alextheteacher

01:03 am: This is not my final post yet...
Dear students,

Our course is formally over, and I guess you're waiting for the results... and certificates. I am currently preparing the documents for the institute administration and I think it might take up to two weeks for the certificates to be issued.

Thank you for your patience.

12:29 am: Week 12. Final self-reflection essay
Wow! We are approaching the final week of our course. While some of you are still preparing reviews of the projects developed by your colleagues, it's time to start thinking about the final assignments.

So, by the end of the next week you are to write the second self-reflective essay. Perhaps, before writing, it is worth looking at your first essay that you wrote during Week 1. Have your understandings about the role of internet technologies in language teaching changed during our course? What new perspectives for ICT in teaching can you see now? What course readings and activities did you find most(least) useful and challenging? What kind of internet tools/activities are you going to try with your students? I would also like to know if your attitude to distance learning has changed as a result of the course.

I will also send you a formal anonimous course evaluation form that you are to send to the head of the Institute of Professional Development and Retraning. Details will be given in just a few days.

And finally, I'll do my best to review all your blog entries that I haven't yet within a week.

12:24 am: Week 11. Review of a final project, just a reminder
Just to remind you some lines from the syllabus, please try to evaluate your peers' projects against the criteria of authenticity and suitability for a chosen audience.

12:38 am: Week 10. Signing up for reviewing a final project
Hi all,

It's time to sign up for reviewing a final project developed by your peers. Please go to our wiki and choose a project to review. Shorts descriptions of all projects have been published recently by groups in their LJs and I hope full descriptions will appear by the end of this week.

I need to inform you that I had email and chat communications with Group 1 members recently to discuss their progress. As a result, unfortunately, Group 1 has been dismissed. We decided that Tatiana Yamskikh and Irina Filippova are preparing their individual final projects. Irine Yunusova is joining Group 2.

12:06 pm: ICQ chat
Well, in addition to my previous posting, I think we can chat via ICQ, if some of you prefer. I've just added some time slots for the next week.

01:23 am: Skype Chat
Hi all,

Hope everybody is here again. I've noticed that some of you have already posted some information about your projects. Please allow me several days to review them (as well as tons of your blog entries I haven't commented on yet - shame on me!).

Meanwhile, as we are in the last third of our course, I decided to arrange some individual Skype chats with you. They are optional, so if you feel you would like to discuss anything related to our course, please visit our wiki and put down your name and Skype name in the table. There are six 20-minute slots available this week and I'll try to arrange more slots at different times for the next week. By the way, you can tell me what time would be convenient for you, but, please, provide me with some time ranges, not exact times.

I'm thinking about arranging some ICQ chats for those who cannot use Skype for technical or other reasons. Please let me know if you are interested.

Finally, my Skype name will be alex_the_teacher . Hope to hear some of you soon.

02:40 pm: 43 things
I have recently come across an interesting website, 43 things, where, upon opening an account, you can put down 43 things that you want to do in your life and then share your progress with other people with similar dreams. It is like a blog, actually. Now they are collecting resolutions for 2007. Want to know what the most popular resolution is? It is "Read 50 books in 2007"! How do you like it.

Well, if you find the website interesting, just go forward and think of your 43 things..! Anyway, how can we use this website in our work? A question to think about.. :)

02:25 pm: Happy New Year!

03:32 pm: Week 7. Evaluation of existing internet-based activities
Hi all, According to our plan, by the end of Week 7 (let's say it ends next Wednesday, December 27), you are to submit a written evaluation of three existing internet-based activities. This is one of the main assignments of our course, a well-done evaluation will add 10 of 100 points to your final grade.

You are free to find the activites to evaluate in books, journals, or on the web. You may consider some sources that you have already used during our course:

• WebQuest Page at San Diego State University
• Teacher's Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet
• any other activity described somewhere on the Web. By the way, if you find a good website with activities for language learners why not to share the link with other participants in a comment to this entry.

Please try to find the activities that use various internet tools (e-mail, chats, web, blogs, etc). I mean they should not all be webquests primarily oriented to reading skills.

Unlike your usual weekly journal entries, I expect your evaluations to be formal writings. For each activity evaluation you need to include:

• Name of the activity
• Sourse (webpage URL, book title, author, etc).
• Audience it is designed for (age, level, etc).
• Brief description of the activity.
• What skills/competences it is intended to develop.
• Suitability evaluation - is it suitable for the audience it is designed (I mean, if the authors say that it is for 5-graders of intermediate level, does it look like that? If the audience is determined by you, you can skip this part of evaluation).
• Authenticity evaluation - does it provide an opportunity for a learner to receive some authentic language input? Does it engage students into activites or put them in (simulated) situations similar to those in the out-of-school context?

The length of each of three evaluations should be about 1,500-2,000 signs (you can measure it in the Word statistics).

01:23 am: A question mainly for students from Novosibirsk
Dear colleagues,

Are we having a NATE Winter School next January that has usually been held at the Technical University? I haven't seen any announcements. It could be a good opportunity for us to meet. :)

02:46 am: Week 6. More on using chats in the classroom
Dear students, Here is a review of some papers on using chats in language teachings. Unfortunately, most of the articles mentioned are not available online, but I hope you will find this digest useful.

* * *
Tools supporting writing and speaking through writing. Chats and instant messaging

The technologies we discussed earlier, supported asynchronous communication, when participants were not required to be online simultaneously. Let us now take a look at the tools for synchronous text interaction. Although instant messaging services such as ICQ or Yahoo! Messenger appeared as tools for one-to-one real-time communication, their recent versions are configured to allow conversation among three and more people, thus making them similar to chat services like web chatrooms that have always been multi-user tools. Perhaps, the only essential difference between them is that by default web-based chats were open for anyone while one can join an ongoing IM conversation by invitation only. This difference, however, does not seem to influence linguistic peculiarities of the interaction, so in this section the word “chat” will be applied to any form of synchronous textual communication.

It was noticed above that, being written by form, chat has certain features bringing it closer to spoken language. Some scholars suggest that writing competence of this kind might be transferable to oral competence. Chun (1994) made this suggestion based on high frequency of cohesive linguistic references and expressions in chat that are typical for spoken conversation. Discussing the advantages of chat compared to face-to-face class communication he finds that in chat, learners interact directly with each other as opposed to dominating student-teacher interaction in a traditional classroom. During online sessions, students are more active in starting a conversation, expanding on topics as well as demonstrating sociolinguistic competence in greeting, leave taking, apologizing, etc.

Kern (1995) agrees with Chun about larger language output produced by students in chat than in usual oral discussion. Comparing the characteristics of discourse produced by two groups of French learners during online chats and oral discussions on the same topics, he found that in chats students made twice as many turns and two to four times as many sentences than in spoken conversations. During online interactions they also used a greater variety of discourse functions and morphosyntactic features, thus showing a higher level of language sophistication. Kern’s thesis is supported by Payne and Whitney (2002) reporting on the study of a group of Spanish learners who, after participating in a hybrid course in which half of the class time was spent in online synchronous discussions, showed higher oral proficiency than the control group that received only face-to-face instruction.

Tudini (2003) investigated the effects of involving learners into chat sessions with L1 speakers. Intermediate students of Italian participated in dyadic communications with native Italian interlocutors without any teacher support or intervention. Analysis of chat transcripts revealed that native speakers offered students some conversation practice that included an important component, namely, negotiation of meaning. Statistically, negotiation of meaning occurred in 9 per cent of turns. Chat sessions also promoted greater attention to errors and form, and modification of language. Research findings led Tudini to the conclusion that chat environment is likely to be conductive to SLA by distance learners (p. 157).

Kern (1995) and Tudini (2003) agree in that in spite of certain advantages, online chat cannot substitute for normal classroom discussions. Kern (1995) points out that grammatical accuracy suffers due to the fast pace of communication, leading to reading “defective” language. Therefore, discussions about effectiveness of chats should be put into the context of teaching goals. It is not likely that chat can be a good tool to develop formal accuracy, style, or global coherence. Still it can be a means to support student initiative and responsiveness as well as status equalization.

References
Chun, D. (1994). Using computer networking to facilitate the acquisition of interactive competence. System, 22(1), 17-31.

Kern, R. (1995). Restructuring classroom interaction with networked computers: Effects on quantity and characteristics of language production. The Modern Language Journal, 79(4), 457-476.

Payne, J. & Witney, P. (2002). Developing L2 oral proficiency through synchronous CMC: Output, working memory, and interlanguage development. CALICO Journal, 20(1), 7-32.

Tudini, V. (2003). Using native speakers in chat. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 141-159.

02:04 am: Week 6. Important. Reading Change
Alas, I have to say that, again, one of the readings is not available, namely a chapter from the book by David Crystal Language and the Internet. But never mind, I found a substitute for you. It's an article "Computer-Mediated Discourse" by Susan Herring, who is, in my opinion, one of the most fruitful researchers on the linguistic features of the Netspeak.While reading, please pay attention to her discussions on presence of the features of written and spoken discourse in CMC.

01:37 am: Week 6. An online chat
Dear students,

We are starting to introduce some synchronous group work when you need to do things simultaneously. I am glad that by now 14 students have signed in for a group, and we have 4 groups so far. For Week 6, the synchronous work is going to be an online chat in which you need to

1)discuss advantages and disadvantages of synchronous chats compared to asynchronous discussion boards,
and
2) develop ideas for you final projects.

The details are given in the syllabus.

You can use any chat service you like. Perhaps, some of you are registered with ICQ - the most popular instant messaging (IM) service. If you don't have an account, you can easily create one, download the software from the web, and use it. You might want to use a web version of ICQ, when it's not necessary to download the software or when you do not have privileges to install new software on your office computer. An example of a Web ICQ service can be found here. Please e-mail me immediately if you have problems with installing and/or using ICQ software. You can also write about it in your blog, so that some other students will be able to help you earlier.

Alternatively, you may agree to use some other messaging services, for example, Yahoo! Messenger.

You need to agree about the date and time when your group can meet in the virtual space. Perhaps you'll need to e-mail your suggestions to each other, or use your blogs, or create your own wiki at Wikispaces to discuss the matter. Please send me an e-mail, when you make up your mind, and if I am not busy, I'll join you in the chat. But first of all, the time should be convenient for all group members, not for me.

As the deadline for the group formation was extended, I think we need to extend it for the chat too. So, please arrange your chat no later than next Wednesday, December 20.
You need to copy the script of your chat to one of group members' blog and analyze it from grammar and spelling viewpoint.

04:11 am: Group formation
Hi all,

You have been blogging and reading other students' LJs for quite a while so far, and I hope it was a chance for you to know each other better. Now the time came for us to form groups to start online collaboration on our final projects.

I have created a wiki (remember, it's a space where everybody can edit everything) for you to sign in for one of the groups. You'll see a wiki is as easy as a word processor. Please go to alextheteacher.wikispaces.com, click on the "Edit this page" button and put down your name, LJ name, and your university in one of the cells of the table. Don't forget to press the "Save" button when you finish. Please make sure that students from the same university are in different groups - I think it's important for you to experience some real online collaboration when you start working on the final projects.

Perhaps you'll need to contact each other before you join the same group. I am about to publish the list of your e-mails in my LJ to make it easier. It will be a "friend-only" entry and you'll need to log in to read it.
Just to remind you, the deadline for the group formation is extended until Wednesday, December 13.

03:29 am: Some changes in our schedule
Dear students,

I am awfully awfully awfully sorry not to keep you posted about this week's activities. The thing is that I am still in transit - now I am in Kaliningrad. While my stay in Moscow was business-related - not teaching-related though (I do some PR work for the administration of the science town of Koltsovo near Novosibirsk), my trip to Kaliningrad is more about fun - I am visiting my sister and her family here. Well, Kaliningrad is a nice city, but the internet available through the telephone network is extremely slow. I have to limit myself to downloading only the texts and not even images.

Because of this, I have to make some changes in the course schedule. The deadlines for Wikipedia assignments and group formation are extended until next Wednesday, December 13. The readings and two blog entries are still due this week, as noticed in the syllabus. I will create a wiki for the group formation and let you know asap.

I will resume commenting on your blog entries Monday, December 11.

Thank you for your patience again.

03:41 am: Business trip
Dear students,

At present, I'm in Moscow and unfortunately I have only sporadic access to the Internet. For this reason, this week it might take longer than usual for me to respond to your questions, emails, and journal entries, but please don't think I have forgotten about you. I'll try to publish the instructions about Wikipedia and group formation within two days.

Hope for your understanding and thank you for your patience.

01:33 am: Would you like to talk to a robot?
Well, I have finally read all your essays as of December 1 and put my comments. Waiting for you Week 4 writings.

Meanwhile, I checked the latest issue of Language Learning and Technology. By the way we are reading some articles from this journal in Week 5 and later. I think, it's an interesting publication. They welcome contributions from teachers and researchers worldwide; it's a peer-reviewed and, fortunately, free journal.

I usually read their "Emerging Technologies" section in which they discuss some really new tools that appear in the net and how they can be applied to language teaching. This time the article is about 'chatterbots' or just 'bots' - computer programs designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with a human. You type a question in plain English, the bot replies, you respond to it's reply, and so on.. Would you like to try? Here are a couple of bots mentioned in the article:

A.L.I.C.E. - Artificial Intelligence Foundation. Follow the link "Free Live Chat: with the award winning A. I. chat robot A. L. I. C. E." on the top of the page.

Dave E.S.L Bot. Specially for language learners. Unfortunately, this bot does not chat for free :)

Jabberwacky. Another bot that can learn from your interaction with him.

The article says bots can be used when students don't have an opportunity to talk to a native speaker, and it can be especially useful for some accomplished students, not for beginners. What do you think?

02:03 am: Week 4. Webquests
So, we are starting to discuss specific ideas about integrating the internet in our language programs. And we are beginning with some activities that can help in developing reading skills.

One of the obvious ways to incorporate web into a reading lesson is to treat it as a virtually bottomless pool of authentic texts in the target language on any conceivable topic. Some of you mentioned this in your applications and introductions. While I don't want to discourage you from using up-to-date materials on the web for reading, one should notice that if they are essentially treated like stories from textbooks or newspapers, one can hardly design an approach significantly different from using offline texts. Such activities may be authentic as we defined earlier, but we are not going to talk much about them because of a low level of interactivity they provide.

Instead, I suggest we focus on one type of internet-based activity that can promote developing reading skills, namely, webquests. Invented by Bernie Dodge, webquests are inquiry-oriented activities in which most or all of the data students interact with come from online sources.

Traditional format of a webquest includes
(1) an introduction to set the context and give background information,
(2) a motivating task,
(3) a list of resources (usually websites) necessary to complete the task, (4) a clearly described process that learners should go through to accomplish the task, and
(5) conclusion reminding students of what they have learned.

Some scholars say that using webquests fits in constructivist teaching as students are offered an authentic task and real resources to work with and finally become experts in a particular aspect of the topic (you can read the article Why WebQuests? by Tom March, 1998). In one of the assigned readings for this week, Koenraad and Westhoff, looking at webquests from the perspective of the SLA theory, list some features of a well-designed linguistic webquest: it should elicit the activities that exposure learners to a rich input, provide both content-oriented and form-oriented processing, push output, and develop a repertoire of strategies to compensate always existing gaps in language knowledge. An ideal SLA webquest is conceived with a product in mind (such as a report, webpage, project proposal, etc) which is evaluated against explicit criteria. Finally, the presentation of the product should be important for a real or make-believe "recipient."

* * *
As part of your assignments for this week you should browse the WebQuest page at http://webquest.sdsu.edu for the webquests that are designed for language learners (if you know some other WebQuest sites, feel free to explore them). Select one webquest that you think might be useful for language learners and do it. Do you think it provides an opportunity for authentic language learning? Put a brief reflection in your blog.

Please refer to the syllabus for the other assignments.

01:23 am: Week 4. Comments on readings and assignments
Hello again, my dear students,

We are now in the mid of Week 4, so it's time again to do some reading, thinking and writing.

So, after we came to a conclusion that computers do not perform miracles without us, teachers (Week 2), and that authentic activities, in which students face "real life" tasks, are likely to bring better results (Week 3), it's time to launch the discussions about particular internet tools and how we can create authentic activities with them.

And sure we will! But wait a moment! Imagine you want to use e-mail or chat in your teaching. Or maybe you are fascinated by the opportunities offered by Skype™, a program that allows users to talk online using a mic and a headset. What could they be used for? What language skills can you develop using e-mail or ICQ or Skype?

You might, perhaps, say that, because e-mail and chat are about producing and understanding texts, they support reading and writing, while Skype, which is about sound, might help in gaining competence in listening and speaking. Does it make sense?

It is true, e-mail originally appeared as a tool for exchanging textual messages; however, but nowadays it is common to attach to the message or insert into it an image, or a sound file. So you may ask your students to record themselves and e-mail their recordings for you to check their pronunciation. At the same time most voice-over-IP programs such as Skype™ allow users to have two concurrent sessions: voice interaction and text exchange. Communication via Skype™ can be asymmetrical: while one participant speaks into the microphone, the other, who might not have a microphone, replies by typing.

As for chats, they have some definite features of written communication: it is space-bound, there is a time lag between production and reception, and the recipient cannot reply to the message while being typed by the sender. At the same time, some peculiarities put this form of computer-mediated communication (CMC) closer to spoken language: it is time-limited, very dynamic and immediate response is often expected or required (A good book on the topic, Language and the Internet was written by David Crystal, 2001). As a result we have textual communication in which traditional writing norms are neglected: typos are often not corrected, genre-specific abbreviations are used widely, and capitalization is abandoned or used rather randomly. As this and other forms of CMC incorporate features of both oral and written discourse, some scholars conclude that we see the rise of a new written style that is close to spoken and reminds the transcribed speech (you may be interested to read the article "Why Email Looks Like Speech?" by Naomi Baron from American University, Washington DC). In these circumstances, it would not be reasonable to assert that integrating chat into a language lesson would help develop writing skills, at least, writing skills only.

The examples above illustrate an increasingly multimodal character of CMC in which meaning is made not only through text, but also through visual, audio, and spatial forms of representation. Gunther Kress, Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London notices in his book "Literacy in the New Media Age" that the advent of new electronic media has actually de-emphasized textual mode of communication while the role of other modes, especially visual, has elevated from supplementary to central. Multimodality expands the notions of reading and writing to that of multiliteracy. It is not enough to decode and comprehend alphabetic texts in order to "read" a webpage – one needs to understand the meaning of its constituent elements: text, graphics, icons, etc. Some of them may be pertinent to the "reading" task while the others have only peripheral meaning (see Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, Toward a theory of new literacies, 2004 - one of the readings for this week).

For a language teacher, one consequence that can be drawn from this discussion is that a particular internet tool cannot be strongly associated with the specific language skill(s) it is "designed" to develop. Virtually, nothing can prevent a teacher to involve their students in an e-mail exchange with language learners from another country in which they will exchange not text messages but sound files with their voice recording. Nor would it be reasonable to ban students from sending text documents while speaking over internet phone. Still, for every internet technology exists a prototypical, traditional way of use that is exploited most intensively. Admitting this not clear-cut correspondence between internet technologies and language skills, I present the following tentative classification of internet technologies in terms of their possible application in the classroom:

•tools supporting reading – World Wide Web;
•tools supporting reading and writing – e-mail, discussion board, blog, wiki;
•tools supporting writing and speaking through writing – chat, instant messaging;
•tools supporting speaking and listening – voice e-mail, voice-over-IP, audio conference, video conference, podcasts.

We will use this classification to discuss various practices of applying these technologies to language teaching tasks. Meanwhile, we need to make another inference from multimodal nature of the internet and CMC. As reading a web document, due to its multimodality, may differ considerably from reading a text-only book, a new literacy skill will be required. Actually, the whole set of new literacies are essential for effective work in the cyberspace. For example, the abilities to:

•use a search engine to locate information quickly;
•evaluate the reliability of information on a webpage;
•predict what information may be found behind a hyperlink,
to name only a few (Leu et al., 2004). The instructors who manage to interweave developing the new literacies into learning activities will assist their students well in training them to participate in the Information Age society.

01:18 am: More on constructivism
In case you're interested and not tired of constructivism-objectivism discussion, here's a paper on constructivism in Russian by M.Choshanov, Doctor of Pedagogy.

http://testolog.narod.ru/Other13.html