By Barbara Dieu · November 12, 2010
This is a translated near copy of a post I made in Portuguese for the OER community in Brazil. I transferred it here as I feel it illustrates well a process that can be used not only in ELT but also by teachers and learners of any foreign language. It is an example of a participatory language activity within a community of practice, which uses authentic material from the open web, and creates an artifact that brings value to the community at large instead of only producing a response to pre-packaged published material produced for the classroom alone.
I have incorporated this example, together with Juliano Spyer’s Adote um Parágrafo project, to the presentation I will be giving at the Global Education Conference next Wednesday, November 17th at 21 GMT together with Laura Franklin and Moustapha Diack on the Merlot OER world-languages and accessibility matters in OER design and deployment.
Open Access 101 is a video made by Karen Rustad from the Right to Research NGO. The author explains how the academic publishing industry works and comments on how the high cost for the end users involved causes knowledge to be bottled up in closed silos, only accessible to those who can afford it. The alternative is Open Access, which allows unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly journals.
The video is in English so this hinders the understanding for people who do not master the language. Therefore, I decided to translate it to facilitate access. The Creative Commons License BY/NC/SA, adopted by the video creator, tells me I can use her work, distribute it, remix it as long as I credit her, do not use if for commercial purposes and share the result of this remix by using the same license.
A good way to do it was to beta test Universal Subtitles, a Participatory Culture Foundation project : “It is a collaborative toolset and community for volunteers and organizations around the world to make almost any video accessible for the deaf and to translate videos for all of us”.
Universal Subtitles, however, accepts (for the time being) only some sites online like YouTube and blip.tv and the FLV and ogg formats.As the original film is on Vimeo and I had downloaded it in mp4, I had to convert it to ogg. I did not have on my computer what I needed to convert it…grrr
Fortunately, at that exact moment I saw (through the Gmail chat) Ewout Ter Haar, one of the founders of Stoa and an active member of the OER community. I sent him an SOS. After a brief exchange, Ewout graciously helped me convert the mp4 , allowing me to have an ogg version to subtitle. This is how communities of practice work. Thank you, Ewout and here is the result. I first subtitled it in its original language, English and then translated it into Portuguese.
This open resource can now be shared and modified by the community as Universal Subtitles allows other users to participate and improve on what has been done. You will see that Open Access 101 was already translated into Dutch and if you look at the recorded subtitling history (like in Wikipedia), another user rectified and made my own translation better.
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By Barbara Dieu · October 14, 2009
In his post Dogme and Identity, Luke Meddings, one of the writers of the co-authored Delta Development Blog, points to the present excess of standardized course materials, content and technology we are exposed to in ELT. The 2007 article The Autumn of the Multitaskers in the Atlantic, while not specifically dealing with English teaching, also illustrates well the cognitive overload and haste we have to deal with presently and warns us against their dumbing down effects.
In both situations there is little room for slow conversations and the emergent language which arises from the learners’ own interests and shapes their evolving identity in the foreign language.
At Dekita, we have brought up the need for peer-centered learning and questioned the forced standardized content from the strict curriculum and the cookie-cutter model of the standard pre-packaged coursebook topics.
How can we guide our students to acquire what they need so they can express their thoughts, share them with others, and negotiate meaning in self-directed ways? How do we move from dependence towards greater independence and inter-dependence? How do we adopt a more process-oriented approach and interact in a more open and decentralized fashion which allows for self-directed participation, informal communication, inter-cultural and inter-linguistic development?
Is it possible to make time within your class to slow the pace and allow for different meaningful processing experiences, during which understanding and language are negotiated and appropriated individually or are our courses becoming devoid of meaning and as as queer as a clockwork orange?
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By Barbara Dieu · August 19, 2008
Have you ever seen 10,000 students learning English from one teacher – all at the same time? Have you ever met a detective whose mission impossible is to arrest bad grammar? Or encountered a 74 year-old retiree who thinks nothing of ambushing foreigners on the streets just so he can practice his English? Or heard a Chinese policeman speak English in a New York Bronx accent?
Mad About English, a film by Singaporean filmmaker Lian Pek, humorously documents China ‘s passionate love affair with the English language and their obsessive quest to learn it (some through very unorthodox methods).
This TechCrunch article shows another opportunity to_grow_ your_ career by pointing to a very grammatically (and politically) incorrect website, EngrishFunny, to which users send in photos of poorly translated or odd variations of written English in products, signs or instructions.
Deivis Pothin, a student of linguistics in London, shares his impressions and worries about the underlying message.
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