office in UAE using a version of Elluminate provided Webheads by Learning Times. The presentation was recorded and may be viewed at tinyurl.com/uae2iran.

Links to URLs are

Portal for Web 2.0 workshop: http://tinyurl.com/web20iran
TELLSI conference program: http://tinyurl.com/tellsi2008
Recorded presentation on Elluminate: http://tinyurl.com/uae2iran

Clipping courtesy of http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

Morteza's Comment:

Morteza has been trying to post this comment from Iran but he gets a blank page when he clicks on Comments and tries to post. He can read the comments already there but can't post from where he is in Iran. He sent me this and asked me to put it here:

A Dream which changed into a Reality
I was very disappointed and very worry about the tools and amount of cooperation for having a live conference at the main time according to the conference time. After two days going here and there and speaking with conference organizers finally i found a wireless internet connection the Conference main Hall. And changed our place with another person who wanted to have a presentation in that place. I was full of stress and my blood pressure went up I thought I was burning in the fire but everything changed and first connection with Vance showed me there a way to do it. At that time I asked someone to go invite Dr.Susan Marandi to come to the main Hall. But She was invited to meeting for discussing about TELLSI.I asked God to help me and
succeed.

Connectivism: Too much Noise?

2008-09-13T03:43:00.018Z

George Siemens commented in the Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge Moodle this morning http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=241#3625 on "how structure influences the ability for students to learn. Too much noise and learners are overwhelmed. Too much order and learners are not challenged. Some ambiguity in the learning process permits room for exploration and creativity." Noting that the course itself was 'traditionally' structured, he said "it's the conversation that's more chaotic...does that detract from the learning experience?"

My reply

We often hear that the goal of learning is to prepare a learner for a real-life experience of some sort. As a language teacher and learner, I can think of sitting in classes where the teacher tried to reduce the whole of the language into an ordered subset (here, learn these conjugations, that's what the test will be on). Later you find you were not prepared for the real world. I would say, too little noise, too little challenge definitely, but also too little emulation of what the real world is like. In fact, ambiguity is rampant and managing work and learning tasks involves filtering and reduction. If the work of filtering is done for you then the opportunity to learn is reduced, not only of the knowledge to be acquired, but of the heuristics to be applied in the real world. I think field dependence and independence describes how comfortable individuals are with coping with noise, but I would say it is a necessary part of the learning process.

Connectivism and noise in real life

Writing that was almost the first thing I did over coffee this morning. It's Saturday in the UAE, a day off, and though I'm not on the east coast diving, I still woke up at six thinking about how much I had to do (noise in my head) and switched on the computer. Do I then systematically work through my task list? No, that would be too structured and would ignore the wealth of connectivist activity (noise and clamor) that had accumulated in email and on Twitter and Google Reader while I slept, and which in fact impacts very much how I carry out the tasks I choose to do on my day off. Reflecting on what I just said I see that if I did not connect with my network today then I would be doing my work as if it were yesterday and I might be seriously out of date (as in 'that's sooo yesterday' ... on the other hand I might actually get some work done ;-) So perhaps touching base with the network is succumbing to the siren call of all that noise, and distracting me into procrastination. I'm not the first to have observed that this might be the case. So I decided rather than discipline myself into efficiency (after all, it's my day off) I would ADD to the noise (with this blog post) and try and document some of that noise and in the process see how connectivism fits into my workflow (or work stoppage, as the case may be).

Now where was I (sorry got up to make coffee, glance at morning papers, another part of my distributed learning network). Oh yes, how many windows are open on my computer? Here's one with an email I wrote but didn't send. Why not? Perhaps the answer will be in something I was looking up in another window (clicking, searching).

Scrolling through windows I come on Twitter. Let's see what the latest is there. That window has lots of tabs open because when I click on what people in my Twitter network suggest I check out, each item opens in a new tab. Twitter is very convenient in this respect. You can click on a tweet, the item appears in its new window, and when you click on the Twitter tab you're back at exactly where you left off. I like to keep Twitter running because it's the epitome of connectivism and connectivist knowledge. And noise. There's a lot of noise in Twitter, but never more than 140 characters of noise, so the noise is almost a whisper. Yet the pearls of wisdom shine there. I've learned a lot through Twitter, not only about things I can use in my practice, but also about how networks and the people who comprise the nodes in them work (and play, and interact both frivolously and seriously, and also that both are important; that you're not your best at work without taking time for play, and visa versa).

So Twitter is a big part of my day-to-day (hour-to-hour? minute-to-minute? nanosecond-to-nanosecond?) connectivist tools and influences, and one of the elixers I feel I need so that I can keep my work up to (today's) date. Email is another, obviously. I follow a couple of really good professional mailing lists. One of them is Learningwithcomputers, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/, an offshoot of Webheads that is active and well moderated in a way that Webheads isn't. Webheads is the other list, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/, and the flip side of the coin. There's a lot of noise in both places, but people keep coming back to and swear by Webheads. And they've been doing that for ten years now. In fact, Webheads is ten years old today: http://webheads10years.wikispaces.com/, which is something I should mention on Twitter shortly (assuming I dare put off doing my real work for just a little while longer; oh, what the heck, the whole morning's gone already!)

Now it's pretty amazing that a group, which started as an eGroup before it was a YahooGroup, and which we then came to look on as a community of practice, and which we now see as part of an even larger distributed learning network, can grow and remain not just cohesive but effective and inspiring, for an entire decade. There may be many other groups and communities and networks in play at the moment, one of the most impressive being the one that has jelled around the Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge seminars, yet none have stood the test of time as have Webheads. This is really interesting because Webheads has in all that time been essentially leaderless. It's been a mob phenomenon, as Claire Siskin once said, refreshingly without any one person pushing an agenda. It's been a truly co-operative venture, which has sustained itself on the learning that each individual achieves through working within the network. And playing also, not just working.

So to complete this post, I was going to try and document all the stepping in and out of windows I've been doing this morning as I sit alone at my computer while remaining incessantly in touch with my network. Speaking of which, stop presses! Miguel Guhlin just twittered about TipCam free screen recorder (for Windows) that uploads to YouTube! How cool is that? And Jeff Utecht twitters to say he is planning to podcast every presentation at the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai http://learning2cn.ning.com/ so that's another network we can avidly follow while we're engaged in CCK08, as we get our proposals in for EVO http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/CfP which starts rolling now through February, and I'd promised to announce the next Webheads in Action Online Convergence http://wiaoc.org today, on the tenth anniversary of Webheads. All this assuming I can skim off time from the demands of 'real' work, the kind that pays the bills and sustains my DSL pipe from my home and workplace to the network where my 'real' work gets done (now which is the 'real' work; will the 'real' Slim Shady please stand up?)

Whoa!! too much networking. Stop the noise, I wanna get OFF! Maybe I should go for a jog (hang on, first gotta download the latests podcasts from http://edtechtalk.com/ so I can stay connected via my iRiver ... What else would I do with my brain while exercising?? ... )

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/4oasm9

Connectivism Oversimplified

2008-09-12T06:43:00.005Z

It must be the start of the school year. You can tell because I haven't blogged in a while. Meanwhile the super-course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge being facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes has started in the vicinity of http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/ as well as a few thousand other online spaces. One of them is a Moodle where the thread Skeptic has gained a following (you'll have to log in to access the thread http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=473). A devil's advocate has healthily questioned whether reading thousands of emails of introductory nature has been worthwhile, is this then what is meant by connectivist knowledge, and therefore does the theory of connectivism have any substance or is the emperor being exposed to be wearing no clothes. Along with dozens of others, I was drawn into responding as follows. I thought I'd post my comment here so as to have SOMEthing to say in my blog, which I can then tag CCK08 and see if it surfaces somewhere.

My post ...
Trying to couch my thoughts in some kind of parameter I guess I'll start with process and product. The desired product is to get some pearls from the discussion but to attain that you've got to go through the process of trolling a lot of seabed. Put more palatably, in order to learn from someone, you've got to get to know the person and establish what each of you wants to learn from one another. Kind of hard when there are almost 2000 people who've suddenly landed in an online space, but let's negate that and say that these 2000 people had no contact whatsoever with one another. Clearly in that case they would learn nothing (from one another). It seems to me that what connectivism describes is how important it is that the connections be made in the first place and from that, assuming these are intelligent people with something to contribute to the discussion, someone's gonna learn somethin'.

It's up to each of us to decide how much energy to devote to this means of learning as opposed to switching off the computer and reading a good book, say. But to me it's not just whether each message contains some information I can use, what's of value is to see how the organism flows in synch, how pearls in the mix might be aggregated and made to surface. And of course to reflect on what's happening.

I'm not sure this posting will help YOU to understand what you are gaining from this course but writing it has helped ME to couch what I might learn in my own personal framework, and if we juxtapose a lot of such frameworks, what would we have? A scaffold??

CALL Consultancy

2008-08-26T03:29:00.003Z

It's past time for another blog post (school just started, 5 classes, busy!). I'll make one here from a recent email. It's in reply to someone here in the UAE who asked me if I could make a proposal for a modest computer-based language lab. His company is involved with vocational training of national oil company employees and these companies like to buy a 'package' that they can build to spec and then plug their students into. I used to do this kind of work when I worked for the Military Language Institute here in Abu Dhabi, and we were frequently invited to scout remote locations and propose computer-based facilities for satellite clones of what we had done at the MLI. My feeling at the time was that what we had done in our context was to put tools in the hands of the knowledgeable practitioners we had with us at the MLI in Abu Dhabi, but that if you grafted the same thing onto another location minus the skilled practitioners, you were unlikely to achieve the same results. Not only that but our proposals were frequently warped and sidetracked by the commanders at the bases who had their own ideas of what students should be doing for language training, and these ideas would be best served by purchasing shrink-wrapped software and inflicting that on students, rather than encouraging teachers and students to flourish in the constructivist learning environments we had in mind.

It's been a while since I've been involved in such projects, but the following is in reply to someone who requested that I submit a proposal for such a language learning facility. He was asking that this proposal be comparable to that submitted by a well-known vendor of educational software in the UAE:

"I've worked a lot with [that vendor]. They are good people. Competent too. But they are not teachers. They can sell you a product and support it and display decent command of that product, but they can't really advise you on how to use the product, and in this situation the product you buy might not really be what you had in mind, or what some teacher you've yet to hire has in mind, to accomplish what you had in mind when you bought it.

"I don't sell products commercially. My expertise is as a consultant. I think I know how people learn languages and I know what tools exist online to support my view of how people learn languages, and as most of these are free, I'm surprised when people go for what commercial vendors have to offer without examining their underlying premises. I think this is often through some basic misunderstanding of what is needed and what is available, and such misconceptions can usually be traced to the person in charge who has the money and who is hiring the likes of us to find the products that can be bought that will support what might under fine or perhaps even rough focus be a bogus view of language learning.

"I think it is essential to define what you think the students should be doing in your lab. That's what I might help with, but it would not be to prescribe, but to discuss with the stakeholders what their view is and to try and apprise them of the most current thinking on the topic, and maybe put them in touch with current thinkers. There are several communities of tech savvy educators who are in perpetual discourse on this topic. If I were to have input on this process think it would be to put your practitioners in touch with this community, through its blogs, podcasts, live webcasts, presentations, and seminars etc and get some dialog going as to what you want the students to do. Otherwise THAT crucial aspect is driven by the vendors, which will sidetrack you until someone comes along and sees what you have in hand, and figures out how THAT can be used to instantiate a viable view of language learners and how your students can best learn via technology."

So that's my thought for today. Any other thoughts out there you'd like to share in comments to this post?

Trial by Twitter

2008-06-27T17:54:00.017Z

This article was prepared in preparation for publication in the On the Internet column in the June 2008 issue of the TESL-EJ (http://tesl-ej.org). If wishing to cite anything from here, please reference:

Stevens, Vance. (2008). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year's most viral microblogging platform. TESL-EJ, Volume 12, Number 1:http://tesl-ej.org/ej45/int.html

A draft version appears here: http://tinyurl.com/3hqn9e. The TinyURL for this post is http://tinyurl.com/4j9zy9.

When I decided to write this article, Twitter was riding the crest of a wave sweeping the microblogosphere. Nevermind that till Twitter's release in 2006 there hadn't even been a microblogosphere. But this Internet niche has proven durable, compelling, mildly addictive even, and integral to the workflow of the most ostentatiously connected educators and knowledge workers. Twitter was an idea that converged with a need few even knew existed. Still today, many are saying "Who needs it? Why?" Others are saying "WE need it, bring it
back!!"

Microblogging

What is Twitter? According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter (as it appeared June 25, 2008): "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application."

For the more graphically oriented, the Commoncraft series by Lee and Sachi LeFever includes a video explaining "Twitter in Plain English": http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o&NR=1. Twitter was rated number 19 on The PC World post "The 100 Best Products of 2008," edited by Mark Sullivan, May 26, 2008
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146161-page,12-c,electronics/article.html#.

That in a nutshell is the story of Twitter. Now to fill in some details: Twitter is currently (in this present nanosecond) the most popular of the genre of 'microblogging' tools that emulate SMS messaging but fall short of blogging by whatever you can say in a blog beyond a very short text message of 140 characters (the maximum permissible length of an SMS text message when sending 8 bit data). Coincidentally this happens to be a text-length that encourages brief and succinct responses to the question, "What are you doing right now?"

But if that's as far as you've got with Twitter you're a long way from fully appreciating it. In fact, as with many other milestones in our lives, Twitter's aficionados can most likely recall the moment when they 'finally got' Twitter -- and many have documented these moments in a wiki set up by Alan Levine here: http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/TwitterCycle .

'Getting' Twitter

I 'finally got' Twitter when I heard Jeff Utecht's presentation entitled “Online Professional Development,” podcast as part of the 2007 K-12 online conference: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205. Jeff recorded his presentation as a description of what he was doing at his computer in Shanghai while walking us through how he was using Skype and other social networking tools to connect with his professional network from there. So he was crafting his presentation as a live Skypecast, and he mentioned that he had just put a message out on Twitter inviting anyone online to Skype-in and discuss with him how they were using these tools themselves. A few minutes later, he had a bite, as someone responded to his tweet and spontaneously joined him in Skype. The presentation then became a conversation which illustrated how Jeff's network functioned in connecting him with other educators to further each other's professional development through taking advantage of such opportunities to learn from one another. That was when I decided to start using Twitter myself.

As a further illustration of how Twitter contributes to the conversational aspects of professional development, as I am writing this (everything in Twitter happens 'now') there has just appeared a tweet from Cristina Costa where she points her network to some reflections on her experiences with Twitter. In her posting "Are you twittering this?" on the Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning blog, http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/06/are-you-twittering-this, Cris says she at first "put twitter in my have-an-account-but-not-using-it-tool shelf. And it remained there for a while until Carla Arena and the Blogging 4 Educators team spiced up my curiosity about it once again. They were twittering and I started following them. I was fascinated by the amount of relevant information, bits of personal insights and also some trivial tweets that were arriving at my desktop in a twinkling of an eye. It was fun and most times relevant. I started seeing the point of it."

Another illustration of 'finally getting' Twitter comes from a post in the blog GNUosphere (http://gnuosphere.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/questioning-twitter/, no author mentioned) where the blogger questions the value of Twitter. The post has since attracted over two dozen comments, each of which addresses some aspect of what it means to 'get' Twitter. The post was of course "twittered" to attract so much attention. Here are some sample comments:

I think the effective part of Twitter is the immediate feedback when you have a question or comment that you need to “get out there”. You know it will be seen by your followers and may get you the precise answer within seconds. I have been able to pick up many valuable resources as well as collaborate with teachers who have similar interests.

I find Twitter to be more of an interactive conversation than blogging. When I blog and get comments, it is generally just a conversation amongst a few people. On the other hand, on Twitter, the conversation group seems to be in the hundreds.

I've wondered about the value of Twitter too, but I'm becoming a believer. I've picked up several things of value, not the least of which has been keeping in closer touch with the flow of thought among several close friends. I really do like the community feel of it.

Well Twitter led me to your question, so it must have some value. Through Twitter I have made connections that go beyond reading and commenting on blogs. I've found new tools, jumped into presentations and conversations on UStream that I would have missed had I only heard about it after a blog post, and had some fun too.

The manner in which information is shared transcends the blogosphere. The information shared is instant in access, shared on a more personal level, and often in response to a request. I do not find myself feeling connected with blog authors, on Twitter however, the unique conversation aspect creates a level of connectivity that is lacking in blogs.

Connectivism and the network: The crucial factor

To 'get' Twitter, you have to have your finger on the pulse of what is pumping lifeblood through the Internet, and that is the people on it and how they come together, connect, and relate to one another in virtual learning networks (for seminal explanations of connectivism see George Siemens's reading list for his upcoming course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/connectivism/?page_id=13; the course is free, and you can find out more by following gsiemens on Twitter).

I threw in the word learning just now to keep this article on the topic of this journal, but in fact the concept behind Twitter is applicable to almost any kind of virtual network. When people say what they are doing right now they might be feeding the baby or doing laundry, or more interestingly, "Just landed in Bangkok, hey the wireless works." Now let's put the word learning back in, and suppose that people in your network understand that there might be a low tolerance for things vacuous, and through their postings they genuinely seek to inform and engage one another. Then the postings might be, "See Flickr photos from a tour of Jokaydia," (e.g. http://flickr.com/groups/jokaydia/) or "Webcasting live right now on the Worldbridges network, http://edtechtalk.com," or "Reading a great new article by Marc Prensky" (e.g. Young Minds, Fast Times: The Twenty-First-Century Digital Learner - How tech-obsessed iKids would improve our schools, from the June 2008 issue of Edutopia, http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-digital-learner-technology-2008; announced through 'tweets' almost the moment it appeared).

Now suppose when you log on to Twitter you have a page full of postings like that staring back at you. Suppose you have cultivated a network of professional colleagues who reliably feed you URLs you might want to check out, and you've weeded out those who dwell on sagas in the laundromat. Let's further suppose that you might actually not mind hearing that someone whose writings you respect regularly goes online from the laundromat, or that someone else has an affinity for the brewer's art and intersperses a litany of pointers to interesting blog postings with mentions of tasting this or that amber fluid. One person I follow travels in west Texas on some tech-related work, the nature of which I haven't quite inferred, and tweets occasionally that he is in this bar or that restaurant, and implicitly invites anyone who is in the neighborhood to pop by and carry on the conversation over refreshments. I wonder if he gets any takers (and if so, I assume they would be like-minded people interested in the technology he blogs about), but that's not the point. What we're talking about here is just-in-time informal learning, social networking, low affective filters, a playground for knowledge workers where you can "follow" almost anyone you choose and enjoy his or her 140 character musings, often with a provocative URL to explore, from time to time, day to day, and even minute to minute. These gems of genuine interest are lodged in a matrix of emerging personalities that are themselves interesting. The result is an engaging mix of personality and professionalism, what Clive Thompson (2007) refers to in "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense" (Wired Magazine, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson).

One of the most compelling aspects of this kind of connectivity is the immediacy. Once a network is established then people gradually get to know one another on it. They start to converse, to respond to and support one another. If I see on Twitter that someone has just begun streaming a presentation on http://www.ustream.tv/, and if I have a moment to learn something new right then (and the most successful users of this kind of networking are able to multitask or briefly postpone whatever else they are doing in order to avail themselves of such moments) then I will check out what's happening, and I seldom regret such decisions. I'll learn a new concept or try out a new tool, or I'll make a new contact. Working in this way doors will open to other doors I didn't know existed. After a while a lot of doors are open and I begin to feel more familiar with my virtual surroundings. On the flip side, productivity can suffer if one does not appropriately balance the lure of the constant feed-stream with the discipline to address tasks requiring focus. Or does it? Perhaps heightened productivity depends on taking time for such reflection and percolation of information, ideas, and insights.

From Kathy Sierra's post from March 16, 2007, "Is Twitter TOO good?" in her blog Creating Passionate Users,
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html

Kathy's whimsy prompted Alan Levine to created the knockoff graphic below in his posting "SPLJ 2.0" in his CogDogBlog April 26th, 2007, at: http://cogdogblog.com/2007/04/26/splj-20/

My own habit of using Twitter is to bring it up over coffee each morning and review the bustle in the Twittersphere while I was asleep. I soon have multiple tabs open on my browser where I have followed the most interesting links, and I then start tagging these at http://del.icio.us/vancestevens according to my own folksonomy (an idiosonomy?), which might in turn lead me to others who have tagged these sites as well. These links suggested by people in my distributed learning network contribute significantly to my professional development and to keeping me informed and abreast of my field. I can continue my learning by listening to podcasts in my car on my way to work in the morning, often suggested to me by people I follow in my Twitter network, and often recorded by the very people whose tweets I've been following over morning coffee.

The true value of Twitter is in this network. There are other microblogging platforms such as Jaiku <http://jaiku.com/>, Pownce <http://pownce.com/>, Plurk <http://www.plurk.com/>, and even Tumblr <http://www.tumblr.com/>. Tumblr is a different kind of microblogging platform to the others, which allows users to post (or microblog) a variety of media on the fly. For more on Tumblr (from the horse's mouth) there's an interview at EdTechTalk between Paul Allison and Tumblr founder David Karp, here: http://edtechtalk.com/node/3023. Plurk is more similar in concept to Twitter, though as with Tumblr, it lets you easily incorporate media in posts. It has an intriguing interface, lets you quickly add Plurk 'fans' from your Twitter followers list, and arrays posts on a time-line where you can pull-down any given one and have conversations by postings comments. Plurk awards users Karma points for effective social networking behaviors (e.g. posting, commenting, introducing others to Plurk) which can be exchanged for enhanced features such as the right to customize a user name. There's an amusing Bubbleshare slide show presenting telltale screen shots from Twitter and Plurk which reveal the less than ideal performance of both programs, at Vicky Davis's Cool Cat Teacher blog, "A photographic journey into Plurk: See for yourself before you jump the twittership," from June 26, 2008: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/06/photographic-journey-into-plurk-see-for.html. Like Twitter, Plurk is blocked over public Internet in the UAE, so I often use Pownce simply because it isn't. Pownce is a microblogging platform with a pleasant interface which is also media friendly and allows more than 140 characters, but neither Plurk nor Pownce have the network that Twitter does, for me.

Of course how one develops one's network, and where on prefers to do that -- whether with Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, or Pownce (or some combination of these) -- would be particular to the individual, but there is a critical mass of participation of many users on Twitter that has driven it to the height of this genre of microblogging. It's the happening place where fusion constantly occurs. There might be several discos in town, but often there's only one that's hopping, or that has the magic, the dynamism, the appeal, and Twitter seems to have achieved the status of being where the action is (at present).

Using Twitter

Due to its wide traction, Twitter users sometimes make news in the way they spread news; for example:

"Twitter faster to report news than all other media" is the title of a post on May 12, 2008 in the Xar J Blog and Podcast, with regard to reporting on the recent earthquakes in China:
http://www.xarj.net/2008/twitter-faster-to-report-news-than-all-other-media/

During the recent California forest fires, Twitter proved effective in helping displaced people locate the nearest available emergency accommodations

Twitter is used in combination with http://jott.com to report the situation on freeways during morning commutes. Jott is a service that let's you leave a voice message using a mobile phone, which it then converts to text. Commuters phone in from their cars in traffic, the text is then posted to Twitter, and a network of followers develops to keep each other informed of up-to-the-minute traffic reports.

"Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice", by Michael Arrington, April 16, 2008, in Tech Crunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/twitter-saves-man-from-egyptian-justice/ is about a man arrested in Egypt (for taking photographs of a demonstration) who used his cell phone to twitter from jail and thus alert his followers who managed to locate him and secure his release.

The simplicity of Twitter makes it amenable to mashup, or use of Twitter API's (application program interfaces) in combination with other tools or applications to enhance its capabilities beyond those envisaged by the program designers. One way of measuring not only the popularity but the versatility of a simple idea like Twitter is by looking at some of the third party software developed for it. For example, there are at least two ways of accessing Twitter through enhanced user-interfaces (see Kevin Chu's (2008) "Twitterific vs. Twhirl" in /dev/null/Kevin at
http://blogs.sun.com/kevin/entry/twitterific_vs_twhirl - sic, the correct spelling is Twitterrific, with two r's).

Here are some compilations of Twitter resources, in no particular order:

"The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere", posted May 16, 2008 by a Guest Author to Read Write Web, lists (5 each) desktop, Web, and mobile applications that can be used with Twitter: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/most_popular_twitter_apps_blogosphere.php

Claire Bradin-Siskin's "Resources for Twitter", http://www.pitt.edu/~cbsiskin/ling2148/twitter.html lists a couple dozen resources and articles concerning Twitter.

"8 Awesome Firefox Plugins for Twitter" posted May 6, 2007 by Stan Schroeder in Mashable Social Networking News covers Twitbin, Tweetbar, Twitter Notifier, Twitty Tunes, Ludicrous, Another Firefox search bar plugin, Twitterbar, and Power Twitter by 30 Boxes: http://mashable.com/2007/05/06/8-awesome-firefox-plugins-for-twitter/

Jennifer Verschoor covers TwitDir, My Tweet Map, Tweetscan, Twitteroo, Twitthis, Twixter, Twype, and Twhirl in her March 22, 2008 posting"Twitter Options" at her My Integrating Technology Journey blog: http://jenverschoor.wordpress.com/2008/03/22/twitter-options/

Sarah Perez's post from May 2, 2008 entitled "Greasemonkey Scripts For the Social Media Addict" in Read Write Web links to dozens of scripts available for FriendFeed, Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us/Ma.gnolia, Flickr, Facebook, Google, and for Twitter itself:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greasemonkey_scripts_for_the_s.php

Twitter Fan Wiki provides a place for community members to list resources, which they have been doing in over a dozen categories. The wiki password is given on the front page (and changed regularly) to facilitate both security collaboration: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/

Caroline Middlebrook's well-known "Big juicy Twitter Guide" is at http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/twitter-guide/.

Gladys Baya's Tweetwheel graphic shows which of her followers are connected to one another, posted at:
http://gladysbaya.edublogs.org/2008/05/19/my-tweetwheel-or-why-social-networking-matters/

Here are some examples of numerous mashups with Twitter (listed alphabetically):

Bin-Blog by Binny V A: allows a user to access Twitter's database in just 4 lines of PHP code: http://binnyva.blogspot.com/2007/04/using-twitter-part-3-offline-twitter.html

Hashtags provides real time tracking of Twitter #hashtags: http://hashtags.org/

Crowdstatus; for example: http://crowdstatus.com/webheadsinactioncrowd.aspx - not only does this application allow you to view tweets from those in your network in one place, it also allows you to see them from behind a firewall though Twitter itself might not be working.

Google Twitter Search by Steve Rubel http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004053080137224009376%3Aicdh3tsqkzy is a Google-based search engine for Twitter.

Summize 'Conversational Search' allows users to troll Twitter for search terms, at: http://summize.com/

Tweet Cube - lets you share files on Twitter http://www.tweetcube.com/

Tweetpeek lets you create group twitterfeeds, http://www.tweetpeek.com/

Tweetscan at http://tweetscan.com/, a "Real-time Twitter Search" tool, claims to be "the most complete Twitter index outside of Twitter itself," (which isn't saying much, hence the need for all these third party apps ;-).

Tweetwheel http://www.tweetwheel.com/ lets you find out which of your Twitter friends know each by showing connections between them (see Gladys Baya's Tweetwheel graphic, above).

Twemes allows users to create global #tags for twitter and aggregate their postings through this site: http://twemes.com/. A good example of this is Christina Costa's use of http://twemes.com/scohrid to aggregate the tweets of 66 participants for 6 days this summer in Ohrid, Macedonia; see http://www.slideshare.net/guenter.beham/connecting-our-ples-via-twitter-at-eatel-summer-school-2008 (tag clouds courtesy of http://wordle.net/)

Twitstat.com http://twitstat.com/cgi-bin/view.pl tracks and processes data on Twitter usage; to be included in the listings, simply follow @twitstat on Twitter

TwitPic, lets you share photos on Twitter http://www.twitpic.com/

Twitterbar, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 - allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox's address bar

Twitterfeed allows you to tweet notices of your blog postings automatically into Twitter: http://twitterfeed.com/

Twittermap capitalizes on the social networking aspects of Twitter by allowing users to examine the threads of those being followed by people they're following, as they may well share similar interests: http://twittermap.com/search

Twitter presenter http://johnjohnston.name/tw/present.php enables your tweets to appear similar to PowerPoint slides.

Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/ creates tag clouds to show you "What's hot on Twitter right now!" You can also generate graphics showing frequency of tweet topics over past 6 hours, 24 hours, or 6 days.

Twittertroll is another search engine for Twitter by Brad Williams. Feeling Trolly? Visit: http://www.twittertroll.com/

TwitThis provides an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about their blog posts or websites. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter. http://twitthis.com/

Twitzer - a Firefox extension for Twitter that enables tweets to exceed the 140 limit. (and also text to speech and text to audio animations applications are listed here): http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/write-text-longer-than-140-characters-in-twitter/2665/

A Twitstat chart showing number of tweets registered on Twitter over the past 6 months

Uses in teaching

What does all this have to do with language teaching? Here are some posts and resources that have addressed pedagogical uses of Twitter recently:

Seth Dickens, April 29, 2008 post entitled "Twitter - MicroBlogging" in DigitaLang
http://www.digitalang.com/2008/04/twitter-microblogging/ lists some advantages of Twitter when used with language learners. For example, due to small posting requirements, "language students don't need to feel pressured into writing huge, long blog posts (which I have found can be off-putting for students who are writing a “normal” blog.) With Twitter the emphasis is on posting short, but sweet posts and often. Another
thing I really like about Twitter is that you can send your Twitter posts from a mobile phone (Moblogging?) This could also give our students more freedom to practice their English when its most convenient to them. Out in the centre of town? Seen something amazing? Let your classmates and friends know all about it! Practice your English while your doing so! I'd also like to see if it's possible to centrally “aggregate” several Twitter feeds. I was thinking of trying to set up a wiki which I'd use to tie all the Tweets from a
class together in one place. It would also make for some really interesting inter-personal reading. Ever wondered what your class mates are doing on a Sunday evening? Check Twitter and see if they are telling you!"

David Parry, January 23rd, 2008 post entitled "Twitter for Academia" in academHacK
http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
cites 13 areas where Twitter impacts his classroom. In summary these are
1. Class Chatter: conversations continue inside and outside of class
2. Development of Classroom Community
3. Get a Sense of the World: Use http://twitter.com/public_timeline to gain some appreciation.
4. Track a Word: "Through Twitter you can “track” a word. This will subscribe you to any post which contains said word."
5. Track a Conference: or follow an event via Twitter feeds
6. Instant Feedback: Twitter is "always on"
7/8. Follow a Professional or a Famous Person: e.g. http://twitter.com/BarackObama
9. Grammar: Twitter can lead to discussion and insights of its own unique grammar
and ambiguity as well as of the rules it breaks.
10. Rule Based Writing: Discover insights based in 140-character discourse units
11. Maximizing Teachable Moments: Twitter provides context often lacking in traditional
classroom situations
12. Public NotePad: "good for sharing short inspirations, thoughts that just popped into your head"
13. Writing Assignments: can be based around Twitter capabilities.
- Jeffrey Young, writing January 28, 2008 in
  Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus, in "A Professor's Tips for Using
  Twitter in the Classroom," reports how David Parry required the 20 students in
  his “Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication” course to sign
  up for Twitter and to send a few messages with the service each week as part of
  a writing assignment, with notable changes to classroom dynamics.
  http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2699

Twitterlearn lets you "sign up for regular quizzes via Twitter, allowing you to test your knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German, with French coming soon. Each of the series are linked to our podcasts and the content being tested in the regular quizzes is based on the content of our podcasts. In most cases the quiz will feature a phrase or series of words to be translated into the foreign language. By clicking on the link published with each 'tweet' you will be able to check your answer on the website."
http://www.twitterlearn.com/

Nancy White has set up a wiki to invite Twitter users to share how they have used Twitter to collaborate (and also indicate their wish list for Twitter development. Many Twitter collaboration stories (in classroom and professional development contexts) are appearing at http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/Twitter+Collaboration+Stories

Microblogging: What's on the horizon?

There is one very disappointing, perhaps even fatal, flaw with Twitter, one that is seriously compromising its effectiveness as we speak, and that is its inability to scale. Google's great success was based largely on the ability of Sergei Brin and Larry Page to cobble together sufficient banks of computers that would keep their brainchild running as it not only cached the entire Internet but coped with the accelerating demands of exponentially expanding droves of appreciative users. But Google had a business model based in cleverly directed advertising that supported its maintenance of warehouses full of computers, which were farmed and expanded as needed to handle the load, whereas Twitter seems to not have the means to support its expansion. Limiting tweets to 140 characters kept it lean and simple but Twitter's database has since just this summer been overwhelmed by its burgeoning popularity. The service occasionally goes down, and whimsically displays a graphic of cherubic birds supporting a pastel whale on improbably stressed ribbons, which like Twitter itself, are perhaps a good representation of whatever it is that keeps Twitter on the air.

sigh ...

Twiddict http://twiddict.com/login posts on its site, "We love Twitter. We hate when it's down. If you're addicted to Twitter as well, tweet your heart out through Twiddict and avoid life-changing withdrawal symptoms during Twitter downtime. We'll make sure your tweets end up where they belong". This site gives a status report, but it is sometimes more
optimistic than my own status :-(

As I've been writing this article over the past month, when the service has been working it has not often supported its "OLDER" button. When this button is grayed out you can't access the database of tweets left by your network beyond a single page. If your network comprises a hundred or more colleagues, then this one page of tweets spans only the last few hours of their twitterings. The result is the most damaging thing of all, loss of cohesion of the network. Now I no longer have access to people who normally post when I sleep at night, or during times that I am away from the computer more than a few hours. And it's not just me. Microbloggers are complaining throughout the Twittersphere about this problem, an annoyance experienced by all.

Konrad Glogowski is using http://summize.com to help him keep up with his Twitter network

Last year's NECC conference had a vibrant Twitter back channel. This year, delegates are preparing their Plan B.

These problems with Twitter have been taking place just over the past month, and it is hoped that those managing Twitter will be able to revive the service and return it to its former stature. It is clear that Twitter has struck a chord among educators who enjoy and benefit from maintaining frequent symbiotic contact with so many others in their wide learning networks. As current king of the microblog mountain, Twitter has a valuable investment in its reputation for being able to reliably deliver that network on demand to its myriad loyal users. But this fan-base is slipping away as Twitter continues to frustrate those whose lifestyles and workflows now pivot so tenuously on Twitter. Although Twitter has been the tool of choice, like a trusty old car that is starting to give problems, if this tool no longer functions, people will soon opt for another. What people were actually enjoying was the new and effective way of interacting with their network. Now that the concept of microblogging through a constant interchange of SMS messages has proven so stimulating and popular, the herd could instinctively migrate to more stable pastures. Twitter could yet recover, but if not, it will not be long before another tool appears to take its place.

A day after posting no comments have been made to this post yet but the following appeared in Twitter (thanks network :-)

What about AUTONOMOUS Teachers?

2008-06-02T12:34:00.005Z

Have six weeks gone by already? I must have been busy. I was in New York for the TESOL conference there, meeting Webheads galore, and then I stopped off in London on my way back to Abu Dhabi where, on April 7, 2008, I had been invited to present at the Learner Autonomy SIG Pre-conference event here: http://learnerautonomy.org/exeter2008.html, scheduled as part of the 42nd Annual IATEFL Conference in Exeter http://www.iatefl.org/content/conferences/2008/index.php 7th-11th April 2008.

My presentation was a part of the "Autonomy and the language classroom: opening a can of worms!" project, http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsindex.html.

I am indicated as being 'keeper' of the Technology worm here: http://learnerautonomy.org/wormsmay2007.html (though I was able to pass that off to Deborah Healey back in New York, and now she's got it :-)).
I produced a paper prior to this: Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning, in Independence,Winter 2007 (Issue 42) pp 27-29. Retrieved February 17, 2008 from http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf.
The paper is also on my site here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/iatefl/exeter2008/lasigworm.htm and is mirrored as a blog post here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/07/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html.
My slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning/ or http://tinyurl.com/5qmuxd
Jo Mynard did a nice writeup of my talk on her blog here: http://iateflexeter2008.blogspot.com/2008/04/multiliterate-autonomous-learner.html

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I repeated my Exeter presentation at an event April 12, 2008 at the Abu Dhabi Men's College in Abu Dhabi. I started with a short report from the LA SIG Preconference Event in Exeter, and then did the larger presentation on The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher attitudes and the inculcation of strategies for lifelong learning, "with focus in particular on the influence of teacher attitudes towards technology as it might impact autonomy in the newer generations of learners."

I recorded the presentation in Elluminate and stored the recording online, and you can view and listen to it here: http://tinyurl.com/468qrp.
I used the Exeter slide show with hyperlinks, http://tinyurl.com/5qmuxd
A photo album was put up to archive the event, well done, with links: http://picasaweb.google.com/tailearn/IndependentLearningResearchMorning2008

Carla Arena Interviews AdVancEducation for a class project. Like, wow!

2008-04-28T09:05:00.004Z

Vance's Neighborhood via kwout

I didn't expect a lot from this when Carla asked me if I would record something about Abu Dhabi, the city where I live, for the benefit of an online class that she teaches. I wrote back that I had no idea where to begin, and could she just Skype me and ask me some questions. So she did, and produced the most charming blog posting:
http://explorations.bloxi.jp/a/vance-stevens-talks-about-abu-dhabi/

Of course you can hear the recording at Carla's blog. Amazingly, the posting has attracted well over a dozen comments.