Open and Participatory Environments in Language Learning

Open Participatory Media Environmentsin Language Learning

Barbara Dieu and Patricia Glogowski

49thTesol Conference

New York, April 5th 2008

CONTEXT

• What is your teaching context, who are your learners and what are their interests and needs?

• What social tools and platforms are there available?

• Have you incorporated any into your language teaching curriculum yet? If you did, how did you go about it? Why? If not, why?

Barbara

• EFL bilingual high school (French-Portuguese)

• 460 hours of English in middle school• 20 to 28 students per class• 3 classes 50’ per week• of which 1 x 50’ in computer lab• Blog, bloglines, wiki, Flickr, social sites• Bilingual dictionary, thesaurus, class wiki,

podcasts, study skills, rubrics, CC photos

Patricia

• University preparation program

• Upper intermediate level

• 16 stds per class

• 20 hours a week x 8 weeks

• of which 2 or three hours computer lab

• social media platforms

• Google alerts, scholar,surveymonkey

OPEN AND PARTICIPATORY• What is your perception of open and

participatory online environments for language learning?

• Why do you think they are called 'open' and 'participatory'?

• How can we help learners to improve on their language skills through experiential learning and networking in these socially and linguistically rich environments?

Open LearningDiagrams by Stephen Downes (We added the captions)

borrowed from: http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html

Closed Course Management System

http://poetrysalon.typepad.com/

http://poetrysalon.typepad.com/

CHALLENGES

• What are some of the challenges and what are the constraints for you?

• How can you solve them?

Challenges/constraints

• Data location• Access to data • Retrieving it• Who else can see it?• Service disappears

• Username and password management

• Security risk(using the same)

• Copyright• Inappropriate use

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

1) Ownership of their own personal information, including:– Their own profile data– the list of people they are connected to– the activity stream of content they create

2) Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others

3) Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael ArringtonSeptember 4, 2007

Thank you!

Patricia Glogowski

patricia.glogowski@gmail.com

Barbara (Bee) Dieu

beeonline@gmail.com