Open and Participatory Environments in Language Learning

Slide 1: Open Participatory Media Environments in Language Learning Barbara Dieu and Patricia Glogowski 49thTesol Conference New York, April 5th 2008

Slide 2: 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?

Slide 3: 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

Slide 11: 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

Slide 18: 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?

Slide 23: Closed Course Management System Diagrams by Stephen Downes (We added the captions) borrowed from: http://it.coe.uga .edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html Open Learning

Slide 27: http://poetrysalon.typepad.com/

Slide 29: http://poetrysalon.typepad.com/

Slide 34: CHALLENGES • What are some of the challenges and what are the constraints for you? • How can you solve them?

Slide 35: Challenges/constraints • Data location • Username and password • Access to data management • Retrieving it • Security risk (using the same) • Who else can see it? • Copyright • Service disappears • Inappropriate use

Slide 36: 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 Arrington September 4, 2007

Slide 37: Thank you! Patricia Glogowski patricia.glogowski@gmail.com Barbara (Bee) Dieu beeonline@gmail.com