viernes, 3 de abril de 2009
martes, 31 de marzo de 2009
Greetings from London
Well, I made the flight with minutes to spare, but my luggage didn't move as fast as I did. At least it saved me the trouble of lugging my suitcase around London on the train. It was starting to get dramatic when the suitcase arrived!
Now I'm in Cardiff which is the capital of Wales. It's an interesting mix of old and new. I'm two blocks from the Stadium, and Wales is playing Germany tomorrow night, so, who knows, I might just drop by.
I speak tomorrow, so I can relax after that.
See you!
Now I'm in Cardiff which is the capital of Wales. It's an interesting mix of old and new. I'm two blocks from the Stadium, and Wales is playing Germany tomorrow night, so, who knows, I might just drop by.
I speak tomorrow, so I can relax after that.
See you!
domingo, 29 de marzo de 2009
sábado, 28 de marzo de 2009
TESOL DENVER 28 MARCH
I only went to one talk today, but I was going to be speaking and I didn't want to get overwhelmed. Again the sun is shining but it's still quite chilly.
I, again, put on coat, hat, and gloves, got my tall non-fat latte and headed over to the convention center. I got there around 8 and got the tail end of a talk about Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world where people live, work, interact, and pretty much do what they do in really life. People have been experimenting with it for learning, including second languages. I have fiddled with it, but it takes a lot of patience to learn to use, not to mention extremely fast internet service, so I didn't find it practical.
Anyway, the talk I was waiting for started, and it was great! It's about using voicethread. Check it out at www.voicethread.com. It allows you to make slide shows using images or powerpoint slides and add written or spoken comments to it. I think it would be great for student final projects or things like that. It's really easy to use, too, with minimal equipment.
My talk went really well, I started out with three people, two of them my buddies, but finished with about twenty, all of them very interested and with lots of questions, comments and suggestions. It was pretty great.
After the talk, I left the convention center to pick up my stuff and head over to the airport.
Right now I'm at Denver airport waiting for my flight,which has been delayed due to strong winds in Dallas. There's no guarantee that I will make my connect ingflight to London, so stayed tuned for the next episode.
I, again, put on coat, hat, and gloves, got my tall non-fat latte and headed over to the convention center. I got there around 8 and got the tail end of a talk about Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world where people live, work, interact, and pretty much do what they do in really life. People have been experimenting with it for learning, including second languages. I have fiddled with it, but it takes a lot of patience to learn to use, not to mention extremely fast internet service, so I didn't find it practical.
Anyway, the talk I was waiting for started, and it was great! It's about using voicethread. Check it out at www.voicethread.com. It allows you to make slide shows using images or powerpoint slides and add written or spoken comments to it. I think it would be great for student final projects or things like that. It's really easy to use, too, with minimal equipment.
My talk went really well, I started out with three people, two of them my buddies, but finished with about twenty, all of them very interested and with lots of questions, comments and suggestions. It was pretty great.
After the talk, I left the convention center to pick up my stuff and head over to the airport.
Right now I'm at Denver airport waiting for my flight,which has been delayed due to strong winds in Dallas. There's no guarantee that I will make my connect ingflight to London, so stayed tuned for the next episode.
TESOL DENVER 27 MARCH
No snow today, but it's quite chilly. The sessions start at 7 am, but thank God, Starbucks is open at 6. I put on my coat, hat, gloves and grab a cup of coffee, as I head out to the convention center. It's about 5 blocks away. Without the hat and gloves, my ears and fingers would freeze off.
I had selected one talk about Internet 2.0, but I switch over to the room next door, where they are talking about cognitive overload. It seems that sometimes students get so overloaded with the material they are covering that they start falling behind. They have a great handout, but they were focusing a lot on kids, so I took the handout and ran. I promise to share it later. I went next door to the talk about the Internet and that was great. I got some good tips and ideas that I will also share later.
The next talk was about teaching content through English medium (you see a trend here, don't you). Well-presented but nothing really new.
For some strange reason, I got stuck in two commercial talks, so the day was not the best, howeve that first workshop was definitely worth it.
I had selected one talk about Internet 2.0, but I switch over to the room next door, where they are talking about cognitive overload. It seems that sometimes students get so overloaded with the material they are covering that they start falling behind. They have a great handout, but they were focusing a lot on kids, so I took the handout and ran. I promise to share it later. I went next door to the talk about the Internet and that was great. I got some good tips and ideas that I will also share later.
The next talk was about teaching content through English medium (you see a trend here, don't you). Well-presented but nothing really new.
For some strange reason, I got stuck in two commercial talks, so the day was not the best, howeve that first workshop was definitely worth it.
TESOL 2009 DENVER
Snow and lots of it. They had forecast "light snowfall", but the newspapers say that this is a blizzard. It's pretty much my first experience with snow, so of course I had to run out and touch it and take photos. However, I did manage to get in a few talks. Here is a summary of my notes:
Toni Hull Authentic Materials
Toni has been teaching in Russia and in Vietnam. She talks about using authentic materials- websites, videos, etc, produced by “non-native” speakers of English as learning materials for her students.
The drawback is that these materials are not always grammatically correct, or perhaps they are correct, but they use non-standard structures or expressions that may be used in one part of the word but not another.
She mentions that she uses a lot CNN revealed, a program that interviews celebrities who are not always English speakers.
Curt Reese 14 lessons from Facebook
Uses Facebook applications and you tube videos as starting point for writing or speaking activites. Showed us a very cute video from Sister Salad about youtube haters. Good handout
Non-native content teachers
Lise Lotte Hjulman
Joyce Kling
Ulrich Bliesener
This is related to teachers teaching their content through English, similar to what we are doing at the Uninversity. They talk about advantages and disadvantages and their situation is very similar to ours, with similar concerns: the level of English of the students, how much learning is going on, do they have to simplify the curriculum, etc.
FREEMAN & RICHARDS Is ESOL as we know it dead?
The kind of education required will change and it will need to expand across the life span
So much going on that the classroom is no longer the main learning place. Some changes:
· English as a common language
· Social participation
· F2f vs. virtual learning
· Native speaker/interlocutor is no longer the model
· ESL/EFL is no longer the dichotomy, Graves talks about context embedded and context removed
Some concerns:
· When should English learning start
· What is proficient
Freeman: early start is not correlated to proficiency (Spain vs. Germany)
Richards: do dubbed movies have anything to do with this? The availability of English in the real world?
THE LEARNERS ARE LEADING AND THE DELIVERY NEEDS TO CATCH UP
Industrialization of teacher education. Quality matters and it matters tremendously. For teacher training, there must be indicators of quality, levels of education and levels of training.
What are materials in the wired world? Can you have global standards?
Toni Hull Authentic Materials
Toni has been teaching in Russia and in Vietnam. She talks about using authentic materials- websites, videos, etc, produced by “non-native” speakers of English as learning materials for her students.
The drawback is that these materials are not always grammatically correct, or perhaps they are correct, but they use non-standard structures or expressions that may be used in one part of the word but not another.
She mentions that she uses a lot CNN revealed, a program that interviews celebrities who are not always English speakers.
Curt Reese 14 lessons from Facebook
Uses Facebook applications and you tube videos as starting point for writing or speaking activites. Showed us a very cute video from Sister Salad about youtube haters. Good handout
Non-native content teachers
Lise Lotte Hjulman
Joyce Kling
Ulrich Bliesener
This is related to teachers teaching their content through English, similar to what we are doing at the Uninversity. They talk about advantages and disadvantages and their situation is very similar to ours, with similar concerns: the level of English of the students, how much learning is going on, do they have to simplify the curriculum, etc.
FREEMAN & RICHARDS Is ESOL as we know it dead?
The kind of education required will change and it will need to expand across the life span
So much going on that the classroom is no longer the main learning place. Some changes:
· English as a common language
· Social participation
· F2f vs. virtual learning
· Native speaker/interlocutor is no longer the model
· ESL/EFL is no longer the dichotomy, Graves talks about context embedded and context removed
Some concerns:
· When should English learning start
· What is proficient
Freeman: early start is not correlated to proficiency (Spain vs. Germany)
Richards: do dubbed movies have anything to do with this? The availability of English in the real world?
THE LEARNERS ARE LEADING AND THE DELIVERY NEEDS TO CATCH UP
Industrialization of teacher education. Quality matters and it matters tremendously. For teacher training, there must be indicators of quality, levels of education and levels of training.
What are materials in the wired world? Can you have global standards?
martes, 10 de febrero de 2009
Knowledge building
From a sociocultural perspective, learning is a process carried out in interaction with more knowledgeable others. Those 'others' can be adults, they can be teachers, or they can be peers that know more about the topic than we do. In peer to peer interaction, what normally happens is that we discuss what we think we know about a topic, then we try to iron out the differences between what we believe. These differences are called 'dissonance' and they cause a 'cognitive conflict' because what you believe is not the same as what I believe. The truth is that our beliefs are caused by our experience; since we don't have the same experience, we probably don't hold the same beliefs.
Anyway, sharing these differences and negotiating them to try to come up with the truth is what we call knowledge building. Notice then, that we usually don't learn because someone tells us something: we learn because we- together with someone else- build our knowledge.
This is what I feel didn't happen with the participants in my study: they limited themselves to finding definitions and posting these on a wiki without ever discussing if what they were doing matched what they believed about how vocabulary is learned.
So, that's the next step in the project.
Anyway, sharing these differences and negotiating them to try to come up with the truth is what we call knowledge building. Notice then, that we usually don't learn because someone tells us something: we learn because we- together with someone else- build our knowledge.
This is what I feel didn't happen with the participants in my study: they limited themselves to finding definitions and posting these on a wiki without ever discussing if what they were doing matched what they believed about how vocabulary is learned.
So, that's the next step in the project.
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