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 · November 04, 2008
During the 2005 WiAOC conference, we introduced, explained the P2P concept and showed why / how it could be incorporated in language learning. We also set up the Dekita Exchange project for learners, which unfortunately came to a halt earlier this year for lack of interest and participation.
Today, I have just come across a series of other P2P presentations and initiatives. During the E-merge Conference in July 2008, Robin Good and Michael Bauwens discuss P2P Models in Education, demonstrate that P2P is far more than technology and file sharing and describe the collaborative social arrangements which are necessary for large scale voluntary projects such as writing and editing Wikipedia articles.
The P2P Virtual University is about to be launched in February 2009. Similarly to the EVO sessions, the P2PU courses will run for 6 weeks and be open to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. Learning, however, will take place in small groups of 8-14 students and will require the payment of a small sign-up fee and an application as a way to ‘assure’ learner commitment and motivation.
As Alastair Creelman states in his post
The whole concept relies on committed tutors who use P2PU to enhance their academic reputation and the opportunity to work in communities they would not otherwise have access to. The role of the “sense makers” is more to provide academic depth to the courses and to liaise with the tutors. Whether these people will get some kind of financial reward for their contribution in the future depends on the success of the project.
While George Siemens questions the notion of “sense makers” (no one makes sense for us) and centralization, the Chronicle of Higher Education points to some of the obstacles to such project.
Although the initiative signals yet another movement towards openness, de-institutionalization and personalization, like Siemens, I still see it as linear, top-down and very teacher-centred. The content and design are laid down beforehand and precede the learner instead of respecting truly self-determined learning and reflection.
I wonder whether I will see the day when learners themselves discuss and write down their own curricula on a wiki according to their passion and needs, and then, interact in diverse communities to seek out experience, discuss and collaborate with feedback from tutors, experts and peers in order to make sense and achieve their goals. Their certificate, whether accredited by an institution or not, would then be their personal learning process and trajectory documented through their interactions and artifacts on the Web/f2f.
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By Barbara Dieu · December 23, 2007
This is an end of year homage to Teresa Almeida d’Eca, one of the most illustrious and hard-working members of the Webheads in Action Community of Practice.
Teresa, whose students have been featured on Dekita in a previous post, has been involved in ICTs since 1996 and is working against all odds to implement these new technologies in her EFL classes at the Escola EB 2,3 de Sto Antonio in Parede, Portugal.
I am very happy to report that Teresa was one of the 13 finalists of the international eLearning Awards 2007 and that her CALL Lessons 2005-2007, a curricular blog for 5th & 6th graders (1st-2nd year EFL) for learning English with the help of different Web 2.0 tools, has won the SMART Technologies award for the school of the future at the e-Leaning 2007 event organized by the European Schoolnet during the Eminent Conference held in Brussels on 6/7 December 2007.
Teresa, who has been documenting the work Webheads of many WiA along these years, shares a more detailed explanation of her own success on a wiki she opened to register the event.
Congratulations Teresa on your prize, given as a recognition to your diligence, inventiveness and commitment to your students and ELT.
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By Barbara Dieu · November 07, 2006
This year I was fortunate enough to be able to engage two of my secondary school classes in open and participatory webpublishing (read and write web) more regularly and for a longer period. They were split in half and I’ve had them in smaller groups in the computer room for one hour (from the two other hours in class).
I managed to have them open accounts with Wordpress and other social tools like Flickr, Del.icio.us, 43Things and 43Places and Community Walk
We have inter-linked the tools so it is now possible for them to post directly from the other accounts to their main blog. They have also learnt how to aggregate friends’ blogs and interesting sites through Bloglines to be able to read the posts directly from one page.
After showing how and why to use the different tools, the moments in the lab are now devoted to reading other blogs, commenting on them and publishing their own posts. Students choose the subject and the tool they are going to work with. If they have not managed to conclude what they have set out to do during that hour, they polish it off at home.
At the end of the trimester, I check if they have accomplished the different tasks they have undertaken during the sessions and mark them symbolically for “participation” only because the system demands I do it for all work students engage in. Students KNOW however that they are not doing it for a grade.
Correction is done on the spot, when they ask me for it or later in class, to the whole group, when I notice recurring mistakes. They are encouraged to go back to their posts and rewrite them but I have found out few actually do it. They tend to forget about it once class is over.
Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced AWAY from the blogging area, on Hot Potato sites that abound on the net, grammar books or photocopies – if and only if – the need arises. If I were totally online, I would do it inside an LMS system as Aaron suggests in his Blogging for Homework post . I point them to links for more practice on static pages.
Time in class is devoted to reading, listening, speaking and discussion. More formally structured essays are submitted by mail and the correction and comments go back the same way. I have also experimented doing some group and collaborative work on wikis but the concept is not yet totally clear so I decided to re-introduce next year once they are really at ease with blogging and social tools.
Now, what I like about Wordpress is that it gives you the possibility of having a static page so I am thinking asking students at the end of the school term is to choose some of the essays they like best and archive them on the static pages as part of their learning portfolio. This will make them go over the writing they engaged in during the year, reinforce some concepts and give them an idea of their progress.
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