Take a guided tour of the Dekita Orchard.
Below, you will be able to follow feeds from the Connectivism course, ELT participants and other sources of interest. Click on a folder to view individual feeds; click on a text link to read the most recent posts.
The Orchard runs on Gregarius.
I have just come across the June 15th post on the Open Education Conference 2009 site and realized that I am one day late for the travel scholarship offered for the event. Although the deadline was yesterday, June 30th, I am writing this post in the hope the date will be postponed and that this application will be valid.
The title of the OpenEd conference 2009: Crossing the Chasm is very appropriate. First, because as an enthusiastic early adopter of innovation, my work with new technologies and Open Education has been mostly on the fringes of the secondary school system I work for, without any institutional, logistic or financial support to pursue my work /projects in this field. But then, I suppose that in secondary schools, the established idea is that teachers are not supposed to care about this because others will for them. Secondly, because as I have almost come to the end of my tether, I have not written a single post since April. The prospect of seeing some light at the end of the tunnel (thank you, Leigh) has somehow energized me and made me cross at least the blogging chasm…one step at a time.
I have been working openly and sharing my resources on the web over these past 12 years. I have joined several communities of open-minded people and various networks both locally and internationally, with whom I have collaborated and cooperated in participatory projects presentially and online – voluntarily in my free time. Among these, I can highlight:
1. co-creation and co-management of dekita.org, a project which advocates participatory uses of Web applications in EFL/ESL teaching, favoring open approaches to language learning in which students get to engage the public Web instead of being locked into narrowly circumscribed online spaces;
2. co-development and co-moderation of three 6-week online workshops for teacher professional development in participatory media:
3. publications and presentations in English, French and Portuguese
4. contributions to Wikieducator and this year’s NMC Horizon Report
5. participation in open projects to divulge the open culture in Portuguese;
6. participation in the FLNW unconferences, the Unesco and Brazilian OER list and growing involvement with different local actors , events and educational networks so as to establish OER and CC awareness among educators to foster an open culture in education in Brazil.
So to the questions:
What you would “bring” to the conference? What can you contribute, be it a willingness to volunteer to moderate a session, some special expertise or project, an already accepted proposal…
At the OpenEd conference, I’m willing to contribute with what I know, talk with participants and organizers about possible projects/partnerships involving the networks I belong to (inside and outside formal educational institutions) and help divulge the conference and its themes– before, during and after through my personal learning spaces and networks.
What you see as the most critical issue facing you in your efforts around Open Education, and how you think the conference can help you address it?
The fact that the Brazilian government officially embraced the open source movement and that our country’s culture is very much based on mix and remix does not mean the majority of educators and population understand how Open Ed can be used and the benefits it can bring to them and the population as a whole.
The most pressing and critical issue for me around Open Education is to establish logistic, technical and financial support to start sustainable projects with actors who are willing to make them work. Why is it so difficult to make this happen? I believe this conference will help me understand and learn how to cross the chasm.
Webheads in action have once again invented an online phenomenon. SpeedLifing is an offshoot of SpeedGeeking [en.wikipedia.org], which Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht mentioned in their excellent presentation at WiAOC [webheadsinaction.org], and in this blog post: [mscofino.edublogs.org] This got Webheads thinking we could try the technique, so we decided to do it in Elluminate [tinyurl.com] starting at 13:00 GMT June 14, 2009. There's more information at our wiki [wiaoc09.pbworks.com]
SpeedGeeking is where a lot of participants show up and move at a signal from one presentation to another. The presenters keep repeating their presentations. In Online SpeedGeeking as Webheads will attempt it we will rotate presentations through our Elluminate presentation room at [tinyurl.com]. Elluminate has a countdown timer. We'll set it to countdown 5 minutes. The SpeedGeeker's task is to present cogently and concisely on a topic of choice (non-commercial of course :-) in just 5 minutes. Anyone can present. Scope of topic is up to individual presenters, as long as the topic is covered in 5 min. Anyone interested can sign up at the wiki.
At our usual Webheads Sunday noon GMT chat on May 31 , someone had some questions about Second Life, so we decided to meet in SL the following week June 7It gradually dawned on us, why not try a similar format in SL? We put the event down on our wiki page and invited people to show us their favorite places there, with the caveat that each tour would last 5 or ten minutes. We thought we could get people into SL, exchange friendships, and teleport each other from place to place. And guess what? It worked, and it was F.U.N.
On the day of the event, we had only two presenters who had signed up.

Vance: It’s been a great career for me. Lots of travel opportunities and good vacations, pays the bills while allowing me to interact with a great community of online educators. I like working with language learners.
2. What do you think about teaching a second language with the help of the Internet and computers?
Language is about communication. For most people, there is no purpose to learning a language apart from a desire to communicate in it (not counting theoretical linguists who might wish to study a language for other purposes). Since this is most people's goal, it is awkward and inefficient to study a language in a context where communication is not done purposefully. By purposeful, I do not include exercises that a student might do on instructions of a teacher which put the student in communication only with the teacher. Communication with others in the class is also possible but I have been a language learner in classrooms where the teachers did not exploit this potential, dominated the class with student to teacher interaction, and spent class time on exercises with printed materials which were not at all communicative.
Properly used, the internet opens a world of communication to language learners. They can blog and get comments, they can collaborate with others worldwide, they can engage in live voice conversations, and do constructive language play with real people behind avatars in Second Life (just as a few examples). No student needs to study language in isolation any longer. Teachers who have developed skills in productive use of Web 2.0 can model use of appropriate tools with their students and put them in touch with language learners in collaborative projects. Teachers who reflect on the results of such projects report remarkable gains in motivation to write and hone ideas for peer critique. Most importantly language learning becomes FUN and meaningful for all concerned. Communication is clearly restored as the true purpose of learning the language in the first place.
3. How have your students changed compared to the ones you used to have when you first started teaching?
I started teaching in the mid 1970’s and everyone has changed. I would say that the most significant recent changes, apart from going from questioning the efficacy of using computers in language learning to general acceptance of technology in all aspects of life, have to do with the ubiquity of mobile technologies, especially with younger people including students down to the K-12 level, and the integration of social networking into transactions ranging from making purchases on Amazon and eBay through to so many people, especially students, congregating on Facebook and in other socially networked spaces. These developments are poised to make even more significant impacts on our profession. I have suggested that CALL is becoming an outmoded acronym. These days I encourage people to think SMALL (social media assisted language learning).
4. What does it take to be multiliterate? Are you multiliterate? Why do you think so?
Multiliterate means to be conversant with media as it develops in conjunction with technology. It means to be able to communicate appropriately in these media, that is to know what multimedia tools are available and how to use them, as well as to be able to search and access the communications of others in their various forms of technological enhancement. I teach courses in multiliteracies so I feel that I am moderately multiliterate myself and generally aware of the issues (see [goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com] for a last rendition of the course, and [multiliteracies.ning.com] for the Ning).
5. In your opinion, do you think that just using a textbook, a workbook and an audio program is enough to teach a second language at university level these days?
It could be enough depending on the motivation of the students to learn. I have met many people while traveling in foreign countries who had used such materials to achieve some competence in English and were grateful for the opportunity to meet a foreigner and have the chance to put their skills to use. However, as noted in question 2, the ability to learn a language well through communication with other learners and native speakers online increases the scope for language learning.
6. What do you do to teach the following skills: listening, reading, writing, critical thinking and speaking to your EFL students?
I taught EFL for 20 years but switched to computing and software development in 1995, so I can’t speak first hand about teaching EFL in the past decade. I have been working in teacher training since that time (online through webheads and other communities and networks) so I am aware of what others are doing. These people are blogging their experiences so my answer here would be to review their blogs and recorded experiences, but as the question relates to my personal experiences in EFL, I am not currently working specifically in that area.
7. What differences do you find between the traditional paper and pencil class and the class that integrated Web 2.0 tools?
These differences are those noted in my response to question 2.
8. What kind of text do you and your students use in your classes?
We use texts teaching computing written in-house by computing faculty.
9. How does participating in a community of learning help to learn more?
Peers in the community model the most productive behaviors to one another toward reaching the shared goals. They scaffold one another, support one another in collaborative projects, feed back to one another, provide encouragement, answer questions on a just-in-time basis, and provide a context for informal, social learning to take place. More importantly each ‘node’ in the network is connected with its own locus of other nodes, with the result that the knowledge contained in any one node is accessible throughout the connected networks to all the other nodes. In connectivist terms, knowledge can be defined not as what one possesses within one’s mind or the walls of one’s library, but in terms of ‘the pipes’ or how successfully one is able to nurture and access the nodes in the extended network. The knowledge contained in the network is the sum of its parts, and to be knowledgeable in multiliterate terms means to be able to incorporate this knowledge into one’s own Personal Learning Environment or Network.
10. How should we evaluate when we integrate web tools into the class?
This is a very good question, and my instinct is to say NOT how we evaluate traditional learning. To examine how we might evaluate alternatively, I refer to my answer in question 3, think SMALL. Techniques are evolving for measuring trust on the Internet. Examples are found in Google’s predominant algorithm for search, whereby trust is measured by calculating links from other trusted sites. E-bay, Amazon, and Couch Surfing all have trust systems set up whereby users rank each other according to expected performance. A system has been proposed for enhancing internet security whereby users might have a way of seeing who else has installed software that’s about to install on their machines as a means to helping them decide if they should authorize it (the information would come from tracking choices made by users as each made the choice individually). I think that these techniques could be adapted to pedagogical evaluation systems, whereby users were ranked on the quantity and quality of comments on their blog postings, for example, on measures relating to download and feedback on their podcasts, how viral their uploads to YouTube were, and other peer measures utilizing features of these so-called ‘trust’ systems.
11. What do you think about using project based approach as a learning tool to validate what has been learned in class?
Projects are the only valid thing to evaluate in a system described above. There would be little of this kind of feedback generated by user responses to a multiple choice test, these tests being designed solely for student-teacher interactions, nothing more. In a world where we are all connected to one another, peer evaluation, both by peers who knew and those who did not know the student in question, could become part of the evaluation matrix. Project based learning also lends itself to students' creating digital portfolios of inter-related artifacts which could be evaluated as yet another measure. These methods might produce a mindset whereby the answer to a question on history might not necessarily be 1492 (though a student could look that up if the exact date were required; as opposed to having memorized it) but something along the lines of, let’s see, Columbus was sent on a voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, who at about that time ejected the Moors from Spain, so this would have been toward the end of the 15th century …
12. What do you think should be the role of the teacher that integrates web 2.0 tools into his or her classes?
I like what I hear from teachers who successfully integrate interactive whiteboards in their classes. What works, I understand, is for the teacher to move to the back of the room and guide the students in turn taking at the IWB. Similarly with Web 2.0 the paradigm of learning has to change. In writing that last sentence I changed what I had originally written to replace ‘teaching' with ‘learning’. The role of the teacher is to not teach, but to become a master learner who is simply the model for how everyone in that class learns. With regard to language teaching, the ‘teacher’ is a language informant in that the teacher ‘knows’ what is accepted as correct language, and the teacher can facilitate the learning process. But the idea that anyone can ‘teach’ a language is a spurious one beyond the most rudimentary levels. Language has to be learned; it can’t be taught. What we still call a teacher is actually someone who is more experienced in learning and who can model tricks and tips for students to apply to their own learning. This is where web 2. 0 fits perfectly with this conception of the role of guide on the side facilitator of learning in a classroom. Web 2.0 tools put control in the power of learners, or anyone who uses them. They enable users to communicate online, to record to online spaces, and to tag their artifacts so that others can find or stumble on them. They are ideal tools for constructivist, connectivist learning environments. The role of the teacher in such an environment is to introduce them to students, model appropriate uses, suggest or help learners conceive of ways the tools might be used in collaborative language development, and then step to the back of the room and let the learners get on with it.
13. What do you think should be added or changed in the EFL class in the university?
What is generally needed is for teachers steeped in traditional ways of learning, who have never had the new tools modeled for them, to become first aware of the tools available, and then to form communities where they can see and experience the tools modeled so that they can learn which ones are effective with each other. Only then will they be tentatively in a position to try some of the tools out on their own students.
The fact that this process is not a straightforward one is its biggest drawback. Some awareness of a number of fundamental paradigm shifts is required. I have elsewhere set out ten or 12 of these and many have been covered here (see [advanceducation.blogspot.com]). Essentially they revolved around a fundamental underpinning of multiliteracies, that the way that people communicate online is becoming less arbitrated and more populist. It comes down to how readily people can accept that people on the Internet will regulate one another, so that it becomes possible for example to produce an encyclopedia (for free!) that anyone can write on that is more comprehensive, more current, and arguably of better quality than a very expensive and ecologically unfriendly one produced through the tradition publishing process. Not until this essential concept is grasped, accepted, and understood, can one make sense of the rest of it.
So the people who need to be reached are those who have not yet grasped a functional conception of the socializing and interconnectivist forces at play in an appropriately configured learning network. This is where the concept of change agency becomes crucial. Teachers already attuned to the role of multiliteracies in 21st century learning have crossed a rubicon and must build bridges to those still on the other side. This is difficult. Those on the left bank, as in the one left behind, are not convinced that there is anything better on the right bank, and think they are being talked down to when those on the right try and explain why this is the ‘right’ place to be. It makes little sense to someone who feels the left bank has been perfectly fine for their entire teaching careers to go to the trouble to move off that spot for something that might be just a passing fad.
There are still people whom I work with who tell me they will never blog, and wonder how anyone could be so self-absorbed. Many (sometimes the same people) will tell you that the blogs they’ve read are just nonsensical journals, not for serious readers. I came upon a post on a mailing list the other day that argued that we should carefully consider how we use computers in teaching because learning is social and computers are isolating. Clearly the author of that post is broadcasting ‘knowingly’ from the ‘left’ bank.
There is also an interesting bit of research that suggests that people who are incompetent are blithely unaware of how incompetent they are (not meaning to question anyone's competence in the present instance, concerning colleagues I don't even know - just that this is an interesting bit of research: [www.nytimes.com]).
But what I have just written is anathema to change agency. Successful change agents do not belittle the shortcomings of others or, more importantly, appear to (I didn’t mean to just then; I might have appeared to - anyway the incompetent could be me, or any reader of this blog, blissfully unaware of course :-). Change agents need to start by forming cooperative partnerships with peers who want to learn. The change that’s needed in teaching programs is that these partnerships need to be somehow encouraged.
Thank you to Doris Molero for giving me the opportunity to post this interview here and link it from WiAOC09. The tiny url for this post is http://tinyurl.com/090522molero

Meanwhile adjustments and tweaks were being made impacting plans I was making for use of this time, but when I saw that happening I managed to lock down 10:30 GMT to 11:30 GMT on the schedule here: [learntrends.ning.com].
Meanwhile a third element was put in juggling motion when I informed student groups at Petroleum Institute where I work, that they could join in as part of their own Earthday celebrations. So a conversation with students at the PI about our environment has become a recorded part of the LearnTrends event, and was streamed worldwide live, as it happened.And here's what was expected to happen ... this is what I wrote prior to the event, to help with planning ...
By 10:00 GMT I will go to a classroom at PI where I will likely be all alone at first, and and I will log on to Elluminate at http://bit.ly/WPKGi. There is no Skype at PI so I will be in the Elluminate chat and voice room, and in the chat room at [earthbridges.net]. I will also be checking Twitter, which you can follow at [twitter.com].
Jose Rodriguez and/or Doug Symington have agreed that at least one of them would be there to stream on [earthbridges.net] (thanks guys!! indefatigable!)
At 10:30 GMT, Sanja Bozinovic intends to bring 5 high school students (not sure from where in the world) to Elluminate.
At around 11:00 GMT some students from the PI might appear. We'll continue the conversation and stream. Michael Coghlan has also promised to be in the area.
Meanwhile in the real world, Dr. Nadia Al Hasani, director of the women's campus at Petroleum Institute dropped by to see what was going on and had an online conversation with Doris Molero, who showed her a social networking site she had created for engineering students in Venezuela. Of course, Dr. Nadia brought along a photographer:
The event was also mentioned afterward at the Petroleum Institute website. I'm not sure how long these links will remain valid, but for what they're worth:
At 11:30 we go to the next item in the program at LearnTrends, whose schedule is here: [learntrends.ning.com]
I will continue as moderator of LearnTrends events until 13:00 GMT.
I'll report how it came out here. However it comes out, it should be F.U.N. All are welcome.
Recordings of the sessions from both LearnTrends and Earthcast09 will be linked from here when recordings are available (audio being edited, renderings forthcoming)
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Last January, my 5th blogging anniversary and the end of the sabbatical year went by without pomp or circumstance : 3 posts, sparse tweets, bookmarks and Flickr photos. Although triggered or lead by digital events and networked conversations, most of the contacts were this time f2f- a noisier, tastier and more touchy-feely complement to the screen: Campus Party, informal meetings, drinks and barbecues.
Going back to school in February just confirmed once again that change just does not seem to happen in closed environments. Same conversations in the teachers’ room, same unsolved problems from 25 years ago and endless meetings, during which there is more red tape than a decision to act.
School more than ever feels like prison with its tight unvarying schedule, routine and very little room for emergence, creativity and “organized chaos”. Focus is on discipline and control so students’ inventiveness and ingenuity are proven by subverting it. Teachers drone, kids get bored by looking at the nape of the same neck for hours and cannot sit still. With instructional technology alone, the difficulty in staying on task - they connect to social sites, message their friends, play games. Same problems as ages ago, just “enhanced” by educational technology. Kids will be kids.
In March, visits, new acquaintances, conversations, exchanging ideas and practices in different areas and levels: Lumiar school, Papagallis, The Hub, VivoEduca and some fun creative play online with Inkscape in a remix challenge.
1. Pedagogy - from didactic TO constructivist
2. Networking - from isolated TO connectivist models; e.g. CoPs and distributed learning networks
3. Sharing - from copyright TO creative commons
4. Literacy – from print dominance TO communication that tends toward multiliteracies
5. Heuristics - from client/server TO peer to peer
6. Formality – from Trepidation, fear of being exposed as not knowing TO F.U.N. = encourage class to explore despite risk of Frivolous Unanticipated Nonsense
7. Transfer – from lecture, sit/get TO modeling, demonstration
8. Directionality – from push TO pull e.g. RSS
9. Ownership – from proprietary TO open source
10. Classification – from taxonomy TO folksonomy
The above remarks were made in a talk given online at an online event put on by George Siemens et al: [www.aace.org]
This conference and much of what George organizes along these lines, and what Webheads attempt in http://wiaoc.org, are excellent examples and models of where I think these paradigm shifts are taking us.
So where I would be taking my 6-8 minute presentation would be to work from our early attempts to organize what we started back in 1983, doing the best we could in the paradigm available. For example I used to solicit articles for and cobble together an MS-DOS Newsletter and photocopy it at Sultan Qaboos University, where I worked, and send it out in department mail to a list of names I had collected, often by snail mail. These were the days where we would keep in a box in someone's house somewhere for 360 days a year all our disks of educational software which we lugged to each TESOL conference. Later we accumulated some of this on a CD that Deborah and Norm (right? or Elizabeth??) put together, and eventually stored on a server in Australia (who was the guy who hosted that?). Having to distribute our work on physical media and then post it entailed costs which got me in trouble at SQU when I felt the need to request compensation from recipients who needed an invoice so they could get money from petty cash from their institutes which I created and eventually got stung with accusations of commercialism, when all I and like-minded colleagues really wanted to do was share our stuff for free at no cost to me or to the recipient, which we can all easily do now that the paradigm has shifted.
So from our clumsy beginnings in CALL-IS with all the software fairs that ended in swap meets and hard copy newsletters and presentations at physical conferences which we sometimes managed to broadcast to the outside world (always the question, should we ask TESOL if we can do this? the edupunk answer, uughhh *bump foreheads!*) ... up through to EVO, which emerged through CALL-IS thinking and much effort over the past decade, and which I see as a model showing the right direction for us. Webheads has been a fixture in all but the first EVO session, and this is another model for interactions with one another, many participants in EVO being members of either and often both CALL-IS and Webheads. And when we model through any of these entities (EVO, CALL-IS, Webheads), we do so in such a way that we help anyone along who wants to follow the model.
This I think has always been what CALL-IS has intended and tried to do. It's people helping one another, since the days where as young people we would happily pitch in to all hours with no compensation beyond whatever support our workplaces provided in getting us to TESOL conferences in the first place.
Now we don't pitch in so obviously at annual conferences. I mean we do, but nothing as labor intensive as those who were not there cannot imagine (sleep deprivation but also commeradie). But the paradigm shift that I would like to focus on is the one which now allows us to treat our annual conferences not as The Cake but as a tasty layer of icing on a larger cake on which we sustain by ourselves throughout the year. That has always been what CALL-IS has intended to do, to provide people with a means to communicate and network not only at the annual conference but between conferences. We now have several models for doing this. To recapitulate, some of these which I have mentioned here are:
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Feb 20, 2009 I gave a talk entitled "After a decade of inroads, SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences" at AACE's Spaces of Interaction: An online conversation on improving traditional conferences. [www.aace.org] - Speaker schedule: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/speakers/ - George Siemens's 4 min. introduction to the event: [www.aace.org] - Ning http://aacecommunity.ning.com/ for conversation and brainstorming before, during, and after the presentations.
My abstract: The presenter has been a long-time advocate and agitator for broadcasting online both into and out of on-site professional development events and conferences. The presenter describes inroads made during the past decade from 1999 to the present in making conferences accessible to many more than just their physically present delegates. Having debunked the myth that if conferences were open to online access on-site attendance would drop off, a case is made for the opposite scenario: that broadening channels for conversation at conference venues is a win-win situation in which everyone benefits, and conferences where these channels are blocked are the dinosaurs doomed to extinction.
- You can follow the draft as it develops at [tinyurl.com]
- The slides are posted at [www.slideshare.net]
- The presentation was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/