ICT for Language Teachers

Conference on Virtual Worlds, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain

2011-12-21T16:17:00.004Z

I have just returned from Spain, where I contributed to a two-day conference on virtual worlds at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), 16-17 December 2011. The conference was organised under the auspices of the CAMILLE Project in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Polytechnic University of Valencia within the framework of EUROCALL’s programme of regional events, in collaboration with the Inter-University Institute of Applied Modern Languages, supported by the Vice President for Research at the UPV Ministry of Science and Innovation, with sponsorship by Macmillan ELT.

There were five invited guest speakers: Randall Sadler, Luisa Panichi, Heike Philp, Kristi Jauregi, and myself. The main target audience was local secondary school teachers of English, but a number of research students were also in attendance. Each day of the conference was divided into two parts: presentations by the guest speakers in the morning and hands-on workshops in the afternoon.

This was a remarkable event in three different ways. Firstly, the size of the audience was impressive: around 75 participants. Secondly, it was the first time that I have been able to work in Real Life with such a distinguished a group of experts in the use of virtual worlds in language learning and teaching. Thirdly, this is the first occasion on which I have experienced such a large number of participants in hands-on workshops. The computer lab that was provided for the workshops comprised 50 high-end PCs with excellent graphics cards and a fast connection to the Internet. This meant that, with 75 participants in attendance, some people had to share a computer, but everybody was able to join Second Life and learn the basics. The hands-on workshops were led in turn by one of the guest speakers, with the others circulating amongst the participants and troubleshooting where necessary. We experienced surprisingly few technical hiccups, and Second Life behaved itself very well – with very little lag, even when the participants were gathered together on a shopping spree in the boutique holodeck on EduNation I Island.

I wish to offer my personal congratulations to the UPV team who organised this event, especially Ana Gimeno and Rafael Seiz Ortiz, who took care of all our needs, including transporting us to the excellent tapas restaurants in Valencia!

Google Translate: friend or foe?

2011-11-22T12:12:00.001Z

Are you a language teacher? If so, what are your views on online translation tools?

Google Translate is probably the most widely used online translation tool, but there are others that will also do the job. Several are listed in ICT4LT Module 3.5, Section 3 (Machine Translation). Such tools have been the bane of language teachers’ lives ever since they became widely available on the Web. The teacher sets a text to be translated for homework and the students use Google Translate to do the job, thus saving themselves work and driving their teacher mad when they turn in a piece of work that is full of mistakes that reveal clearly that an automatic translation tool has been used. Or the teacher may ask the students to produce an original composition in a foreign language - so they type it out in English and paste it into Google Translate. Again, the output is full of mistakes but often of a different kind, for example the students may be using constructions in English that are way beyond what they would be capable of using in the foreign language. And many mistakes made by Google Translate are made solely because the source text is incorrect. If you write "I should of thought" (yes, it's a common mistake!) instead of "I should have thought" then Google Translate's output is wrong. But it translates "I should have thought" correctly into German as "ich hätte gedacht". Thinking back to my early experiences with Machine Translation (MT) in the 1980s, I remember a company (Perkins Engines) that used the Weidner MT system first training its employees to write correct, unambiguous English so that the system could handle the texts more easily – in other words, anticipating potential errors that could be made.

Right now it's not too difficult to spot that Google Translate has been used to produce a text in a foreign language, but a few years ago Google began using a different translation engine that uses a so-called Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approach. Now Google Translate begins by examining and comparing massive corpora of texts on the Web that have already been translated by human beings. It looks for matches between source and target texts and works out which translations are likely to be the most accurate. This YouTube video, Inside Google Translate, explains how it works. As more and more corpora are added to the Web this means that Google Translate will keep improving until it reaches a point where it will be very difficult to tell that a machine has done the translation. I remember early MT tools translating "How are you?" into German as "Wie sind Sie?" Now Google Translate gets it right: "Wie geht es Ihnen?" You can also click on the words in the translated text to hear how they are pronounced.

So Google Translate is no longer the crude tool that it used to be. Besides using a much more sophisticated and accurate translation engine, it also offers the possibility of interaction. When the translated text appears you can hover your mouse over the text and ask Google Translate to suggest alternative renderings if you don't accept what it offers as the first choice. These may be different vocabulary items, different tenses, different case endings in German, etc. You can also rearrange the word order. Thus you can edit the text until you are satisfied with it – and then you can copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word and edit it further using the inbuilt foreign-language spell checkers, grammar checkers and thesauruses. Having said that, I am in no doubt that most students would just accept what Google Translate offers as the first choice and hope for the best. But a clever student would investigate Google Translate's new features and produce quite an acceptable translation that does not have the obvious hallmarks of being translated by machine. So what is the solution if students cannot be persuaded not to use Google Translate?

Do you punish your students for cheating?
Do you hand back their work and tell them to do it again without using Google Translate?
Or maybe you warn your students that you have already run the text through Google Translate and that if you find any examples of the same incorrect phrases being used in their work then they will score zero.
You could also exploit the mistakes that Google Translate makes by displaying them on a big screen to the whole class and showing your students how ridiculous they are. At the same time you could use the output of Google Translate to raise your students’ linguistic awareness. Ask your students to spot the mistakes and explain why they have been made – e.g. parsing like as a verb rather than a preposition.

But perhaps the time has come to admit defeat and to set different types of tasks for homework. A blog posting by Naomi Ganin Epstein, headed If Google is translating then I’ll start revamping, is worth looking at. She suggests setting a number of different types of assignments for homework that get round the problem of students using Google Translate.

Let’s face it, automatic translation tools have been around for a long time and they are here to stay. The European Commission makes extensive use of so-called Translation Memory (TM) systems. These produce a rough draft of the text to be translated, which is then corrected by professional translators. It can speed up their output by up to 80%. I know of one university that trains its students to use a TM tool known as TRADOS. They can then slot more easily into jobs as professional translators when they graduate. I often use Google Translate in the same way – but only with languages that I know reasonably well.

Reactions?

The French Digital Kitchen

2011-10-25T10:40:00.001Z

I had a very interesting day yesterday, 24 October 2011, at the French Institute (Institut Français), London. I had been invited by Professor Paul Seedhouse, Newcastle University, to give a short presentation on the History of Computer Assisted Language Learning to lead into his presentation on an exciting new interactive approach to language learning, The French Digital Kitchen. The French Digital Kitchen is a situated language learning environment in which a computer in the kitchen communicates with students, instructing them step-by-step in how to cook French cuisine while teaching aspects of French language at the same time, namely the essential vocabulary and grammar that are used in such an environment. The underlying pedagogy is Task-Based Learning (TBL), an established approach to teaching foreign languages whereby learners are prompted by instructions in the target language to carry out specified tasks.

As a first step, the students are presented with the grammar and vocabulary, and then they practise using what they have learned in the kitchen. Utensils and ingredients that are used in the kitchen are all labelled in French, and motion sensors are embedded in the utensils and the containers for the ingredients, which track the students' actions and prompt the kitchen computer to give them spoken instructions for each step in the process of preparing the food. Students can ask for instructions to be repeated or translations into English simply by touching the computer screen. Students work in pairs and are encouraged to communicate with one another in French.

As well as watching the presentations, we were treated to a demonstration of the portable version of the kitchen, with volunteers from the audience following the instructions in French for preparing a delicious clafoutis aux poires, which was then cooked in the French Institute’s kitchen and presented to us at lunchtime – a “tangible and edible product”, as Professor Paul Seedhouse described it.

The project is now being extended, thanks to European Commission funding, to develop materials in English, Spanish, Italian, German and other languages.

Videos demonstrating the project are available on YouTube:

French Digital Kitchen Dissemination Video

The Talking Kitchen that Teaches you French

Further information is available at the Digital Institute website at Newcastle University.

Scoop.it! Useful "curation" tool

2011-07-25T15:46:00.002Z

I have recently begun using Scoop.it! It's a useful tool that enables you to set up Web pages that gather together links on a specific topic. Scoop.it provides a facility for you to "curate" information on your topics by trawling the Web and finding links that you may wish to add to your topic pages. The links are then laid out attractively like the page of a magazine: http://www.scoop.it/

I have set up two Scoop.it pages:

Computer Assisted Language Learning
http://www.scoop.it/t/computer-assisted-language-learning

Virtual World Language Learning
http://www.scoop.it/t/virtual-world-language-learning

And I follow other people's pages on related topics. As well as being useful for setting up permanent resources, Scoop.it could be used by students for creating one-off magazines.

QR codes in education: Why all the fuss?

2011-07-25T14:10:00.014Z

The Web is abuzz at the moment with blogs on using QR codes in education. I am not going to give a detailed explanation of what a QR code is if you don’t already know. Suffice it to say that it’s a bit like a barcode but looks different and has a wider range of uses. The Wikipedia article on QR codes gives a good summary of their historical development and how they have been used, particularly in industry. These are examples of a QR code and a barcode that I generated:

QR code of the ICT4LT website. Generated by http://www.qrstuff.com/

Barcode containing information about Graham Davies’s gender, age, weight, height, location
and value in US$! Generated by http://www.barcodeart.com/

Although QR codes have been around for some time, namely since 1994, it is only recently that they have attracted the attention of educators. Joe Dale’s blog posting (21 July 2011), for example, outlines some of their potential uses in teaching foreign languages. Joe describes using QR codes to:

• launch an mp3 file,
• play a video,
• visit a website and answer comprehension questions,
• engage in a treasure hunt,
• answer questions set by the teacher using QR code voting.

I have to confess that so far I am not too excited by the current interest in using QR codes in education. It’s not a new idea. Back in the 1980s I attended a seminar in Denmark at which Peter Looms of Danmarks Radio demonstrated how a barcode reader could be used to locate resources for language learners on an interactive videodisc and how teachers could create their own lessons by photocopying, cutting and pasting previously prepared barcodes to create activities for students. The barcode reader was used to jump to a particular frame or segment on the videodisc, not unlike the way in which a URL or QR code is now used to jump to a particular website or part of a website. See:

Pinfold C., Fox R. & Looms P. (1994) “Barcoding a Japanese language videodisc for secondary schools”. In McBeath C. & Atkinson R. (eds.) Proceedings of the Second International Interactive Multimedia Symposium, Perth, Western Australia, 23-28 January 1994: 436–442. Available at
http://www.ascilite.org.au/aset-archives/confs/iims/1994/np/pinfold.html

Using barcodes in education did not catch on. CD-ROMs and DVDs replaced interactive videodiscs and the advent of the Web in 1993 brought about radical changes in storing and accessing educational resources.

The main problem with QR codes is that you need a device and an application that can read and interpret them – in the same way that you need an appropriately programmed barcode reader to read and interpret barcodes. The difference is that devices and applications that can read and interpret QR codes (I use my iPhone and the Qrafter application) are in common use by the general public. But pointing an iPhone at a QR code image – and you may need more than one shot to read it – waiting for your phone to boot up a Web browser and then render the page to which it is pointing seems to need a lot of additional time and effort. And if you wish to create your own QR codes you need to know how use another application. Maybe I am just getting old, cynical and unimaginative. I have been playing around with technology in education since I began using language labs in 1965 – which were not as wonderful as they were cracked up to be – and now I have to see a real need for the use of technology with evidence that it saves teachers time and produces better learning results.

However, I have found a good use for QR codes. My wife Sally was watching one of her favourite cookery programmes on BBC TV last week. I was half-watching with her, but I am mainly interested in the results of cooking and not the process itself. My eyes lit up, however, when the TV chef began cooking a smoked haddock pilaf that looked particularly tasty. Sally thought she would like to try it and wondered where she could get the recipe. At that moment I spotted a QR code flash up, all too briefly, in the corner of the TV screen. As we were watching the programme on our Sky+ Box I was able to rewind and freeze the screen so that I could point my iPhone at the QR code. Bingo! It worked first time and sent me to http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/smoked_haddock_pilaf_84768. Using Qrafter on my iPhone, I emailed the URL link to Sally so that she was able to click on it in her email application on her computer and display and print the recipe. We enjoyed an excellent pilaf the following evening. Now that’s what I call a sensible use of technology!

Languages ICT website to close on 25 July 2011

2011-07-13T08:53:00.000Z

The Languages ICT website, which was set up and maintained by CILT and ALL, is due to close on 25 July 2011. The announcement of its closure appears on the Languages ICT homepage. If there are materials at the site that you find useful grab them while you can! There are many PDF and video files that can be downloaded.

This is another example of a useful site being abandoned as a result of the lack of available funding. We have seen this happening many times, especially since the current government took over. Having said that, websites that depend on national government or EC funding are often short-lived. Once the funding period comes to an end they are unable to sustain themselves, so they get out of date and are finally abandoned. Teachers TV is a typical example, although the videos can now be streamed from other sites where they are archived: http://www.tes.co.uk/TeachersTV and http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/

When the ICT4LT website was initiated with EC funding in 1999-2000, it was made available in four languages: English, Italian, Finnish and Swedish. After the funding period came to an end it was sustained as a labour of love by the five original partners, but the Italian, Finnish and Swedish versions were not kept up to date and have now been abandoned. I took the decision to take over the English-language version and to keep it going. It requires quite a bit of work as links keep changing or disappearing and new developments in ICT take place every day. Nevertheless, the site is reasonably up-to-date and includes information on ICT developments that have taken place since the funding period came to a close, e.g. blogging, podcasting, Web 2.0 applications and virtual worlds. Income from a few discreetly placed advertisements more than covers the costs of paying for the broadband connection and Web space is donated free of charge by my daughter Siân, who is a graphic designer / Web designer. So there are ways and means of keeping a project going. The site receives an average of 12,000 to 13,000 visits per month – “real” visits, not visits from bots and search engines:

So what happens to dead sites? Sometimes their resources are archived on new or existing sites, but there is a huge Web archive, also known as the Wayback Machine, that keeps records of earlier versions of websites. It is not 100% complete, but I have often found it useful in tracking down resources that I thought had disappeared into oblivion.

Have PLNs been over-hyped? A reaction to Gavin Dudeney's blog

2011-03-19T09:52:00.005Z

I was interested to read Gavin Dudeney's posting to his That'SLife blog, 18 March 2011. It’s headed On PLNs. In his posting Gavin asks whether Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) have been over-hyped. The essence is summed up in his opening paragraph:

"I think all this ‘PLN’ business is seriously over-hyped and overrated and most people are kidding themselves about just how much they get out of theirs, just how many of their PLN would be friends and mentors ‘in real life’, and just, well, just how real it all is."

I posted a response, agreeing on the whole with what Gavin had said, especially this extract from his posting:

“Here’s what I know (and I must stress this is a personal post – your mileage may vary)… My best friends are all, with one or two exceptions, people I have first met face-to-face and then continued to contact online due to distance or whatever. I also know that, like most people, I have an optimum number of friends, and that number is very small. I see these people when I can, and I get more out of two hours in their company than I could ever in a few weeks with them online in Twitter.”

So true! I get more out of chatting to half a dozen friends at my local pub on a Saturday night than I do out of a whole week of browsing the Web. Twitter is OK for picking up links and for occasional bits of information, but on the whole I find it confusing. Turn your head for a couple of hours and the interesting threads you were following have got lost in a mass of idle chit-chat. I deliberately avoid accepting lots of new friends on Twitter or Facebook. I can’t handle large numbers of friends or followers, and I don’t want to anyway. Facebook is my fun area. It embraces my family and real friends, and a few people I have met at conferences. Don’t expect too much serious stuff from me on Facebook. Most of my postings have nothing to do with my professional life.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that life online is becoming stressful. I often read about people worrying about keeping up with new developments. They are never away from their laptops, iPhones or iPads. I recently read a posting from a young woman who was horrified to find that she had been charged $30 a day for using her iPhone while spending a holiday at her parents’ home (which is in a different country from the one in which she works). Her parents’ home did not have wifi, so she chose to pay the roaming charges in case she missed something important. There’s another solution: switch off your phone while you are on holiday.

Some years ago, when I was still in full employment, I came back from a short holiday to find 500 messages sitting in my email in-folder. In a fit of pique I just trashed the lot without reading a single message. On reflection, I felt a bit guilty and also apprehensive about this, wondering if I might have missed something important. But my act of vandalism appeared to make no difference to my life. People who really needed a reply to the messages that they had sent me contacted me again. A friend of mine did the same thing recently, dumping all the messages that arrived by email into a trash folder while she was on a skiing holiday. I think her experience was much the same as mine.

ICT Links into Languages Conference, 12-13 February 2011

2011-02-18T14:01:00.028Z

There has been a buzz of excitement following the ICT Links into Languages Conference (ILILC) that took place at the University of Southampton over the weekend 12-13 February 2011. This is clear from the activities on Twitter and in various blogs and wikis that are managed by teachers of modern foreign languages. I was not at the conference in person but I followed the text chat in the CovertitLive window embedded in the ILILC wiki and I watched the streaming videos of Joe Dale's and Rachel Hawkes' presentations. Even at a distance it was clear to me that this was going to be a memorable occasion. All credit is due to Joe Dale, who played the main role in setting up this event. See Joe Dale's blog for further information and links.

One of the questions raised by Chris Fuller and Alex Blagona is how the buzz of this conference can be sustained. It’s not an easy question to answer, and I’ve thought long and hard about it. Keeping the buzz going and, above all, convincing the unconvinced that ICT can play an important role in language learning and teaching are not easy tasks. I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s been a long, uphill struggle. Maybe we can learn from the past.

When I first got into ICT in the late 1970s I was regarded by my colleagues as the departmental freak. Their attitudes changed, when my CILT publication on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) appeared in 1982, the first of a string of CILT publications on this topic that appeared from the 1980s onwards. Looking at the titles on my bookshelves I can see my own publications and several others, spanning the period from 1982 to 2001:

Davies G. & Higgins J. (1982) Computers, language and language learning, CILT.

Davies G. & Higgins J. (1985) Using computers in language learning: a teacher's guide, CILT.

Atkinson T. (1992) Hands off. It's my go! IT in the languages classroom, CILT in association with NCET.

Hagen S. (ed.) (1993) Using technology in language learning, City Technology Colleges Trust in association with CILT.

Hewer S. (1997) Text manipulation: computer-based activities to improve knowledge and use of the target language, CILT.

Atkinson T. (1998) WWW: the Internet, CILT.

Atkinson T. (ed.) (2001) Reflections on ICT, CILT.

Thinking back, I recall the 1980s and 1990s as a period of great optimism and enthusiasm - quite different from today in many respects. The first major conference on ICT and language learning and teaching was organised by CILT in association with the Council for Educational Technology (CET) at Queen Mary College’s Halls of Residence way back in 1981. In the following years CILT organised a series of annual conferences that took place at St Martin’s College, Lancaster. Each one generated a buzz, and overall they probably had a considerable impact.

In 1985 the National Centre for Computer Assisted Language Learning (NCCALL) was set up at Ealing College with the aid of central government funding. Its brief was to address the needs of language teachers in FE, but in practice it addressed all sectors of education. I was proud to be the Director of NCCALL, which received visits from around 400 language teachers per year during its existence. Most were participants in our regular courses, but we also had a steady stream of individual visitors from the UK and all over the world. NCCALL worked in close collaboration with the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Modern Languages (CTICML) at the University of Hull, which was set up in 1989 to address the needs of the HE sector. Both centres had a considerable impact on spreading the word about ICT in language learning and teaching, but the funding did not last for ever. NCCALL was closed down in 1990 and the CTICML was closed down in 2002.

BECTA’s predecessors (the CET, MESU and NCET) were also active in the early days of CALL. The CET (Council for Educational Technology) collaborated with CILT in setting up the first major CALL conference in 1981, and a number of important publications followed. I can see the following on my bookshelves:

Learning languages with technology, NCET/MESU, 1988.

The videocassette, Granville in the modern languages classroom (about the Granville simulation, written for the BBC Microcomputer), NCET/MESU, 1988.

Accent on IT, NCET, 1997.

Then there was the NOF initiative, 1999-2003. The NOF initiative was one of the most extensive ICT in-service training initiatives ever undertaken. Funded with £230 million worth of National Lottery money, the initiative aimed to enable thousands of teachers in all subject areas to make effective use of ICT. A nominal sum of £450 was allocated to each full-time teacher in publicly maintained schools. NOF was not a roaring success, however. The main problem was that most of the training was delivered by agencies specialising in ICT training in general rather than subject-specific ICT training – and they were highly criticised. Those agencies, e.g. CILT, that delivered subject-specific training were more successful and highly praised by teachers who took part in their courses. See what I have written about NOF in my article on ICT and MFL in the National Curriculum.

And then CILT set up the Languages ICT site in collaboration with ALL, but this now appears to be a dead site, with the homepage dated April 2009.

A lot of money has been spent on promoting ICT and some of it has been well spent - see the examples above - but who is spending the money now? Not the current UK government, certainly. I hope the impact of ILILC is maintained, but I don't think it will be easy. The key problems are a lack of continuity and a lack of funding, and there is no focal point to which language teachers can turn for advice. I do, however, try to keep the ICT4LT site updated as a labour of love. It’s still going strong, 12 years after it was set up with the aid of EC funding. It’s a struggle keeping it going as so many innovations appear each week, but the average daily visitor count of 1000+ gives me encouragement.

EUROCALL, founded in 1986, is also still going strong. The 2011 EUROCALL conference will take place in Nottingham, 31 August to 3 September, and one of the sub-themes is The use of new technologies for language teaching in schools. Will you be there?

Finally, take a look at my EUROCALL 2010 keynote, Where have we been, where are we now, and where are we going? Can we learn from the past? How can the buzz be sustained?

My life online

2011-01-08T12:59:00.019Z

I have been using electronic communication for many years, dating back to my first encounter with email back in 1985. Around the same time I was able to access the French Minitel system. Getting online to send emails and accessing Minitel in those days was a cumbersome process that involved using a dial-up modem linked to a BBC Microcomputer, but it worked. I was able to communicate by email with a group of colleagues with whom I was working on a project and to display authentic Minitel pages to our students of French. The big breakthrough came after my college joined the JANET network, and in 1993 I was able to send my proposal for a conference keynote presentation to the University of Victoria, Canada, by email. My proposal was accepted by email and all the subsequent correspondence with the University of Victoria took place by email. Not a single piece of paper was posted in either direction.

I began using the Web in 1994. It required the use of a dial-up modem and it was S-L-O-W. Pages took an eternity to download, and I often switched off the display of images to speed things up. But it was fascinating - all that information at one’s fingertips, although it was only a tiny fraction of what is available now, and sound and video did not exist in the early days of the Web.

How things have changed. I am now retired and I spend a lot of time online - but mainly for leisure and pleasure. I am so glad that I am no longer under pressure to keep up to date like many of my younger colleagues. My computer is my window on the world. This is how I spend my day:

I begin my day by checking my email. Thank to my efficient ISP I get very little spam. Most spam is blocked before it reaches my computer, so I never see it, and the odd spam email that sneaks through is trapped by my MailWasher Pro filter. If an email requires a reply that I can deal with in less than a minute I answer it immediately. Emails relating to my business partnership and consultancy work take priority, and anything that requires a longer reply or research goes into my pending box until I find time to deal with it.

My next task is to look at the 30+ discussion lists, blogs, wikis, Nings and fora that I follow. Thanks to RSS and Google Reader this does not take long. I skim quickly through the subject lines and read only those contributions that look interesting - which is usually a small fraction of the total. I reply to one or two if I have anything useful to say.

I then take a quick look at my Twitter account. I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. On the one hand I love the way in which Twitter’s 140-character limit forces people to be succinct, but I hate the flood of messages piling up one after another, often with no easily discernible threads. If people keep bombarding Twitter with stuff that is of no interest to me then I just unfollow them - and I protect my tweets in order to cut down spam. I do, however, find Twitter useful. I pick up many new interesting Web links and announcements via Twitter, especially via the #mfltwitterati and #flteach hashtags.

I then take a quick look at my Facebook account. I use Facebook mainly to keep in touch with my family and friends worldwide, but many of my Facebook followers don’t seem to realise this. They follow me expecting pearls of academic wisdom, but mostly I post personal messages, links to amusing YouTube videos and photos that are of interest only to my family and friends. I find that my Facebook friends are more likely to engage in communication than my Twitter friends. This is probably because most of my Facebook friends are people whom I know personally, but I think it also has something to do with the interface of Facebook, which makes two-way communication easier. In addition I belong to several closed groups (e.g. EUROCALL) on Facebook, where the information exchanged is viewed only by members of each group, i.e. it's quite separate from the information that is broadcast to my family and friends. I use the groups mainly for educational purposes and for keeping myself informed about specific topics in which I have a personal interest.

I also have accounts on Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. I have posted a few videos that I have made to my YouTube account and a small collection of photos to my Flickr account, but I only do this occasionally. I use LinkedIn to build up a list of professional contacts. I thought it might be useful in picking up offers of consultancy work, but so far I have not had a single offer.

By this time it’s mid-morning and time for coffee. I take a break for half an hour walking around most of the time. I do this at regular intervals during the day. I used to suffer from back problems, which my doctor diagnosed as the result of sitting at the computer for long intervals without a break. In 2006, following major surgery, I was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis (DVT). DVT often follows surgery and it is also associated with sitting in the cramped conditions of long-haul flights. But DVT can also be triggered just by sitting for too long. Yes, sitting for too long at a computer is not good for your health. See this story: Computer game teenager gets DVT.

After my coffee break I update the two websites and the Ning that I maintain: Camsoft (my business and personal site), the ICT4LT website and the joint EUROCALL/CALICO Virtual Worlds SIG Ning. Mainly this involves adding new links and information that I have picked up via email, Twitter or Facebook. Once a week I use Xenu Link Sleuth to check my websites for broken links.

Time for lunch and an afternoon walk with our greyhound, Brett. I walk at least a mile every day. We are fortunate to live very close to beautiful National Trust woodland and common land, so this is an enjoyable part of the day. When I get home I usually have a nap for half and hour, and three times a week I go for an afternoon swim in our local Holiday Inn pool.

At around 5pm-6pm I pop into Second Life. This is a good time as my American colleague, Randall Sadler, is usually up and about and I often engage in text chat or voice chat with him - and other colleagues - at the CALICO/EUROCALL HQ. I can also access Second Life via my iPhone, using the Pocket Metaverse app, but only for locating friends and engaging in text chat with them; it’s not (yet) in 3D.

Around 7pm I usually shut down my computer. The evening is for relaxation: a couple of drinks, listening to music and a long and leisurely dinner, followed by viewing TV. Most of the music we listen to now is relayed from iTunes on a laptop in our lounge to my ancient (1994) but powerful Kenwood hifi system, using a small transmitter device - a wonderful blend of old and new technologies. The Sky+ Box that we bought a couple of years ago has totally changed the way in which we watch TV. Most of the broadcasts that we watch, apart from the news, have been recorded on the Sky+ Box’s hard disk, which can store 40 hours of recordings. It’s a very efficient and easy-to-use system, and I can even program the box remotely from my computer or iPhone.

I usually sit with my iPhone by my side while watching TV. I find a couple of iPhone apps particularly useful: namely Google and the International Movie Database (IMDb), and I occasionally use the Twitter or Facebook apps on my iPhone. My memory is not so good as it used to be. For example, while watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age neither my wife Sally nor I could not remember in which way Elizabeth was related to Mary Queen of Scots. Google gave us the answer - they were cousins. We often forget the names of actors too, but the IMDb can quickly provide us with this information. All I have to do is search for the name of the film and call up a complete cast list, a summary of the plot and selected reviews.

Well, that’s about it. How do you spend your life online?

EUROCALL symposium on corpora and computer mediated communication

2010-11-20T10:26:00.001Z

In cooperation with the Eurocall CorpusCALL and CMC SIGs, the Applied English Linguistics group at the University of Tübingen (Germany) is organising the following CALL research symposium:

Authenticating Language Learning: Web Collaboration Meets Pedagogic Corpora
17-19 February 2011

Website: http://www.ael.uni-tuebingen.de/symposium.html

Review of "Talk Now", a CD-ROM for learners of Mandarin Chinese

2010-11-15T11:20:00.005Z

Further to my November 2010 posting on MYLO, in which I criticised the pedagogy underlying the MYLO project and described my (failed) attempt to use it to learn Chinese, I decided to have a look at an existing commercial product, namely “Talk Now” Mandarin Chinese by EuroTalk, to see how it fared. Here is my review:

The package was extremely easy to install. It is supplied on CD-ROM and all I had to do was pop the CD into my computer and then most of the process was automatic. The package has the following features:

- You can choose which language you want to learn FROM. The default is English, but you can also choose to have the interface and translations of the Chinese in a huge range of other languages. This means, for example, that if you are a native German, French, Spanish or Polish speaker you don’t have to struggle with English as the “Trägersprache”.

- The interface is simple, and the screen is clear and uncluttered.

- I signed in as “Graham”, the name under which my scores and progress would be recorded. Records are carried over from session to session, so that you can see how well you are doing and what you already know. If other students were using the package at the same time they would be able to sign in under their individual names and sign back on from session to session.

- I was presented with a choice of learning words and phrases in the following categories: First words, Food, Colours, Phrases, Body, Numbers, Shopping, Countries, Time. I chose First words.

- I could click on the English translation of each word and hear how it was pronounced both by a native male and native female speaker. At the same time each word and phrase was presented to me as pinyin text, as Chinese characters and with an associated cartoon. The sound quality was excellent.

- I was able to click on a microphone and practise pronouncing each word and phrase as many times as I liked in order to hear how I sounded, using the male or female native speaker as a model.

- I was able to print a full-colour list of the words and phrases that I was learning as pinyin text, Chinese characters, translation into English, and with a cartoon image associated with each word or phrase. I sat down in a comfy chair and read through the words and phrases after I had finished practising pronouncing them on my computer.

- I worked my way through four game-like quizzes at increasingly difficult levels that tested how well I could remember the words and phrases that has been presented to me. I discovered that the program remembered my weak points and homed in on them so that I was offered additional practice.

- I was able to click on a button that stored all the recordings of the words and phrases in iTunes on my computer, and I was then able to transfer them to my iPod and iPhone so that I could listen to them while walking around.

So what’s missing? There’s a lack of explanations about the tone system, the pinyin writing system and how to recognise and write Chinese characters. I also missed images and videos showing real people in China speaking Chinese, and something about Chinese culture – but I found all this at the BBC Languages website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/

I needed explanations of Chinese grammar too, but I found it difficult to find anything on the Web that explains Chinese grammar in simple terms. I also needed a dictionary. This was easier to find. The “Useful links” section at the BBC site led me to http://www.clearchinese.com/. Other links can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_guides/links/

My verdict: “Talk Now” is not perfect, but it’s not at all bad, and it does an efficient job. After a couple of hours of practice I was actually LEARNING Mandarin Chinese. I could recognise and pronounce about 50 words and phrases, and one day later I could still remember around half of them. “Talk Now” is good value for money at £24.99 for a single-user licence or £110 for a school site licence, but it needs to be backed up by other resources. There are other packages for more advanced learners and the range of languages on offer is enormous. There is already a EuroTalk Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/EuroTalk, and EuroTalk products will be going online early next year. For further information see
http://eurotalk.com/en/

I am not alone in criticising the MYLO project. A lively discussion is currently (November 2010) going in in the Linguanet Forum.

Regards
Graham Davies

MYLO - a new way to learn languages?

2010-11-12T11:01:00.011Z

MYLO is a UK goverment-funded project that aims to offer secondary school students a "new way to learn languages", specifically French, German, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. See my February 2010 posting on MYLO.

I have had a quick look at the MYLO Website and the MYLO YouTube videos. My first reactions:

The following message on the homepage (as of November 2010) does not inspire visitors with confidence:

"A new UK Government took office on 11 May. As a result the content on this site may not reflect current Government policy. All statutory guidance and legislation published on this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indicated otherwise. To view the new website, please visit http://www.education.gov.uk/"

Why does the MYLO URL continue to use DCSF? The DCSF changed its name shortly after the new government took over in May 2010, and most old DCSF addresses have been updated.

As a former teacher of German, I looked first at the section on German Basics, Greetings and Goodbyes. The word "tschüs" (informal "goodbye") is introduced here. There are different ways of pronouncing and spelling this word, depending on the region, personal preferences, etc. The "ü" can be long or short and the spelling must correspond to the pronunciation. In the sound recordings in MYLO the "ü" is pronounced short, and therefore the spelling should be "tschüss", but MYLO presents the written form as "tschüs", which is the correct spelling only if the "ü" is pronounced long. I remember having this discussion when I worked on German Steps for the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/lj/. You will find "tschüss" in the BBC materials. Not trusting my own judgement or memory, I checked the spelling/pronunciation at http://www.canoo.net/. This confirmed that, since the 1996 spelling reform, "tchüss" is correct when the vowel is pronounced short and that "tschüs" is correct when the vowel is pronounced long. Duden agrees: 23rd edition (2004) and later. MYLO has promised to correct this error, but someone should have done some thorough checking in the first place.

The MYLO YouTube presentations are slick and the advice given in the “Learning to Learn” clips is sound, but I think it will wash straight over the heads of most teenagers.

I decided to put myself in the position of a learner. This is a bit difficult for me as I speak German fluently, my French is tolerable, and I have good survival skills in Spanish. I don’t know much Chinese, however. I followed a BBC radio course in spoken Mandarin over 40 years ago, and I have forgotten most of what I have learned, so I had a go at MYLO’s Mandarin Chinese exercises. I scored 100% on all the exercises that I attempted (matching sounds with the pinyin texts and the Chinese characters), but I learned nothing about the tone system and how Chinese is structured. Half an hour later I could not recall most of the words that had been presented. These important elements are lacking:

1. The possibility of recording and playing back one’s own voice, which is vital in the early stages of language learning and features in many software packages that have been published in recent years by companies such as EuroTalk and Virtual Languages.

2. There are no “real-life” images or videos. See, for example, the BBC’s introduction to Mandarin Chinese at http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/. Furthermore, the BBC materials are much better in terms of presentation, e.g. the tone system, pinyin, Chinese characters, and what the words and phrases actually mean. There are also useful links to external sites.

3. There is negligible feedback in the exercises in MYLO, and I don’t recognise the pedagogical and cognitive principles on which they are based - maybe a variation of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development? Feedback is crucial. We learned a lot about interactivity and feedback (both intrinsic and extrinsic feedback) while working on the TELL Consortium software in the 1990s. See ICT4LT Module 1.1, Section 7.1 and Section 7.2:
Interactivity: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-1.htm#7.1
Feedback: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-1.htm#7.2

MYLO advertises itself as a “new way to learn languages”. Well, not really. Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has been around since the 1960s, CILT’s first publication on CALL - aimed at secondary school teachers - appeared in 1982 (I was one of the authors), and multimedia CALL has been around since the early 1990s: see my EUROCALL 2010 keynote,
“Where have we been, where are we now, and where are we going?”
Video: http://iufm.u-bordeaux4.fr/ressources/recherche/eurocall2010_conf1
PowerPoint: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/Graham_EUROCALL_2010_Keynote.ppt

We have learned a lot of lessons on this long journey, but MYLO does not appear to have been listening.

I am not alone in criticising MYLO. A lively discussion is currently (November 2010) going on in the Linguanet Forum.

10 best languages to learn right now

2010-10-17T10:55:00.002Z

This is an interesting list of languages, compiled on the basis of the numbers of community speakers of these languages in the USA - and also the prospects of using these languages in international business. The list of 10 best languages to learn right now comprises:

1. Spanish
2. Chinese
3. French
4. German
5. Tagalog
6. Vietnamese
7. Korean
8. Polish
9. Russian
10. Italian

What would such a list look like from a UK point of view? We often talk about the "best" foreign language for us to learn, but weighing up the various reasons for learning a particular foreign language is not easy. As native speakers of English we find life far too easy travelling around a world where English is so widely spoken both as a first and as a second language.

French is currently the No. 1 language that is taught in UK schools, mainly for historical reasons and because France is our nearest neighbour, but strong arguments have been put forward for learning Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese too.

And what about our community languages? Polish or Panjabi might be the first choice in the area where I live.

What do you think?

Top 25 world languages blogs

2010-10-17T10:30:00.000Z

We are delighted to announce that the ICT4LT blog has been listed at No. 15 in the Top 25 languages blogs.

No. 1 on the list is Lisa Stevens' blog ¡Vámonos! - a useful and entertaining blog for primary school language teachers. We list Lisa's blog - and many others - in Section 12.2.2 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site under the heading Useful blogs created by and for language teachers.

SLanguages Conference, 15-16 October 2010

2010-09-24T10:34:00.000Z

SLanguages 2010 is a 24-hour virtual conference on language teaching and learning in Second Life. It will run from 10:00 SL time (5pm GMT), 15 October, 10:00 SL time (5pm GMT), 16 October. Wherever possible, sessions will be repeated to enable people in different time zones to see them. There will also be group discussions and social events and the opportunity to visit an exhibition of SL tools for educators. Further information can be found in the AVALON Ning:

http://avalon-project.ning.com/events/slanguages-2010

EUROCALL 2010 Conference, 8-11 September, Bordeaux

2010-09-01T13:51:00.007Z

The EUROCALL 2010 Conference took place in Bordeaux, 8-11 September. As in previous years, the conference was covered in a Virtual Strand to enable people who could not attend the conference in person to follow the main events. The EUROCALL 2010 Conference Blog, with embedded CoveritLive windows, was the main element of the Virtual Strand, but other social networks were also used:

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Flickr

Videos of the plenary presentations have now been made available, as well as photostreams of the parallel sessions and social events: EUROCALL 2010 Videos and Photos.

Further information about EUROCALL can be found at the EUROCALL Website.

The 1920s Berlin Project in Second Life

2010-07-16T13:26:00.001Z

This is the website for The 1920s Berlin Project in Second Life:

http://www.1920sberlin.com/

More information, with screenshots and videos, can be found in the AVALON Ning:

http://avalon-project.ning.com/forum/topics/ich-bin-ein-berliner

Second Life is a 3D world in which simulations (“sims”) of any real or imagined location can be created and in which people can interact in their avatar guises. The aim of the project is to stage a German course in a historical setting. Participants are asked to wear clothes of the 1920s, and a free set of clothes is provided for your avatar. There is an active role-playing community with great characters like Jo Yardley, a war widow, and Petrus, the barman, who might give you a glass of Absinth when the police are not looking.

Here is the SLURL:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dudintsev/130/60/501

The German course is an experiment to see whether language teachers in Second Life can set up a sim and a community where they can offer their courses and where the lessons offer real added value for the learners, introducing them to a community and place which they can come back to by themselves and practise their German.

Here is an extract from the description of the project at the above website:

“Berlin in the 1920s was a very interesting time, politically, culturally and in many other ways. We wanted to try and recreate the atmosphere of this fantastic city in that amazing era. But we wanted to show a realistic and authentic view of the darker side of this city. Most historical sims show a somewhat romanticised, clean, charming view of the past. We wanted to show our visitors what common people lived like in the backstreets of the poorer neighbourhoods. No big houses, palaces, lanes and glorious theatres in our sim, but tiny apartments, a cheap modern looking cinema, a theatre that has seen better days and a dance hall that is situated in a damp basement and where they have lukewarm beer in dirty glasses.”

Second Life - the long goodbye: re Gavin Dudeney's blog

2010-07-16T08:38:00.002Z

There is a very lively discussion taking place right now in Gavin Dudeney’s That’SLife blog in a thread headed Second Life - The Long Goodbye. Gavin has decided to say goodbye to SL, at least in terms of continuing to play a role in using SL for teaching and training. He has decided that SL is not the most suitable environment for educators, citing technical problems, the unfriendliness of Viewer 2 and the general lack of real improvements during the last two years.

As Gavin puts it: “It’s frustrating not to improve at a better pace, it’s frustrating to see competent users still having voice and other problems and, well, it’s just frustrating sometimes.” Read Gavin’s blog and the large number of comments by people who agree or disagree with Gavin.

What do you think? Is SL “ too demanding and too unreliable for most educators” and are there “better ways of doing most things you can do in SL in terms of education”?

Hard to teach - teaching foreign languages at secondary school level

2010-06-09T11:46:00.002Z

This Teachers TV video shows three imaginative case studies of teachers using ICT to teach modern foreign languages at secondary school level.

1. José Picardo's students at Nottingham High School for Boys use Voki, Glogster and Stupefix to practise speaking Spanish.

2. Fiona Joyce at Kingstone School in Barnsley uses the Web to stimulate her students' interest in French life and language. She uses French-language videos to trigger vocabulary work with her students, encourages them to use the Web for research and to use an inter-school social network to communicate with French-speaking students around the world.

3. At Cramlington Learning Village, the emphasis is on encouraging students' self-assessment skills. Chris Harte's students practise their spoken French, using Audacity, by creating an audio-visual presentation about Haiti.

See also José Picardo's Box of Tricks blog.

New UK government to close BECTA

2010-05-26T09:12:00.009Z

See this article in The Guardian, 24 May 2010:
Government to close BECTA

BECTA is the British Education and Communications Technology Agency, which is responsible for information and support regarding the use of ICT to schools and other educational institutions throughout the UK.

Way back in 1981 BECTA was known as the Council for Educational Technology (CET). I was invited in that year to a meeting with representatives from the CET and CILT (now known as the National Centre for Languages), which led to the first major UK conference on the use of computers in language teaching and learning - at which I gave my first public presentation on computer assisted language learning.

The CET changed its name a couple of times in the following years, first to the National Council for Educational Technology (NCET) and later to the Microelectronics in Education Support Unit (MESU). I have some good publications on my bookshelves that date back to that era, e.g.

Learning languages with technology (printed materials), NCET, 1988
Videocassette on the Granville simulation, NCET, 1988
Accent on IT (videocassette and printed materials), MESU, 1997

In those days representatives of BECTA’s predecessors were often in evidence at national conferences for language teachers in the UK and at the international EUROCALL conferences, but then they disappeared into their hi-tech shell. BECTA expressed an interest in becoming a partner in the ICT4LT project, which was initiated with European Commission funding in 1999, but then they withdrew, indicating they would rather just play a role in publicising and supporting the project in a more informal way – which never happened.

The name change to BECTA took place in 2000, and from this point on I think the agency began to lose the plot. It became more technology-driven, and the needs of language teachers (and other non-technical subject areas) were overlooked. The 1980s was a good period, but pedagogy faded into the background in the 1990s, and then BECTA got involved in expensive, grandiose (but short-lived) schemes such as the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) and Curriculum Online. There is very little at the BECTA site now that focuses on language teaching and learning.

Teachers do not need a costly government agency like BECTA. There are hundreds of sites on the Web where useful information about ICT can be obtained, and teachers also tend to use social networks if they are looking for information or advice. Frankly, I am happy to see BECTA disappear.

Language learning and social media

2010-05-19T11:31:00.002Z

Language learning and social media is an EC-funded project that embraces a mix of activities exploring the relationship of language learning and social media in the Web 2.0 era:

Participatory debates, award-winning competitions, policy recommendations and reports, scientific publications and field studies.

The 14 partner institutions will examine six key dimensions of language learning and social media:

Language learning, social media and social inclusion.
Language learning, social media and development of language resources.
Language learning and teaching through social media in new EU countries: Romania, Latvia and Poland.
Language learning, social media and multilingualism.
Language learning through social media: evolution of teaching practices.
Language learning and teaching in formal and non formal contexts through ICT.

Further information at: http://www.elearningeuropa.info/languagelearning

New book on interactive whiteboards: Thomas & Schmid

2010-05-14T15:26:00.003Z

Thomas M. & Schmid E.C. (2010) (eds.) Interactive whiteboards for education: theory, research and practice, Hershey, PA (USA): IGI Global. ISBN: 978-1-61520-715-2.

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) play an important role in language teaching, especially in the UK, where it is unusual to find a school that does not have at least one interactive whiteboard. Most schools now have several interactive whiteboards installed in their classrooms. See ICT4LT, Section 4, Module 1.4, where we take a look at the use of IWBs in whole-class teaching and where other publications on IWBs are cited.

This new publication by Thomas & Schmid (quoting the publicity) “emphasises the importance of professional development, credible educational research, and dialogue between teachers, administrators, policymakers and learners. This book intends to guide and inform the process of technology integration in education, introducing valuable case studies for educators interested in present and future IWB technology.”

On the whole IWBs have been embraced with enthusiasm by teachers of foreign languages in the UK, as shown in my small-scale investigation, How effective is the use ICT in language learning and teaching? which I conducted in the autumn of 2008.

But IWBs have not been without their critics, for example Scott Thornbury, whose provocative contribution to the IATEFL 2009 blog inspired this thread (May 2009) in the ICT4LT blog: “IWBs are useless. Discuss” (Quoting Scott Thornbury).

What do you think?

Flash forward: Language teachers using social networking sites

2010-05-11T09:59:00.003Z

Flash forward is an article written by Yojana Sharma and Joe Dale, published in the TES Magazine, 9 April 2010

Many language teachers are sceptical about the use of social networking sites and other Web 2.0 applications. They question how such tools fit in with language teaching methodology and they often find that their school's network blocks wikis, blogs, YouTube, Twitter and many other Web 2.0 sites that offer potentialy exciting learning opportunities.

This article should convert some of the sceptics. It illustrates how an informal network of around 50-60 language teachers in the UK is making good use of such tools in the modern foreign languages classroom.

See also New growth from the grassroots, Joe Dale's blog, 10 May 2010.

Section 12 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site focuses on social networking.

Second Life videos: Groovy Winkler tours the EUROCALL/CALICO HQs

2010-05-06T13:01:00.003Z

I have recently created these three videos about Second Life. They aim to show you some of the features of the EUROCALL and CALICO HQs, which are managed jointly by myself, Graham Davies (aka Groovy Winkler) and Randall Sadler (aka Randall Renoir). All three videos were made using the Fraps screen capture software:

1. Tour of the EUROCALL HQ Building in Second Life

2. Holodecks at the CALICO/EUROCALL HQ in Second Life

3. Shared Media at the EUROCALL/CALICO HQ in Second Life

More videos are in the pipeline.

Using Viewer 2 in Second Life: new opportunities for teachers and students

2010-02-28T11:25:00.001Z

I've been experimenting with Second Life's new Viewer 2. It's a big advance on the previous viewer. The interface is easier to understand, having more in common with a Web browser, which should shorten the learning curve for newcomers to Second Life. But, most importantly, Viewer 2 opens up a host of new opportunities for teachers and students. It is now possible to set up a live Web page on any surface in Second Life - a flat screen, a cube or even a sphere. The user can interact with the Web page in the normal way, i.e. as one would using a standard Web browser. This means that Second Life can now incorporate a range of Web 2.0 tools, such as collaborative writing tools (e.g. Etherpad), Flickr, online PowerPoint presentations, etc. Video can be streamed in from almost any source, including YouTube and Teachers TV. This was not easy to do using the previous viewer - and I could not stream Teachers TV videos into Second Life, except by using a very cumbersome roundabout route. Now both teacher and student can embed Web pages or videos into Second Life without hassle.

Have a look at this blog thread in the EUROCALL/CALICO Virtual Worlds SIG Ning, which contains links to the Viewer 2 tutorials on YouTube and to Nergiz Kern's wiki, where she describes and demonstrates some of Viewer 2's capabilities:

Second Life launches its new Viewer 2

Keep an eye on Section 14.2.1 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT website. It's all about Second Life and continually updated.

Graham

Practice: the missing link?

2010-02-23T12:27:00.000Z

Many changes have taken place since I first got involved in using ICT for language learning and teaching. In the early days of the microcomputer boom in the 1980s there was not great deal of choice in the range of software available. The first programs that appeared were rather dry text-only multiple-choice and gap-filling exercises, which were nevertheless very popular. Audio and video were not available and many schools could afford to buy only one single computer, which was moved around different classrooms, connected to a large TV screen and used for whole-class teaching. And the Web was just a twinkle in the eye of its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, finally reaching the public at large in 1993.

Now we have some excellent Presentation tools - interactive whiteboards and associated software - and a range of so-called Web 2.0 tools have appeared that are useful for the Production of language by our students, e.g. blogs, wikis, podcasts, animations, etc: see ICT4LT Module 1.5, Section 2.2, headed What is Web 2.0?

This may be misconception on my part, but am I right in thinking that there is a missing link, namely Practice? What has happened to the programs and authoring tools that teachers used to generate practice activities for their students? During the late 1980s and 1990s the range of published programs and authoring tools for generating practice activities - vocab, grammar, all the mundane but essential stuff - got better and better, incorporating audio and video, discrete error analysis and intrinsic feedback: see ICT4LT Module 1.1 Section 7.1 on Interactivity and Section 7.2 on Feedback.

I may be wrong but, judging from most of the blogs, wikis and forums aimed at language teachers, it now seems to be a case of either “Where can I find a PowerPoint presentation on XYZ?” or “Where can I find a Web 2.0 tool that enables my students to write a blog / record a podcast / create a cartoon strip?” Is Practice the missing link?

Reactions?

MYLO, the Open School for Languages

2010-02-08T13:44:00.008Z

Setting up an Open School for Languages (OSfL) was one of the major recommendations of the Dearing Languages Review (2007). Dearing proposed that the OSfL should offer an innovative and exciting online learning environment to motivate pupils to learn languages and to help reverse the alarming fall in the number of young people choosing to study languages beyond the age of 14 (i.e. after Year 9) in UK schools.

In March 2009, the OSfL contract, worth £5.4 million, was awarded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to Lightbox Education, part of the RM group (Research Machines), Oxfordshire. The other key players are the University of Cambridge’s Language Centre, CILT (The National Centre for Languages), the Association for Language Learning (ALL), the University of Salford and the University of Southampton.

The working name of the Open School for Languages is now MYLO (My Languages Online). A MYLO Website and MYLO Blog have been set up.

Initial priority is to be given to those learners who might give up languages at the end of Year 9 and who therefore require more stimulation to maintain levels of interest and engagement. Year 10 and Year 11 are to be targeted in later stages of the project. In the initial phase the materials will focus on French, Spanish, German and Mandarin Chinese, with the capability of later expansion according to identified needs and allowing for the fact that different languages have different requirements. Materials will be provided for ab initio learners of particular languages as well as for learners with pre-existing knowledge. This may include the provision of intensive courses.

Activities proposed by Lightbox include producing a TV advert, working in a French fashion house, and designing a football kit. MYLO will also include a social networking element that allows learners to join a MYLO community. Students will be able create their online profile, comment on the work of their peers, get feedback from their teachers and even compete against other schools. Teachers will be able to create playlists of activities for their students to tie in with their own study requirements and personal interests.

This is a major project, with big money at stake and with high expectations. MYLO is also expected to provide:

1. Learner-focused practice materials and resources such as online dictionaries, information on grammar, functions and notions.

2. Information about and links to existing websites, services and other online learning resources.

3. A blended learning experience that reflects individual learners’ preferences and varying capabilities, including personalised evaluation routes.

4. Clear learning routes, i.e. the “core”, combined with a series of flexible modules to enrich, develop and personalise the core.

5. Maximum accessibility to all and appropriate use of interactivity, including learners at home using standard equipment,

6. Support for teachers to help them advise learners how to use the resources.

7. Support for teachers on how best they can use the materials in face-to-face classroom-based learning.

8. Support for learners directly as well as for teachers, including the provision of essential study skills materials on learning how to learn a foreign language.

9. Materials to support “languages in use”, for example how materials could be used to support languages in the new diplomas, or languages used in the context of sport or the arts.

10. Technology that clearly serves the pedagogical objectives. Access to the website, while delivering a personalised experience, will also take into account the fact that the target audience will utilise a variety of access points, for example, the young person’s home, his or her school, a local library, etc.

Consideration is also expected to be given to new developments in learning technology over the duration of the project. One idea that comes to mind is Second Life for Teens, a 3D world for learners of English as a Foreign Language, managed by The British Council.

MYLO was presented publicly for the first time at the BETT Show on 15 January 2010 and again to a group of practising language teachers at CILT, The National Centre for Languages, on 8 February 2010. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend either of these presentations.

Post your impressions here if you were one of the lucky ones who got a preview of MYLO.

The SAEL Project - online support websites for language teachers

2010-01-25T16:06:00.004Z

The ICT4LT site and its associated blog have been mentioned as an example of good practice at the SAEL Project Website.

SAEL (Sites d'Accompagnement pour les Enseignants de Langues) is an EC-funded project that aims to facilitate the implementation of language policy recommendations with a view to improving the quality of language teaching in Europe. The project seeks to achieve this by promoting the creation of online support websites for language teachers to help keep them up-to-date with innovative approaches, resources and other information. See:
http://www.eurosael.eu/en/project/aims-5.html

One of the final outcomes of the SAEL Project is a Guide that contains practical suggestions for creating and updating websites designed to support the work of language teachers. The Guide sets out to provide practical answers to the following questions:

• What is a language teacher support website?
• How are these websites designed, run and improved?
• Who is involved in this process and what are the main stages?
• Why does a support website represent real added value for the teaching community?

The Guide includes recommendations, examples of websites and good practice for setting up, improving and running support websites that match the requirements of your country, region or institution. The Guide can be downloaded in PDF format. Click here: SAEL Guide

Links to blogs on ICT and language teaching

2010-01-09T12:04:00.001Z

There are two very active blogs that I would like to recommend. Both focus on teaching foreign languages in secondary education in the UK.

Joe Dale's blog, Integrating ICT into the Modern Foreign Languages Classroom:
http://joedale.typepad.com/

José Picardo's blog, Box of Tricks:
http://www.boxoftricks.net/

Joe works as an adviser for CILT, the National Centre for Foreign Languages, and José teaches in a secondary school in the UK. There are many other good blogs written by practising teachers. I have compiled a list of those that I look at regularly in Section 12.2, Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site.

I would be interested in receiving feedback on what you find in any of these blogs, and if you know of a blog that you would like to recommend please let me know and I will add it to my list in ICT4LT Module 1.5.

Teaching Languages in a Virtual World

2010-01-09T11:59:00.003Z

A TESOL Electronic Village Online (EVO) Course: Ref. TLinVW10
11 January to 21 February 2010

Teaching Languages in a Virtual World is a hands-on collaborative teacher CPD workshop to explore the relationship between virtual worlds and language learning. The course targets mainly ESOL teachers, but a good deal of workshop is relevant to teachers of other languages.

For further information about the TESOL Electronic Village Online (EVO) see:

http://evosessions.pbworks.com

21 things that became obsolete this decade

2009-12-28T12:50:00.007Z

The subject line of this thread comes from the The Business Insider website, which lists 21 things that have supposedly become obsolete in the last ten years:

It’s an interesting list and it prompted me to think about all the things listed on the above Web page that I no longer use:

1. PDAs that used a stylus: I went back to my trusty Filofax in 2003 when I dropped my Psion Organiser at Gatwick Airport and lost four years of records and appointments. Yes, I did have a backup on my PC but it was not in a format that I could easily convert to other formats. I retrieved most of the important data, however.

2. Email accounts that you have to pay for: I still pay for mine, but it’s part of my deal with my ISP, which includes broadband, website space and email.

3. Dial-up modems: British Telecom finished digging up the pavement outside my house in 2002 to install a broadband line. I threw away my 56kbps modem and bought a broadband modem.

4. Getting film developed: I shot my last reel of 35mm film in 2004 while I was on holiday in Canada and Alaska. Most of the trip was documented on my digital camcorder and the videos are now stored on DVDs.

5. VHS cassette and DVD hire shops: Our local Blockbusters shop is about to close. I can’t remember the last time I visited the shop to hire a VHS cassette or DVD.

6. Maps: I bought a TomTom satnav device in 2006 and I use it to guide me all over Europe. Before that, I used Google Maps and an AA route planner on CD-ROM. I still have a map of the Europe in my car; you never know…

7. Newspaper classified ads: They are still around. Our local paper carries hundreds of them every week, but I have hardly ever used classified ads to look for jobs, furniture, a new car, etc.

8. Landlines: I still have a landline at home, which I use for phone calls and for broadband, but I have also been using a mobile phone since 1995.

9. Long-distance telephone charges: I use Skype regularly, but many of our (mainly elderly) relations and friends in Canada and Australia still rely on landlines. Charges have dropped considerably, however. I use Second Life to talk to my wife when I am away from home.

10. Public pay phones: I have not seen anyone using our local public pay phone for years. The last time I remember using a public pay phone was in 1997, when British Airways gave me a free phone card to enable me to change a hotel booking in Vancouver because our flight was cancelled as a result of industrial action by cabin crew.

11. VCRs: I have a dual VCR/DVD player/recorder that enables me to record off-air onto both types of media or to transfer videos from one type of media to the other. I rarely record onto VHS cassettes these days but I have a big VHS library that I’ll never get round to converting to DVD format.

12. Fax machines: I disconnected my fax machine this year. It was hardly ever used over the last two years.

13. Phone books, dictionaries, encyclopedias: I still use all of these but not as frequently. Most of the up-to-date information I need is online.

14. Calling “411”: This is a telephone information service in North America. I can’t remember the equivalent number in the UK, but I never use it anyway.

15. Audio CDs: I can’t remember the last time that I bought an audio CD. I buy most of my music from iTunes. I sometimes create my own CD audio mix to play in my car, but now I play most of my music via an FM transmitter (similar to iTrip, but cheaper) that sends it from my computer to my hifi system. When I am on the move I use an iPod.

16. Backing up your data on floppies or CDs: I stopped doing this around three years ago when I bought a massive external hard drive with software that backs up all my data automatically. I also back up valuable data on the other two computers on my home wifi network and online at my website – belt and braces!

17. Getting bills in the mail: I receive notification of most of my regular household bills by email and I always pay them online.

18. Buttons that you press: This refers to the trend towards touch-screens on hand-held devices. My camcorder uses a touch-screen, which I quite like. I use buttons on my mobile phone, which – annoyingly – have become a bit too small for my clumsy fingers.

19. Losing touch: Social networks help to keep people in touch, but I use them mainly for professional purposes. I keep in touch with most of my relations and friends by email.

20. Boundaries: Reading contributions to Facebook and Twitter, it is clear that boundaries of rudeness and good taste are often overstepped. I try to be a nice person online.

21. Paper: It’s definitely still around in huge quantities. Tons of junk mail drop through our letter box every year. Computers are very good at generating printouts of stuff that you can’t be bothered to read from the screen – or would rather read from a printout.

22. Bonus No. 22 – Record shops: Two big shops in our town that used to sell audio CDs and DVDs closed around 2-3 years ago.

I also checked out the 15 new gadgets that changed everything this decade entry at the same website. I don't own so many of these, but I do have an iPod, I regularly use flash drives for moving data around, I have a TomTom satnav, and my desktop computer has a flat-screen monitor. I love my Sky+ Box, with its 40 hours of hard disk space for recording TV programmes off-air; it has totally changed my viewing habits.

Graham

Technology v. pedagogy - lest we forget...

2009-12-05T12:15:00.006Z

There is an interesting discussion going on right now (November-December 2009) in Marisa Constantinides' blog: Don't forget the pedagogy. She opens the discussion by stating:

"Technology is the means, not the end. Technology is wonderful when it is not the end but the means to education, language acquisition, whatever it is that we want to use it for... It should enhance our lessons, not take over because all the members of our PLN seem to be doing nothing else!"

Wise words! As we state on the ICT4LT homepage, our approach is pedagogy-driven, and the emphasis is on language teaching methodologies that can be implemented successfully with the aid of new technologies.

This is not a new debate. The question of technology v. pedagogy has been around for as long as I have been involved in using computers to teach foreign languages, i.e. since 1976, but it needs to be reawakened from time to time to ensure that we don’t lose sight of it. Judging by the number and variety of responses that Marisa has received in her blog, the debate is not going to subside for a long time – which is, of course, a good thing.

Above all, it is important that we never lose sight of established pedagogical and methodological approaches that appear to work, but we should also keep an eye on emerging technologies and consider ways in which they might be applied to language learning and teaching to do things that cannot easily be done with other media. There are many examples of the latter, dating back to Higgins and Johns in the early 1980s, who gave us total Cloze (see Section 8.3 of Module 1.4) and classroom concordancing (see Module 2.4), neither of which would have been possible without the use of computers.

The danger is that some (mainly younger) teachers are dazzled by the technology and do not seriously think about how it might be usefully applied. But most of them soon grow out of their fascination and make their choices more carefully. Perhaps it is time we stopped talking about ICT as if it were something special. It’s no more special to me now than the tape recorder was when I began my career as a language teacher in the mid-1960s. For me, ICT is “normal” (v. the reference to Stephen Bax in Section3.6 of Module 1.4). I use a computer every day for several hours per day, not so much for teaching now as I am theoretically retired, but I would find life without the computer very inconvenient. Last week I paid my telephone, gas and electricity bills online, bought new vehicle tax discs for both my cars, checked the snow reports in anticipation of my skiing holiday, sent photos to friends and relatives in Canada, the USA and Australia, etc. I also toured a few Spanish sims in Second Life in order to improve my knowledge of Spanish.

I am often taken to task for my tendency to look back at the past rather than forward to the future, but there is a good deal that we can learn from the past. I was honoured to be invited to take part in a Virtual Round Table Panel Discussion on 13 November 2009, shared with Ton Koenraad, Vance Stevens and Duane Sider (President, Rosetta Stone). Between us, we have over 100 years of experience of CALL! The theme of the discussion was:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana 1863–1952, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905).

It was an interesting debate. Shortly after the discussion ended I had another look at an article that I was commissioned to write for a Council of Europe of Europe publication (1997): Lessons from the past, lessons for the future: 20 years of CALL. I added a host of comments indicating what is different now. A lot has changed, but many old attitudes remain.

What do you think?

Graham

Second Life is on the way out...

2009-11-23T10:22:00.003Z

Well, so says the BBC. According to this article at the BBC News Magazine website, Second Life is on the way out: What happened to Second Life?

The author of the article, Lauren Hansen writes:

"Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going."

Read the feedback section on the above page and it's clear that the News Magazine's readers have mixed views.

There is no mention of education in the article, but some of the contributors in the feedback section do mention the value of SL in teaching and learning. I wrote a comment to the BBC website in the feedback section, indicating how useful SL is in education, especially in language teaching and learning, but it has not been published - not yet anyway (23 November 2009). The BBC article is very biased and highlights the ignorance of the writer, Lauren Hansen, who is obviously interested only in the business aspects of SL and could not be bothered to do further research. Maybe she should take a look at Module 1.5, Section 14.2.1, which is all about language learning and teaching in SL. And I am sure she would be impressed by the EUROCALL/CALICO HQ in SL.

Apart from education, I wonder if Lauren Hansen is aware of the excellent work being done by organisations such as the American Cancer Society (ACS) in SL. The ACS holds regular support meetings for cancer patients, who can give voice to their anxieties in their anonymous avatar guises and seek the support and advice of other cancer patients. I was once invited to talk about my own experiences as a cancer patient to an ACS support meeting in SL at Hope Haven. It was a rewarding and very moving experience.

What do you think?

BTW, this topic is also being discussed in the EUROCALL/CALICO Virtual Worlds Ning, and it has featured in Twitter too.

Graham Davies (Groovy Winkler in SL)

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - 20 years on

2009-11-03T09:31:00.001Z

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - 20 years on

I crossed the border into East Germany on three occasions:

1. In 1963 when I was a student in Hamburg. The West German government organised heavily subsidised trips to Berlin for foreign students. The Wall had been there for just two years. There were memorials all along the Wall to people who had been shot trying to flee to the West. We were allowed to cross into East Berlin on foot via Checkpoint Charlie.

2. In 1976 when I was a lecturer at Ealing College. I spent a month on a course for teachers of German at the then Karl-Marx University in Leipzig. I had a room in a flat with an East German family. It was a very good course and improved my German considerably. I travelled around a bit, visiting Dresden, Naumburg, Jena, Bitterfeld, Halle and Colditz Castle. Life was pretty grim in East Germany at that time.

3. I walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin again on Sunday, 12 November. This is quite a story. There had been lots of reports on TV about the demonstrations in the East Germany, and the atmosphere in both East and West was very tense. We all wondered if the Russian tanks were about to move in. But the outcome was not what we expected. As I was driving home from Ealing College on 9 November I heard an announcement on the radio that the Berlin Wall had been opened and that citizens from East Berlin were being allowed to cross into West Berlin. I was gobsmacked, as I was about to head for Berlin the following morning, 10 November, to visit three of my students who were spending part of their year abroad at the Freie Universität in West Berlin, to give a guest lecture at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and to go to a conference on ICT and language learning and teaching in Rostock. This has all been planned weeks ahead, and I had no idea that I would be an eye-witness to the most momentous event I have ever experienced in my life. My full report is here:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/berlin.htm

What a week!

Now we have a whole generation of kids who have grown up and have never experienced the division of Germany. This excellent video on YouTube reminds us of what the border looked like:

"Eingemauert!" Die innerdeutsche Grenze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlbAUFvh04k

If you have the Second Life viewer installed on your computer you can experience the Wall in 3D. The 3D simulation, complete with an accomanying exhibition, can be found here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ciel/62/121/24

Graham Davies

Language Teaching and Technology Events: November 09

2009-10-27T10:44:00.001Z

One-day Conference on Technology Enhanced Language Teaching and Learning, SOAS, University of London, 12 Nov 09:
http://www.soas.ac.uk/events/event53702.html

Virtual Round Table Conference on Language Learning with Technology, 12-13 Nov 09:
http://virtual-round-table.ning.com/page/conference-1

ICT Show and Tell Day for Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages, 14 Nov 09:
http://joedale.wikispaces.com/MFL+Show+and+Tell+09

I'll be there, face-to-face or virtually!

Graham Davies

Using presentation software and online communites in the classroom

2009-10-23T13:28:00.002Z

Two useful videos at the Teachers TV site

Improving your presentations
http://www.teachers.tv/video/37335
The Teachers TV website describes the video as follows:
Year One primary teacher Lise Bosher is challenged to improve her presentation skills using ICT. Presenting to pupils is something teachers do on a day to day basis, yet many are still nervous about incorporating ICT into their presentations. Lise meets Joe Dale, a middle school French teacher, who is already using ICT technology to enhance his own presentations. After observing one of his classes, Lise returns to her own classroom to put the presentation technology she has learned into action.

Online Communities in the Classroom
http://www.teachers.tv/video/37336
The Teachers TV website describes the video as follows:
Secondary French teacher Marie Guyomarc'h, investigates how to make use of online communities in her classes. Online communities and social networks are often shunned by teachers because of negative publicity and online safety surrounding certain websites. Marie meets with Lisa Stevens, a primary Spanish teacher, who relishes using social media websites for teaching purposes. Lisa explains the benefits of using websites such as Twitter and Voicethread, and demonstrates how you can use them in the classroom. Later, Marie faces her challenge of taking back what she's learned and using it in the classroom.

Graham Davies

EUROCALL 2009: Videos of plenary speakers

2009-10-16T13:50:00.001Z

Videos of the plenary speakers, their PowerPoint presentations and handouts are now available at the following link:

http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/speakers.php

The conference blog is still active at:
http://virtualeurocall09.blogspot.com

The blog records the impressions of a number of people reporting on the parallel sessions, and it also includes embedded live coverage using a package called CoveritLive. CoveritLive is really useful for reporting on conferences as it enables live reports and feedback to run while the conference sessions are actually taking place - and then each "event" can be replayed at any time. Twitter feeds are also embedded into the blog page. These tools are invaluable for people who are unable to travel in person to a conference but still want to "take part".

Three new EUROCALL Nings

2009-10-09T12:50:00.004Z

EUROCALL has three new Nings for the following Special Interest Groups:

EUROCALL Computer Mediated Communication SIG: http://cmcsig.ning.com

EUROCALL Teacher Education SIG: http://eurocallteachereducation.ning.com

EUROCALL/CALICO Virtual Worlds SIG: http://virtualworldssig.ning.com

Teaching and learning languages in virtual worlds

2009-09-28T09:11:00.001Z

A new group has been set up by two leading language teachers’ associations, EUROCALL (Europe) and (CALICO (USA), to promote teaching and learning foreign languages (including English as a foreign language) in virtual worlds: the EUROCALL/CALICO Joint Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group (VW SIG).

It is clear that there is a growing interest in virtual worlds. There have been several presentations on virtual worlds in recent EUROCALL and CALICO conferences. Introductory workshops for newcomers to Second Life have also taken place at the annual conferences of both associations. In November 2007 EUROCALL began setting up a headquarters building on EduNation III Island, and in early 2009 CALICO established a presence on the land immediately next door. The two locations now form a significant joint environment linked by a teleport system. The joint Welcome pavilion is located at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/31/35/22

The SIG has also set up a ning, where its members and other interested parties can communicate, exchange information, announce events and initiate discussions:

http://virtualworldssig.ning.com

Further information is available at the EUROCALL website:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/sigs/vwsig.html

Anyone may join the ning, but to take part in future events (e.g. workshops, seminars) organised by the SIG you need to be a member of EUROCALL or CALICO.

Graham Davies

EUROCALL 2009 - after the conference

2009-09-22T10:19:00.002Z

EUROCALL 2009 in Spain was fantastic: perfect location, great food, super social events and excellent presentations. I ran a workshop on Second Life for newbies, assisted by my wife Sally, who acted as a fashion consultant to the ladies. We had 14 people in a state-of-the art lab equipped with computers with excellent graphics cards and big high-resolution display screens. The workshop ran without a hitch for three hours and then I gave a plenary presentation on a big screen to 50 local teachers, with a contribution from Randall Sadler speaking to us from the USA.

Randall Sadler (representing CALICO) and I (representing EUROCALL) have set up a joint Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group (VW SIG) for CALICO and EUROCALL members. 20 people were present at the launch meeting at EUROCALL 2009. I presented the EUROCALL HQ to the meeting and Randall was there "virtually" to give us a tour of the CALICO facilities next door, including his fabulous new castle holodeck. Further information on the new SIG will be announced at the EUROCALL website:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/sigs/index.html

I also played a role running the Virtual Strand. We set up a blog (using Blogger) with embedded CoveritLive events managed by Penny Coutas. Penny was able to feed Twitter tweets and PowerPoint slides into CoveritLive, as well as typing a running commentary on selected presentations. You can replay the CoveritLive events via the blog at:
http://virtualeurocall09.blogspot.com
and our Twitter feeds are still live at @EuroCALLVirtual:
http://twitter.com

The plenaries were videorecorded and will be made available via a Web page (to be announced later). I particularly enjoyed the presentations by Steven Thorne and Gavin Dudeney, both of which focused on using games in language learning and teaching.

CoveritLive is really handy. We will certainly consider using it again for future conferences: http://www.coveritlive.com

Graham Davies

EUROCALL 2009 Virtual Strand

2009-08-26T10:28:00.001Z

Just a reminder that you can join the EUROCALL 2009 Virtual Strand online if you are unable to attend the conference in Spain. We have set up a Twitter account, and we will also be using CoveritLive alongside this blog:

http://twitter.com/EuroCALLVirtual

You need to have your personal Twitter account and then contact @EuroCALLVirtual via Twitter in order to seek permission to view our updates. Your Twitter feeds will also be viewable in a window in the blog (see above).

CoveritLive is new for us. It's a live blogging facility, so you can interact with conference presenters and participants in real time. The CoveritLive window in the blog (see above) will become active on 5 September. Incoming comments will be moderated.

Finally, I shall be dropping into the EUROCALL/CALICO HQ in Second Life from time to time. The joint HQ has really moved on in the last few weeks, thanks to the great work that has been done by Randall Sadler (CALICO). The Resources centre contains a growing collection of useful tools, objects and landmarks, and Randall has created some fantastic new holodecks. The combined HQ is linked via an internal teleport system that we have set up. At EUROCALL 2009 we will be formally endorsing the decision to set up a joint EUROCALL/CALICO Virtual Worlds SIG at our first SIG meeting, where we welcome suggestions for future developments. Here is the SLURL of the EUROCALL/CALICO Welcome pavilion:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/28/36/22

If you are a Second Life newbie then you may be interested in the introductory half-day workshop that I shall be running at EUROCALL 2009:
http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/acwork.php#wkshp4

The AVALON team will be running a half-day workshop on their project, which will be useful as a follow-up to my workshop or for people who are already familiar with Second Life:
http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/acwork.php#wkshp5

Further information about the Virtual Strand can be found here:
http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/vsinfo.php

Graham Davies

Web2practice videos on Web 2.0 tools

2009-07-28T12:04:00.002Z

I have recentl added a lot of new links to the ICT4LT Section on Web 2.0, Module 1.5, Section 2.1, headed What is Web 2.0?
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#WEB2

This section now includes many more links to a range of social media tools and also to JISC's Web2practice videos on Blip TV:

- Social Media: http://web2practice.jiscinvolve.org/social-media/

- Microblogging: http://web2practice.jiscinvolve.org/microblogging/

- Podcasting: http://web2practice.jiscinvolve.org/podcasting/

- RSS: http://web2practice.jiscinvolve.org/rss-2/

- Collaborative Writing: http://web2practice.jiscinvolve.org/collaborative-writing/

and more to come...

Graham Davies

Students are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies

2009-07-28T11:53:00.004Z

I've just read this article by Gregor Kennedy et al., which suggests that the new generation of students is less interested in Web 2.0 technologies than teachers imagine them to be. It reports on a research study conducted among a large number of students in Australia, which concludes:

- There is greater diversity in frequency of use of technology than many commentators have suggested.

- The use of collaborative and self-publishing Web 2.0 technologies that have often been associated with this generation is quite low.

"The net generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies: Preliminary findings", ASCILITE 2007 Conference, Singapore:

http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/kennedy.pdf

Interesting - comments?

Graham Davies

We have been nominated in the Top 100 Language Blogs list

2009-07-12T08:14:00.003Z

The ICT4LT blog has been nominated in the Top 100 Language blogs list in the category Language Technology. You can vote for us by clicking the link below:

Graham Davies

The VLE is dead. Long live the PLE!

2009-07-10T17:56:00.004Z

There has been a good deal of discussion in various blogs that I read about the death of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Many educators are now arguing that the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) points to the future of e-learning. The Wikipedia article gives a good idea of what a PLE is all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_learning_environments

I can see a PLE working for older learners (and that obviously includes me) - and in effect I have already set up my own PLE using a variety of Web 2.0 tools - but will it be suitable for children of school age? Will this be a feature, for example, of the new Open School for Languages (OSfL)? The contract for the development of the OSfL has been awarded to Lightbox Education: see the Press Release.

Graham Davies

Report on Love Language Conference, 1 July 09

2009-07-03T09:28:00.001Z

I spent a very fruitful day, 1 July 2009, at the Love Language Conference, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds, organised by Careers Europe. The main theme of the conference focused on ways of encouraging students, especially boys, to continue learning a foreign language or to take up a new language. There were two keynotes by Barry Jones and Simon Green and four workshops conducted by Tom Barwood, Ruth Linden, Bev Whiteside and myself.

Barry Jones gave examples of ways of motivating boys to learn foreign languages, based on research that has revealed approaches that really work (v. Barry Jones's CILT publication "Boys’ Performance in Modern Foreign Languages"). Simon Green gave an entertaining presentation of effective strategies for engaging language learners at KS3/KS4.

The focus of Tom Barwood’s workshop, entitled “Foreign languages – not me mate!”, was also on motivating boys, while Ruth Linden talked about languages in the world of work and Bev Whiteside talked about teaching languages in the context of sports.

My workshop focused on ICT as means of engaging language learners, especially through games and Web 2.0 applications. I was also able to demonstrate Second Life and play a short video on a school that is using Second Life with children aged 13-plus – though not yet in teaching foreign languages.

I have uploaded my PowerPoint presentation to the Web. It might be useful, but it probably needs my accompanying commentary in order to make sense – and I did not have facilities available to record it. There are, however, lots of clickable links in the presentation that will lead you to some useful websites:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/TASJuly09.ppt

All in all, this was an inspiring day, even though we sweltered in the heat. The conference was attended by around 35 teachers, mainly from the North of England.

Careers Europe is based in Bradford and acts as a National Resource Centre for International Careers Information: http://www.careerseurope.co.uk

Graham Davies

Nominations for Top 100 Language Blogs 2009

2009-06-26T09:38:00.002Z

Nominate your favourite language blog at the Lexiophiles website. Click here:

Nominations for Top 100 Language Blogs 2009
http://tinyurl.com/mjkzwb

There are some really excellent blogs relating to language teaching and learning, translating or just musing about languages. The list of nominations that is appearing at the Lexiophiles website looks amazing.

Have a look too at Section 12.2 of Module 1.5, where you will find a list of teachers' blogs that I read regularly.

Graham Davies

EUROCALL / CALICO Headquarters in Second Life

2009-06-25T08:46:00.002Z

New developments at the EUROCALL/CALICO HQs in Second Life

As announced a few weeks ago, EUROCALL and CALICO have joined forces in Second Life on EduNation III Island. We have just created a Welcome area, from which you can teleport to the main locations in the two headquarters of our associations, as well as a joint Resources Centre that we are stocking with free resources for teaching and learning. Here is the SLURL of the Welcome area:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/29/32/22

I have just finished creating a snapshot wall (with landmarks) in the Resources Centre displaying views of interesting locations covering a variety of languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Italian. There are a few fun links too: Winter Wonderland, Fibber Magee’s Pub in SL Dublin and the Knightsbridge Underground Club where you can dance the night away.

Ralph Sadler has put together some amazing scenes that can be accessed via the base holodeck on the CALICO site, and there is a new Skydeck that can rez really large holodeck scenes. The Resources Centre, the Skydeck and the holodeck on the roof of the EUROCALL HQ are all accessible via the joint teleport system that we have installed.

It appears to be hard to convince teachers that language learning in Second Life is effective until they have tried it. I am currently learning Spanish in anticipation of EUROCALL 2009. I had an introductory lesson in the Ciudad Bonita sim, which is mini-city set up specifically for learners of Spanish. There are a number of activities that are suitable for self-access, but the main purpose of the city is to provide an environment in which teachers can conduct their classes - which have to be paid for. Access to Ciudad Bonita is restricted to registered students of Spanish. My own approach to learning, however, tends to be exploratory. I visit Spanish-speaking sims in which the signs and messages are all in Spanish and where I can meet native Spanish speakers. I have reached the point where I can understand most of what they say, but when I get stuck I switch on my X-Lang translator (for text chat) and then I can match up the English and Spanish. X-Lang is only as efficient as Babel Fish (i.e. it makes lots of mistakes), but it's surprisingly effective at helping you through a dialogue. I have even had a text chat with Mandarin Chinese speakers in Ling’s Chinese City.

There are several sims in SL that are set up for language learning and teaching. Language Lab is the biggest and mainly geared towards EFL teaching to students aged 18-plus, but I have found many others. For example, the Goethe-Institut maintains a sim where you can learn German, and you can learn Japanese in Little Yoshiwara. The Open University has a teaching area too, but they are not using it yet for teaching languages.

We will be holding a Virtual Worlds SIG meeting at EUROCALL 2009 to discuss the way forward, and I will be running a pre-conference workshop for newcomers to Second Life:

http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/acwork.php#wkshp4

See you in Gandía!

Graham Davies, 25 June 2009

SLanguages 2009 Conference in Second Life

2009-05-10T17:11:00.001Z

Well, the SLanguages 2009 conference in Second Life is over. Phew! This was undoubtedly the best online conference that I have ever attended. I learned an enormous amount about teaching foreign languages in virtual worlds, and I even took part in a lesson for beginners in Spanish.

The conference ran for 24 hours from Friday 8 May to Saturday 9 May, with many of the 39 presentations being repeated so that people in different time zones could attend them without having to stay up all night. A total of 359 participants took part in the conference, with a peak of 91 in attendance concurrently on Friday evening.

If you missed it you can catch up here in Gavin Dudeney's blog:

http://slife.dudeney.com/?p=191

Graham Davies

"IWBs are useless. Discuss." (Quoting Scott Thornbury)

2009-05-01T07:53:00.013Z

I picked up the title to this thread in Twitter. It comes from Scott Thornbury's contribution to the IATEFL 2009 blog:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/iwbs-are-useless-discuss

What do you think? I referred Scott to my mini-survey that I conducted in the autumn of 2008. Many teachers waxed lyrical about their IWBs:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/ICT_Effectiveness.doc

See also ICT4LT, Section 4, Module 1.4.

Scott, BTW, was interviewed by Nik Peachey in Second Life last week and managed to upset a few people about his apparently negative views on technology. But I didn't find his views particularly controversial. Like Scott, I have never regarded technology as the panacea, and I have expressed similar views in my article "Lessons from the past, lessons for the future":
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/coegdd1.htm

New Joint Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group for Teachers of Foreign Languages

2009-04-28T18:20:00.001Z

New Joint Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group for Teachers of Foreign Languages

Following discussions between Graham Davies (EUROCALL), Thom Thibeault (CALICO) and Randall Sadler (CALICO) it has been decided to create a joint CALICO/EUROCALL Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group for teachers of modern foreign languages and English as a foreign language.

CALICO has already set up a Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group (VW SIG):

http://colanmc.siu.edu/virtualworlds/

EUROCALL already has a headquarters building in Second Life, on the EduNation III island at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/9/29/22/

If you have not visited the EUROCALL HQ recently, drop in sometime. I have made several improvements, including a more efficient video projection screen, and I have begun installing teleporters to enable easier movement around the site. There is also a holodeck on the roof. What's a holodeck? The term derives from Star Trek. Think of it as virtual reality within a virtual world. A holodeck offers exciting possibilities of calling up a range of instantly available simulations that can be used for entertainment, presentations, conferencing and, of course, teaching and learning.

CALICO has now acquired the land immediately next door to the EUROCALL HQ and will shortly be building its headquarters there. This the two HQs will form a a significant joint environment in Second Life for teachers and learners of foreign languages, where meetings and classes can take place and where resources can be distributed.

We welcome suggestions about what people think would be useful to have at the site. We plan to hold our first joint SIG meeting at the EUROCALL 2009 conference in Spain in September – details to be announced at the EUROCALL website:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org

The contact persons for the joint VW SIG are:

Graham Davies (EUROCALL): graham@camsoft.force9.co.uk
Thom Thibeault (CALICO): ttbo@siu.edu
Randall Sadler (CALICO): rsadler@uiuc.edu

If you are new to Second Life there is a wealth of information in the rapidly expanding Section 14.2.1 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site (which I edit):

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife

A pre-conference workshop for newcomers to Second Life will take place at EUROCALL 2009:

http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/eurocall2009/acwork.php

Graham Davies

New projects on language learning in Second Life

2009-02-28T11:39:00.003Z

I am updating Section 14.2.1, Module 1.5 almost daily. Three new additions:

AVALON (Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline) is a two-year EU-funded project running from January 2009 to December 2010, aiming to explore 3D worlds for language learning:
http://avalon-project.ning.com

CALICO 2009 Workshop on Virtual Worlds and Language Teaching:
http://sl4calico.pbwiki.com

NIFLAR (Networked Interaction in Foreign Language Acquisition and Research): An EU-funded project, which began in January 2009:
http://cms.let.uu.nl/niflar/

Keep checking out Section 14.2.1, Module 1.5 at
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife

Graham

What do you think about Twitter?

2009-02-22T11:42:00.001Z

I was luke-warm about Twitter when I joined it some months ago, but I now realise it was my own fault for failing to seek out friends, old and new, who use Twitter. I have therefore made an effort over the last few days to find out who uses it. I found over 20 friends in a couple of hours, and I picked up some useful Web links and other information from them.

You can find me on Twitter as Graham Davies.

http://www.twitter.com/

What do you think about Twitter?

How effective is ICT in language teaching and learning?

2008-11-26T14:05:00.002Z

This question has been raised on numerous occasions and few convincing arguments have been put forward that ICT makes much difference. There's a bit on ICT effectiveness here in Section 3 of Module 1.1 at the ICT4LT site:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-1.htm#anchor158435

So I thought it was high time I raised this question again. Concrete evidence on the effectiveness of CALL is difficult to obtain. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about the positive effects of CALL. Teachers often report on their students being "enthusiastic", "engaged", "motivated" and even "excited" in classes in which CALL is used, but are sceptical about measuring its effectiveness. See this summary (in Word format) of a discussion that took place in the MFL Resources forum in 2008:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/ICT_Effectiveness.doc

Farewell to Lively by Google

2008-11-26T14:02:00.001Z

Google plan to drop Lively on 31 December 2008, five months after it was launched. So, if you have a Lively room, use it for a final New Year’s Eve bash, take some screenshots and say bye, bye. I guess this is the way things are on the Web: if it doesn't catch on in a couple of months then drop it like a hot potato, especially in these troubled economic times.

The demise of Lively, along with many other websites, should remind us that it is unwise to build a teaching course around a website, unless it is your own – although you can't even guarantee that your own site will always be there. One of mine went down for three weeks in 2001 when my hosting service went bankrupt. I didn’t lose anything, however, as it was all backed up on my hard disk and on CD-ROM. I have links to over 1000 sites on the three websites that I maintain. The wastage rate averages 3%-5% per month – a phenomenon known as “linkrot”. The worst offenders are government and university websites; they are forever changing.

Lively was probably not an appropriate name. No one ever visited my room unless it was pre-arranged, and I am not aware of Lively catching on in education in the same way as Second Life. Second Life educational locations are springing up like mushrooms these days, and many of them are dedicated to language learning. I ran a training course on Second Life in September, and it worked quite well. A colleague ran a course on Lively for the same participants on the same day. Participants could see more potential in using Second Life.

What I like about Second Life is that I meet someone there by chance almost every day. I maintain the EUROCALL HQ there on one of the EduNation islands, and people often just drop in for a chat - three people were there between 6 and 8 pm yesterday evening, 25 November 2008. I also take part in trivia quizzes and I go to live performances of bands, e.g. Irish groups in the Blarney Stone pub in SL, and fund-raising concerts for cancer research. I have won a bit of money by taking part in quizzes.

Relections on EUROCALL 2008

2008-09-08T10:12:00.002Z

I just got back from the EUROCALL 2008 conference in Székesfehérevár, Hungary. It was a smaller conference than usual, with around 150 participants attending, but the quality of all the presentations that I attended was extremely high this year; I cannot say that I attended a single poor presentation. There were a lot of new faces as well as the old hands. The social events were really good too. I especially enjoyed the conference dinner in the Csarda, where we were treated to a display of folk music and dancing – and even participated in the dancing ourselves.

The conference highlight for me was the session on Second Life, conducted by the Kamimo Project team, both locally and at a distance in Sweden. Second Life and virtual worlds (e.g. Lively by Google) are now a hot topic in EUROCALL. My colleague Lesley Shield and I ran a pre-conference workshop on Second Life, and I was interviewed by the local press and a radio station and asked questions about the different ways in which virtual worlds might contribute to language learning and teaching. The workshop notes that I wrote for newcomers to Second Life will remain on the Web permanently and will be updated from time to time. They can be downloaded in Word format from the ICT4LT site, Section 14.2.1 of Module 1.5:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife
This year’s conference was so good that we able to resist being out and about in the glorious sunshine that we had for the whole week, with temperatures creeping up from the mid-20s at the beginning of the week to 35 degrees on Saturday. The weather was really kind to us, so that we could enjoy sitting out in the open air until midnight – and later for the conference pros. A big thank you is due to Zsuzsa Angeli for organising a great conference in beautiful baroque Székesfehérevár.

The EUROCALL 2008 conference Virtual Strand archives will continue to be accessible at:
http://virtualeurocall.googlepages.com/home
and video recordings of the keynotes will also be available.

EUROCALL still attracts members mainly from the higher education sector in spite of our efforts to widen our constituency, but this may soon change as the Executive Committee has approved a proposal to set up a special interest group (SIG) for teachers in the primary, secondary and higher sectors of education. We will be looking for volunteers to manage this SIG in the near future. Keep an eye on the EUROCALL website and the EUROCALL discussion list for future announcements:
http://www.eurocall-languages.org/
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

Graham Davies
Member of the EUROCALL Executive Committee, with special responsibility for EUROCALL in Second Life

Death of the VLE?

2008-08-26T01:23:00.002Z

There has been a good deal of discussion in various forums on the Web about the downside of technology, for example the overuse of PowerPoint. Some time ago I Googled for “Death by PowerPoint” and got around 375,000 hits, leading me to sites that criticised the excessive use of PowerPoint in presentations both in the business world and in education. This is not to say that PowerPoint presentations are worthless, rather it is a warning not to regard technological innovations as a panacea.

VLE’s are often in the news these days and, like PowerPoint, are often hailed as a technological panacea, so I decided to Google for “Death by VLE”. I got about 87,000 hits. I have always felt that VLEs – like the language lab of the 1960s – were designed to put learners to sleep, and I cannot see that they will ever be in serious competition with the many exciting Web 2.0 developments we have seen in recent years, so the high number of hits for “Death by VLE” did not really surprise me. This reference came at the top of the Google hit list:

Stiles M. (2007) "Death of the VLE? A challenge to a new orthodoxy", Serials, the Journal for the International Serials Community 20, 1: 31-36. Here is the abstract:

“The VLE has become almost ubiquitous in both higher and further education, with the market becoming increasingly 'mature'. E-learning is a major plank in both national and institutional strategies. But, is the VLE delivering what is needed in a world where flexibility of learning is paramount, and the lifelong learner is becoming a reality? There are indications that rather than resulting in innovation, the use of VLEs has become fixed in an orthodoxy based on traditional educational approaches. The emergence of new services and tools on the web, developments in interoperability, and changing demands pose significant issues for institutions' e-learning strategy and policy. Whether the VLE can remain the core of e-learning activity needs to be considered.”
Source: http://uksg.metapress.com/index/55K7732DTHRQ6GK1.pdf

Interesting, eh?

EUROCALL 2008, Second Life, Lively by Google

2008-08-19T08:53:00.002Z

A Pre-Conference Workshop (PCW) on Second Life and Lively by Google will be taking place at EUROCALL 2008, 3 September 2008. I have created a Word document that explains the preparation you need to do in advance of the workshop and what we will be covering in the workshop. The document can be downloaded from the ICT4LT website, Section 14.2.1 of Module 1.5:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife

The document will remain at the ICT4LT site after the workshop and will be added to and amended from time to time.

During the EUROCALL 2008 conference there will be opportunities for online chat in the EUROCALL HQ in Second Life and also in the Lively room that we have created. Here are the URLs:

Second Life:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/9/29/22/

Lively:
http://www.lively.com/dr?rid=-5085702628635910660&edit_room=1

The EUROCALL 2008 conference will also incorporate a Virtual Strand, as in 2006 and in 2007, to enable online participants to get a flavour of the conference. Registration for the Virtual Strand is free of charge:

http://virtualeurocall.googlepages.com/home

Graham Davies
19 August 2008

SLanguages 2008 Online Conference - Free!

2008-03-22T10:14:00.003Z

SLanguages 2008 Online Conference - Free!

The SLanguages 2008 Conference brings together practitioners and researchers in the field of language education in Second Life for a 24-hour event to celebrate languages and cultures within the 3D virtual world.

This second annual event is entirely free and takes place on the EduNation islands within Second Life. Take a tour of the venue:
http://www.slanguages.net/venue.php

Starts 18.00 GMT, 23 May 2008Ends 18.00 GMT 24 May 2008
Further information and registration form at:
http://www.slanguages.net

The ICT4LT site contains an intro to teaching and learning languages in Second Life, with a brief report and screenshots of the SLanguages 2007 Conference:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife

Computer Mediated Communication Conference, 17-19 April 2008

2008-02-22T10:03:00.002Z

The first conference organised by EUROCALL's Computer Mediated Communication Special Interest Group (CMC SIG) will take place at the University of Padua, Italy, 17-19 April 2008.

In an earlier contribution to this blog (7 November 2007) I wrote about setting up EUROCALL's new HQ in Second Life. I shall be giving a presentation about the HQ in Second Life at the CMC SIG conference - from a distance (i.e. in the UK). It's nothing spectacular - just a tour of the HQ, which is located on EduNation III island in Second Life. The HQ can be used for real-time meetings and presentations to small groups, e.g. PowerPoint and video presentations and slide shows. Here is the EUROCALL HQ SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/9/29/22/
You may find me lurking there sometimes in the guise of Groovy Winkler.

David Richardson and his colleagues will be giving a presentation at the conference entitled "Practicing proficiency in virtual space - a case study of cross-cultural collaboration in language learning", which will also be delivered at a distance (from Sweden) using Second Life. David has posted messages concerning his Kamino Island project, which focuses on oral production, in the EUROCALL CMC SIG discussion list at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CMC_SIG/
You can read more about David's oral production project at:
http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud/op/index.htm

Further information on the Padua conference can be found in the CMC SIG discussion list (above). The main contact person in Padua is Francesca Helm. Contact her via the discussion list.

Participating in conferences at a distance is now established practice. The Consultants-E, a business based in Barcelona, manage the EduNation islands in Second Life, where they are running a series of seminars entitled EduCation@EduNation:
http://www.theconsultants-e.com/edunation/edunation.asp

We focus on Second Life in Section 14.2.1 of Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT website:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#secondlife

EUROCALL has incorporated a virtual strand into its last two conferences, 2006 and 2007. The archives are here:

EUROCALL 2006 blog:
http://eurocall2006blog.blogspot.com/

EUROCALL 2007 virtual strand, which includes streamed videos of the keynotes:
http://vsportal2007.googlepages.com/

EUROCALL 2008 in Hungary will also include a virtual strand - details to be announced later:
http://www.asszisztencia.hu/eurocall/

Regards
Graham Davies

Copyright - new tricks to catch you out!

2008-02-22T09:46:00.002Z

A colleague drew my attention to the following article at the website of the Computer & Technik Magazin, which summarises a TV broadcast on 16 February 2008: http://www.heise.de/ct/tv/artikel/103344

For those of you who cannot read German, here's a brief summary: A couple in Germany, Marion and Folkert Knieper, have put together an online cookbook with lots of photos taken by Folkert Knieper, e.g. the sort of photos of food that teachers like to use in their worksheets, blogs and online worksheets. The online cookbook includes a lexicon and has lots of links to other sites - which puts it high on Google's hit list if you are doing a search. So you search (in German) for an image of tomatoes, carrots, a cup of tea, etc. You find the image in the cookbook and add it to your website, blog, or online worksheet. Now here's the catch. Folkert Knieper uses the image search facility in Google to find his own photos. Bingo! The photo that you have added to your website turns up. He then asks you to pay for it and takes you to court for breach of copyright if you refuse. In Germany the law on copyright is much the same as it is in the UK. If you take a photograph and publish it on the Web you automatically own copyright in the photo unless stated otherwise. Apparently, Folkert Knieper is making hundreds of thousands of euros out of this venture. Nice little earner, eh? It could catch on...

Selling digital photos is a growing business these days:
http://www.cameradollars.com/?hop=linguaglot

EUROCALL HQ in Second Life

2007-11-07T01:08:00.000Z

EUROCALL now has an HQ in EduNation III, Second Life. The building is still empty, but it will be furnished it during the next few weeks. If you have already downloaded the Second Life software and wish to locate the EUROCALL HQ click on the following SLURL or just paste it into your browser's address box:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/EduNation%20III/9/29/22/
This will enable you to teleport to the front porch. Turn right round and you should see the EUROCALL logo on the wall next to the front door. Click on the door to open it and then have a look round. It is possible to hold meetings and run training courses, etc in the EUROCALL HQ (and many other places) using voice chat, text chat and visuals (PowerPoint, videos, etc), but there doubtless many more interesting things that can be done.

Just a reminder that if you are new to Second Life then there is an expanded Section 14.2.1 in Module 1.5 at the ICT4LT site that should help get you up to speed:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm

EUROCALL 2007 Conference

2007-09-19T08:38:00.001Z

I just got back from the EUROCALL 2007 conference at the University of Coleraine, Northern Ireland – followed by a one-week holiday touring the North-West of Ireland. It was one of the best EUROCALL conferences I have attended since EUROCALL first became an official professional association in 1993. This year’s conference included a more elaborate online Virtual Strand than last year’s conference in Granada, Spain. As well as the conference blog and the Blobber text chat facility, this year’s Virtual Strand included the Yaplet text chat facility, live online presentations in text chat, and podcasts in which conference participants expressed their impressions of presentations that they attended. The plenary keynotes and panel discussion were streamed and are also archived. An asynchronous discussion list has also been set up. All the details are here:

http://vsportal2007.googlepages.com/

The blog, to which you will find a link at the above URL, will remain active for some time.

It is often said that if you return from a conference with three new important impressions or ideas then the conference has been a success. These are mine:

1. Bernd Rüschoff, talking about wikis in his plenary presentation on Web 2.0, pointed out that an analysis of the answers given by the audience in the German TV version of “Who wants to be a millionaire” were predominantly right. He reflected that the criticism levelled at wikis such as Wikipedia may be unjustified, as collective knowledge is increasingly proving to be reliable.

2. The video that Gràinne Conole showed in her plenary presentation of the student living in a high-tech house and using a variety of digital devices as part of her everyday life left a lasting impression on me. Teachers need to be aware that the new generation of students feel completely at ease with new technologies.

3. Uschi Felix – who declared her intention to retire from academic life this year – warned us that students will not be impressed if they are confronted with “boring old technology” at school or university. On the other hand, they often react negatively to teachers who think they are being trendy by using Facebook and other social network sites that are popular with young people. Students often perceive such sites as “their” property, which they want to keep for themselves.

All in all, this was a great conference. All the sessions that I attended were good. The weather was kind to us, we observed a perfect sunset from the venue of the Gala Dinner, were entertained by the Altnaveigh House Band, the best Irish/Scottish band (with a fabulous dancer) that I have ever heard, and we danced ourselves to exhaustion at the Céilí, to the accompaniment of the highly-accomplished traditional music band, Craobh Rua (Red Branch).

Just a reminder that the main EUROCALL website, which contains information about previous and forthcoming conferences, can be found at:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/

Second Life Conference on Learning Foreign Languages

2007-06-26T10:16:00.000Z

On 23 June 2007, I took part in a virtual conference, SLanguages, on learning foreign languages in Second Life:
http://www.secondlife.com
The venue was the Glass Pyramid on Second Life's EduNation Island and there were around 50 participants from all over the world. The conference made use of audioconferencing facilities, using the Ventrilo audioconferencing software, so we could hear the speakers and talk to them. The SLanguages conference went very well, with only a few minor hiccups. I've added a couple of screenshots to the ICT4LT site:
Section 14.2, Module 1.5, headed Chat rooms, MUDs, MOOs and MUVEs
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-5.htm#14.2

The main thing that made the conference so engaging for me was being able to listen to and communicate with speakers from all over the world - all in our various avatar guises. It worked. We could use the standard Second Life text chat at any time and when we wanted to ask a question or make a comment we lit up a bulb on top of our heads in order to attract the chair’s attention and then we spoke when invited. Coffee breaks and a lunch break were built in, and we were able to continue chatting at the disco after the formal day’s proceedings had finished.

The advantages of Second Life compared to videoconferencing were immediately obvious to me. I have taken part in several videoconferences and, even as an adult, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable seeing myself on screen. Lip-synchronisation in all the videoconferencing systems that I have used was not very good - although it may have improved a lot by now. Head and arm movements came across as rather jerky too. In the SLanguages conference I was able to sit my avatar down and then do what I liked. He was always quiet and attentive even if I sneaked off to make a cup of coffee, and I could hear the audio very clearly, either through speakers or headphones. I could speak to the other participants by pressing a single key to activate my microphone - or I could ask questions and make comments in text chat. The speakers were able to show slides on a large screen - which you can see in the screenshots at the ICT4LT site.

Don't be misled by the negative reports about Second Life that you may have read in the press. I was very sceptical when I first had a look at Second Life. It appeared to be peopled by sad geeks who probably only have a half-decent First Life. but as a colleague of mine, Chris Jones, stated in the title of an article he wrote way back in 1986: "It's not so much the program: more what you do with it: the importance of methodology in CALL".

At first sight Second Life appears to be quite daunting. There’s a lot to learn, but I picked up the basics in a couple of hours and I’m content to ignore the bits that I don’t need. There's a lot of garbage there - shopping malls selling virtual designer gear, casinos, etc. All this can be ignored. In any case most of us only use a fraction of the facilities of the software installed on our computers - and there's nothing wrong with that.

The SLanguages conference proceedings will be archived at:
EduNation 178, 40, 22
http://www.secondlife.com/

Web 2.0 – Is it just hype?

2007-04-25T11:57:00.000Z

When I first came across the term Web 2.0 about two years ago I thought that it referred to a completely new version of the World Wide Web, as this is what the appendage of a version number to a product’s name normally means. I was surprised to find that it means nothing of the sort. The term arose as the name of a series of conferences, the first of which was held in 2004:
http://www.web2con.com

See also:
O'Reilly T. (2005) What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

See also the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Essentially, Web 2.0 appears to be an attempt to redefine what the Web is all about and how it is used, for example new Web-based communities using wikis, blogs and social networking websites that promote collaboration and sharing between users. In other words, it signifies a more democratic approach to the use of the Web. In order to achieve this, Web-based applications have to work more like desktop applications, allowing Web users to use the Web in much the same way as they would use applications on their desktop computers, e.g. storing and organising their materials. MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and del.icio.us are examples of websites that enable users to do this.

To what extent the concept of Web 2.0 is truly innovative is a matter of debate, as it is broadly in line with the concept of the Web as defined by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, nine years ago:

“The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialise. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.”Berners-Lee T. (1998) The World Wide Web: a very short personal history:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html

So Web 2.0 is not a break with Web 1.0 but a transition. Is the term Web 2.0 therefore essentially meaningless? Is it just a way of convincing the media and investors that something fundamentally new has been created? Or is it just an example of the continuous development of well-established technologies?

Reactions?

EUROCALL 2007 Conference

2007-04-05T10:38:00.000Z

The EUROCALL 2007 Conference will take place at University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, 5-8 September 2007. The main conference theme is Mastering Multimedia: Teaching Languages Through Technology:
http://www.eurocall2007.com

The Coleraine campus is located in a beautiful part of Ireland, close to the Giant's Causeway and Bushmills Irish Whiskey Distillery. Combine the conference with a holiday. These pictures should whet your appetite:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/eurocall.htm

Just for the record, here are the two key EUROCALL URLs:
- EUROCALL's main website:
http://www.eurocall-languages.org
-The EUROCALL Discussion List:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

History of Computer Assisted Language Learning

2007-03-25T10:21:00.001Z

Some readers of this blog may recall that I have been seeking information via a number of discussion lists and fora on the whereabouts of Philippe Delcloque’s History of CALL website that was created to commemorate the beginning of the new millennium. Although the website has now closed down, a snapshot PDF version of the site has been unearthed by Ana Gimeno, President of EUROCALL. I have now incorporated this PDF document into the ICT4LT site at the following location:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/History_of_CALL.pdf

I have also agreed to take on the task of recording new developments in the History of CALL. To a large extent I have been doing this anyway as Editor of the ICT4LT website, but it’s been a piecemeal job. I have begun to collate new developments systematically in Section 2 (History of CALL) of Module 1.4 at the ICT4LT website, with relevant internal links within the ICT4LT website and a few external links:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-4.htm

Comments and suggestions for additions welcomed.

BBC Jam educational website suspended

2007-03-20T02:40:00.000Z

It’s 20 March 2007. Today is the day on which the BBC suspends its Web-based package of learning materials for schools, which was released under the name "BBC Jam". BBC Jam has been the subject of controversy ever since it was announced that the BBC would be allowed to spend £150 million pounds worth of public funding, namely TV licence payers’ money, developing the so-called Digital Curriculum, later to be renamed BBC Jam. You can read more about it here:

The Reckon (Regulation and Competition Economics) website:
http://www.reckon.co.uk/open/BBC_Digital_Curriculum

The Guardian newspaper, 14 March 2007
http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,2033611,00.html

The decision to suspend BBC Jam is mainly the result of pressure from publishers’ associations and commercial online companies who complained that BBC Jam has had a negative impact on their businesses. This raises a number of important issues, for example the morality of allocating such a large sum of money to a public organisation, thereby distorting market forces, and to what extent the BBC’s move towards the production of Web-based educational materials rather than educational TV broadcasts was desirable. Bear in mind that the unit that produced the excellent series of TV broadcasts for adult learners of foreign languages has now been closed down.

BBC Jam aimed to cover most of the secondary school curriculum. Some materials for learners of modern foreign languages have been produced, but reactions to them have been mixed. Many teachers welcomed them for their refreshing and lively approach, but they have also been criticised for their confusing interface, linearity and lack of interaction, e,g. Donald Clark’s blog:
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2006/01/bbc-jam-french-sticky-mess.html

Reactions?

Digital language labs

2007-03-02T12:53:00.000Z

A one-day symposium entitled "Digital Language Labs: Exploring Good Practice", organised by the University of Ulster's Centre for Excellence in Multimedia Language Learning, is due to take place on 15 March 2007 at SOAS, University of London. Full details can be found on the Centre's website:
http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/lanlit/cetl/news/2007/uk_conference2.html

ICT4LT Module 3.1 mentions digital labs and includes five case studies: Managing a multimedia language centre:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-1.htm

See also Section 2.2.1 of ICT4LT Module 2.2 headed "Media players and digital language labs":
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-2.htm

See also this publication at the CILT/ALL Languages ICT website:
Davies G., Bangs P., Frisby R. & Walton E. (2005) Setting up effective digital language laboratories and multimedia ICT suites for Modern Foreign Languages, London: CILT:
http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/managing/digital_language_labs.pdf

It would be interesting to hear from people who are using digital labs and how useful/effective they have found them.

Reports on the effectiveness of ICT

2007-02-25T11:25:00.000Z

We don't see too many reports on the effectiveness of ICT in teaching and learning modern foreign languages. These two reports have recently appeared:

1. BECTA: Impact of ICT in schools: a landscape review:
http://tinyurl.com/2cdfka
This report is about the use of ICT across the curriculum, but there is a substantial section on modern foreign languages.

2. QCA: The use of ICT for teaching and learning languages:
http://www.qca.org.uk/17307.html

The BETT 2007 show in January this year included a seminar programme in which four sessions for teachers of modern foreign languages took place. Read the report here at the Languages ICT website:
http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/news/bett.htm

More news reports on recent activities are available at the Languages ICT website:
http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/news/ict_news_update.htm

Death by PowerPoint?

2007-02-24T12:09:00.009Z

"Death by PowerPoint" refers to the over-use of PowerPoint as a presentation medium both in business and in educational contexts. Do a search in Google and you will find numerous occurrences of this phrase.

When PowerPoint first began to be used as a presentation medium it looked impressive: the "wow!" factor. But after you've seen 100 presentations it gets as boring as any other medium. What you have to bear in mind when using any presentation medium is that you still have to work hard to get your message across, particularly in the foreign languages classroom, where you have to combine presentation with lots of practice with your students.

See the TES article (1 September 2006), Death by... PowerPoint, by Michael Shaw, who writes:

"The problem - dubbed 'Death by PowerPoint' - arises where the popular Microsoft program is used to teach dull, didactic lessons. Where once trainees were told to avoid "chalk and talk", the new hazard is 'click and talk'."

He continues, citing Roger Higton, Lord Williams School, Thame:
"The teacher may feel very pleased and think they are up-to-date and modern – but the student will glaze over within the first 30 seconds. Students find this passive absorption of knowledge no more educationally creative than copying out of a textbook."

The message is: Don't rely just on the presentation. Presenting new vocab or points of grammar with PowerPoint does not guarantee that they will be retained by your students. They need to practise using the new vocab and grammar.

Have a look at this amusing video on how NOT to use PowerPoint:
Life after death by PowerPoint
by Don McMillan

See also ICT4LT, Section 4, Module 1.4, headed Whole-class teaching and interactive whiteboards.

Interactive whiteboards – how effective are they?

2007-02-24T12:04:00.000Z

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) appear to be springing up like mushrooms in schools in the UK. Some schools have had them installed in every classroom and one headteacher has been heard to say that he expects his teaching staff to keep them switched on all the time and use them in every lesson.

We mention interactive whiteboards in the following locations at the ICT4LT site:

Section 7 of Module 1.3, Using text tools in the Modern Foreign Languages classroom
Section 4 of Module 1.4, Introduction to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

But how effective are interactive whiteboards? This BBC website article (30 January 2007) entitled "Doubts over hi-tech white boards" raises several important issues.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6309691.stm
It states, for example, that IWBs "fail to boost pupil achievement", that they can "slow the pace of whole-class learning", and that they can lead to "relatively mundane activities being over-valued".

OK, just what we thought - memories of the language lab being hailed as the panacea back in the 1960s and then failing miserably to deliver what it promised. Of course, we now know in retrospect that the 1960s technology was not at fault. It was the failure to train teachers how to use the technology effectively, combined with a singular lack of imagination.

My perception of IWBs is that they can be highly effective in the hands of a skilled practitioner - just as the language lab was (and still is) - but most teachers simply use IWBs for presentations that would work just as well on a humble OHP. Who was it who said that an IWB is "just an OHP on steroids"?

Since the advent of interactive whiteboards we've moved away from the more traditional use of the computer as a learning tool in a computer lab, where it offers many more one-to-one practice opportunities – and which many teachers believe are more effective: v. the case studies in Module 3.1 at the ICT4LT website:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-1.htm

In the above module Helen Myers (The Ashcombe School) writes:
Whiteboards: We prefer to spend the money on increasing the pupil-computer ratio - which makes the technology more genuinely interactive for pupils – rather than on facilities for whole-class/teacher interaction.

In the same module Richard Hamilton (Cox Green School) claims a 15% rise in A*–C GCSE results over a period of three years as a result of his pupils doing regular computer lab work in foreign languages.

Podcasting - what's the hype?

2007-02-23T13:29:00.001Z

In the EUROCALL 2006 wiki a question was raised about the main benefits of podcasting, which attracted a few interesting comments, both positive and negative:http://eurocall2006.wikispaces.com/message/view/panel+discussion/58780
We mention podcasting in the following section of the ICT4LT website:
Section 3.5.2 of Module 2.3, Exploiting World Wide Web resources online and offlineThere is also an entry in the ICT4LT Glossary:http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_glossary.htm
My personal view about podcasting in the context of language learning and teaching is broadly in line with the view expressed by one of the contributors to the above wiki, namely that it’s a very efficient way of making digital sound recordings and distributing them to learners and teachers, but that we also need to take another look at audio learning.
As I pointed out in the above wiki, in the end a podcast is just a recording. It's the delivery medium that makes it different. Recordings live or die according to (1) the quality of their content, (2) what you do with them.
Simply making podcasts available to language students is not effective per se. Thinking back to my days as a language centre director, we had a similar experience when satellite TV first became available. "Wow! What a great resource!" we thought. But students, left to their own devices, did not get a lot out of watching TV. So we introduced generic worksheets into the satellite TV viewing room. We had one for recordings of news broadcasts. It was just one sheet of A4, which the students filled in and handed in to language centre staff. On the sheet were a few simple tasks, such as:

Write down the headlines of the main news items that you viewed in the broadcast.
Write down 10 new words or phrases that you learned. (Students usually borrowed a dictionary from the language centre at the same time as they borrowed the video recording, so they could look up new words and phrases.)
Write down a summary of the news item that interested you most and why.

The worksheets were not marked by language teaching staff. They were mainly intended to be a means of focusing students’ attention, but teaching staff would pick completed worksheets at random and offer feedback to students. This resulted in a marked improvement in the way students used satellite TV recordings. Perhaps we need something similar to enable students to get the most out of the increasing number of podcasts that are available on the Web. Reactions?

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)

2007-02-23T09:55:00.001Z

We mention Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in the following locations at the ICT4LT site:

Module 1.4: Introduction to CALL (Section 7: Distance learning)
Module 1.5: Introduction to the Internet (Section 8: Distance learning and the Web: VLEs, MLEs etc)
Module 2.3: Exploiting WWW resources online and offline (Section 3.1: Web-based CALL)

There are also several relevant entries in the ICT4LT Glossary. Start with VLE:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_glossary.htm

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) were hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread when they first appeared, but now they appear to be falling out of favour with many educational institutions - for various reasons: costs, lack of flexibility and problems handling audio and video.

Personally, I don't like VLEs. So far they appear to have resulted mainly in the development of rather boring materials and masses of multiple-choice exercises. I miss the interaction, the humour and the unpredictability of pre-Web, pre-VLE software, e.g. simulations such as A la rencontre de Philippe:
http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/Philippe.html
We mention other simulations in Module 2.2, Introduction to multimedia CALL, at the ICT4LT site.
You can achieve much more with a tailor-made website, which is less expensive than most people imagine, but unfortunately the "one size fits all" mentality pervades among educational administrators, which is what attracts them to VLEs. And, of course, there are many things which (so far) can only be done efficiently and effectively offline, i.e. via a local server, CD-ROM or DVD, e.g. listen / record / playback (virtual language lab) activities.

Moodle, however, is one VLE that is finding favour with the language teaching community, especially in Japan. EUROCALL conferences have attracted Moodle presenters, and there was a Moodle workshop at a recent EUROCALL conference. The main pluspoint of Moodle is that it is open source and can be downloaded free of charge:
http://moodle.org/
The Moodle for Language Teaching forum is a useful source of information about Moodle:
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

At last year's EUROCALL conference in Granada (which I unfortunately couldn't attend due to illness) one of the keynote speakers, Diana Laurillard, mentioned a VLE called LAMs. There's a link to a streamed video of Diana Laurillard's keynote via the EUROCALL 2006 blog:
http://eurocall2006blog.blogspot.com/

Reactions?

Welcome to the ICT4LT blog

2007-02-22T09:12:00.000Z

Welcome to the ICT for Language Teachers blog. This blog was started on 22 February 2007 to encourage feedback from visitors to the ICT4LT website at http://www.ict4lt.org

If you haven't already visited the site, please do so.

Discussion topics and comments on any of the ICT4LT website modules are welcomed, as well as any other aspect of ICT in language teaching and learning.