Week 2: Connecting

Overview : January 21st-January 27th

During this week, we will bring together all the personal blogs into Dekita and into our own aggregator (Bloglines/Google Reader/Pageflakes - or other), comment on participants’ posts from previous week and point out any problems with configuring or finding our way with the social tools (Media Forum).

Before you start publishing, listen to Amy Gharan’s tutorial video on Strategic Comments on Blogs (it takes some time to load).

Activities:

Aggregating

• Watch Alexander Hayes’ slideshare RSS as Glu
• Add your feed to the SMiELT aggregator. In this way other participants will be able to find you and vice-versa. In the title, add your name and the name of your blog (Examples). Once you have submitted it, you can check whether it appears here. Please do not edit or change any other configurations. Further detail is available in this blog post.
• Log into your aggregator account and add the participants of this course. You may want to open one folder for your personal feeds and another one for participant feeds. If you are not sure how and why to do it, check the tutorials.
• From your aggregator window, read what your colleagues have posted on their blogs last week.
• Comment on the posts that relate to you, either by adding your response to the post in the comment area of other people’s blogs or by bringing the discussion to your own blog, quoting (you may want to use blockquotes do do so) and linking back to the original source . Remember that blogging is all about connecting the dots (referencing, linking and aggregating)

Joining Work Groups

• During the next four weeks we will be experimenting with and reflecting on different tools/platforms and how to use them in ELT. We will be forming groups focusing on a particular tool . Add your name under the wiki group you would like to participate in and collaborate with.

Reading

• What is Social Media? by Antony Mayfield (33 page pdf file) (January 22nd 2007)
• P2P and Learning Ecologies in EFL/ESL (2006) - Dieu, Campbell and Ammann :
• Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web (2007) Dieu, B and Stevens, V.
• More resources on the subject.

Discussion

After observing the usage of these tools and behaviour of users in these environments, read the suggested articles and discuss on your blog the affordances that open and participatory environments offer in ELT.

• What are the benefits/constraints that these open environments may bring in your context?
• What are the pedagogical implications of social media for ELT?
• Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?
• Can these social media help you? How?

Benchmarks

I have…

• added my feed to the SMiELT aggregator
• subscribed to other participants’ blogs in my own aggregator.
• read and commented on some of the other participants’ thoughts and ideas or referred back to them, providing links to the original source, extending the conversation.
• read the articles/paper/discussion questions recommended for this week and have commented/reflected on them in my blog.
• joined one (or more) focus groups according to my preferences.