Languages from a Distance

On Friday, April 11, I –or rather my avatar, Benno Tauber– attended the grand opening of the German island Metaversa in Teen Second Life. (*Actually the event was the first of two openings: the next evening another grand opening was held for English speakers –see photo.)

According to one of the Linden Lab officers who was present Metaversa is the largest non-English speaking island on the teen grid. Participants (about 10-15 of us, I think) were given a tour of the island by the teens who had built many of the sights: a mall with different items that the teens had created for “purchase” (all merchandise-mostly clothing– was free) , a stage for fashion shows, various architectural structures -including the Brandenburg Gate–, an apartment complex where students competed by designing their own rooms and living spaces, a race track with drivable race cars, a café lounge for socializing, a movie theater for viewing films and presentations, and much, much more. At the end of the tour we all flew back to the main stage where individual teens won awards for the best design in various categories.

The affair lasted about one hour and was streamed live in at “The Newthinking Store” in Berlin, Germany. Frequently, one could hear applause and laughter from the audience there (photo courtesy of Michael Lange.)

Michael Lange who works in conjunction with the German Federal Ministry for Youth and Education, organized the event and together with his avatar, Ziggy Tomorrow, moderated the tour and awards. Individual teens took part as well.

I think that the Second Life - Teen platform shows great potential for cultural exchange and language practice and actually plan to use it next year for our level 3 and 4 students. There are some obstacles to this plan— I will discuss them later—but the engagement and involvement I witnessed among the many teens on Metaversa island are cause for celebration. Congratulations to Michael and his team of helpers!

Happy George Washington’s B-day! Hey, speaking of presidents…. there’s a presidential election going on: an election, in which the word “change” has been evoked throughout. What a fitting theme to all the activity that is taking place in the world of distance learning! Connectivity, choice, and personalization can now be provided as never before to ALL students regardless of geographic location.

Some of the new components of KET’s Distance-Learning German program are outlined on this short video. Click here and have a look!

The DL German Program at KET was awarded the Public Media Innovation Fund Grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) last month! This is an exciting time! Here’s a slide show I created for a group of Highly Qualified Teachers on Zoho (ZohoShow) in order to 1) present a basic overview of our program and the changes that are in store, as well as 2) provide some background on Web 2.0 tools and formats. ZohoShow worked pretty well though there were some quirks and the finished product is less than polished…. At any rate I thought that it would be a good way to demonstrate the efficacy of read/write web-based tools—by using some in the presentation.

You can also click here to go directly to the ZohoShow site if you prefer.

Ok, I guess I should know these things already: For some time now I’ve been considering ways of providing students writing practice in a dl environment. I have thought about blogs and about wikis too…but it wasn’t until last weekend when I happened upon an excellent piece by Kato and Rosen in the November 2007 edition of The Language Educator that I finally felt I could proceed with confidence and begin drawing up a game plan.Their article is called: Improving Proficiency: Building Community: A Wiki Case Study. (For basic information on wikis go here or here. )

Writing has always been one of the most difficult and frustrating areas of language to “teach” because it involves getting students to understand and buy in to the idea that putting thoughts to paper is actually a process. In the traditional classroom that journey can be an uphill battle to say the least. Add some distance to the equation (as in distance learning) and things get even more challenging.

Most assignments attempt to deliberately instill an awareness for the writing process, say, by requiring students to submit a number of drafts before turning in a final composition. But imposing a contrived process will rarely push students to work hard on improving their writing and come to important insights on their own. For that, two important ingredients, audience and purpose, must first be present. The wiki platform can help to ensure that they are.

And then some.

How do wikis do it? Simply by providing a collaborative space where students can get to know each other, become involved in classwork, and exchange (and edit!) ideas. In their article, Kato and Rosen describe their approach to incorporating wikis in Japanese distance-learning courses administered by the Collaborative Language Program (CLP) at the University of Wisconsin. As a part of each assignment, students from diverse geographical locations join learning groups. Groups are made up of about four to five members. The small-size helps keep the interaction focused so that members quickly become acquainted with one another. Assignments are organized in three stages, each of which entails a specific type of posting. They are: 1) Personal response. Students are encouraged to write from their personal lives as they reflect and respond to a set of questions on a particular theme that is being studied. 2) Commenting and questioning (and proofreading.) Students read their own group members’ postings, and post at least 3 questions. They also highlight three errors that they found after reading the postings of one other group. 3) Responding (and correcting.) Students respond to the questions from posting 2 and correct errors that have been marked.

One of the great strengths of this set up, as Kato and Rosen point out, is that students are writing regularly in the target language, as well as correcting and rewriting drafts. The writing process is built in naturally and does not feel artificial because the audience is not only the teacher but a network of fellow language learners.

In addition to these regular target-language writing assignments, students are encouraged to initiate their own wikis in which they discuss in English various aspects of the target culture ( music, food and animé were popular topics.) What an awesome means for cultivating student interest and promoting life-long learning!

By allowing students to connect with each other, and collaborate (and socialize!) wikis provide fertile ground for a community of learners to evolve naturally. The real beauty of this process is that it can occur regardless of geographic location or time-zone. (Though one wonders whether kids might connect and participate more actively because of these factors, i.e. because they are far removed from each other geographically, they are perhaps more interested in being part of a community than regular classroom learners. Distance makes the heart grow fonder! ) In any respect, the wiki platform seems practically custom made to answer to the challenges inherent in k12 distance learning.

Two weeks ago I took a trip with some of my producer colleagues at KET to the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments (C.V.V.E.) We had received an invitation for a tour some weeks earlier and besides feeling curious about what we might see–none of us really knew what to expect!– we were hoping that the visit might spark our imagination and help us come up with some creative ideas for the video instruction we are set to produce next year. That it did!

As we were guided from room to room, grad students received us and introduced the projects that were being carried out. In the first room, ironically, the focus was not on visual but on audio research. There, we were shown how tiny microphones and speakers can be distributed at various points and synchronized in a way that allows a computer to locate and distinguish voices from within a group. This capability could transform any environment into a “smart” space which could detect and interact with individual visitors simultaneously. The technology opens up all kinds of possibilities: spoken commands from anywhere in the room could direct a computer to call up documents and files to a large screen, a “voice guide” could accompany and direct a person on a tour through a building, or a person could allow his voice to be amplified as he walked through the room but without the hassle of wearing a dedicated microphone.

The different stations of the tour were similar in that each featured an application of technology which in the near future might significantly change the way people interact with information and each other. Tele-immersion research being conducted at CVVE for example involves developing practical methods of transmitting images and environments to displays so that they are “view-dependent.” As the viewer looks at the screen from different directions, the image and light change to create a 3-D, immersive effect: objects, people, and backgrounds seem to be really there. Such a technology will take tele-conferencing to a whole new level. Board members might attend a meeting in which they are seated right across the table from one another, at least apparently so. In reality however they are sitting not only in different board rooms but in different countries as well, separated by thousands of miles. Because tele-immersion can re-create a sense of proximity and presence which we experience in real life, it will have many ramifications for distance learning as well. As we’ve mentioned before on these pages, one essential tactic for increasing achievement in K12 distance learning is removing the “distance.” Tele-immersion provides a way to make that possible.

There were many other cutting-edge projects which we were able to see in action. Research in 3D Face Recognition, 3D Data Acquisition, and the REVEAL project which will allow surgeons to train for and conduct surgeries in a much more efficient and sophisticated manner.

While touring the center, one can not help but notice how the visualization research going on there applies to such a wide range of disciplines: medicine, commerce, government, defense, and…. education.

I’ve been hopeful and excited about the potential of virtual environments in education –especially for language learning and cultural exchange– ever since I first started delving into Second Life at the beginning of this year. Toward the end of our tour at CVVE we were provided with a concrete example (on video) of how life-size, immersive visualization can work for learning. Researchers there had created an environment using a gaming metaphor: a student– equipped with only an armchair to sit in and a remote to direct his motion–took part in an Indiana Jones-type quest through a cavernous maze of tunnels and secret passages to locate and help decipher an ancient Greek tablet. As the student “walked” through the maze, he heard the voices of two guides who gave him advice on how to proceed and what to look out for– but all of the decision making was left up to him. Once he finally found the tablet, he was able to use his remote to pick it up, spin it around, and view it from all angles. As the doctoral student working on the project pointed out, such a close-up examination would be impossible in the museum where the actual artifact is on display: the piece is housed behind glass and cannot be touched (nor lifted up! It weighs more than a ton, I’m sure. ) But how did she create such a realistic 3-D image of this massive relic? She confided to us that is was actually very easy: she simply located a 2D image of the piece on the web and downloaded it. No labor-intensive rendering involved! Again, we see ways of removing the distance out of the equation and allowing students to interact with content up close.

Before leaving one my colleagues made the observation that while the ideas there at the center were all very futuristic, the technology was not. Indeed, most of the projects made use of the most standard equipment, all of it very economical and run-of-the-mill. We were expecting supercomputers but found mostly low cost cameras and gear that seemed thrown together in an ad hoc fashion.

That realization alone made quite an impact on my thinking over the next days. I thought about how although for immediate, practical purposes we aren’t quite there yet with all the exciting new capabilities of visualization technology and virtual immersion, we are very close indeed. In the meantime I too want to make use of the tools at hand (in the spirit of the people at the CVVE!) but for our program the focus will be primarily on creating environments for language learning in which students can experience content first hand.

Mind maps are great brainstorming tools, of course. Here’s a look at some brainstorming I’ve done using mindmeister. Just click on the map to navigate on your own. Drag the blue box to the right.

Not all distance-learning programs rely on video instruction as a component of their courses. In fact, most do not. Why not? Well for one, videos can be costly. Traditionally video involves a whole team of people who work together writing, producing, and packaging what becomes the final product: a complete series of lessons on tape, DVD, or web.

Video formats have been a part of KET Distance Learning since the beginning. KET’s innovations in video as a teaching medium (see below) allowed students even in the remotest areas of Kentucky the opportunity to connect with other learners of German (as well as other many other subjects)—an opportunity they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Of course some things were different back then… The program was televised live via satellite to participating schools. German classes in the various schools all met at the same time so that they could watch the show when it was broadcast. Is that amazing, or what? Today every school seems to be in its own little universe with a distinct timetable and any variation of block scheduling (with extended 90 minute classes), or regular scheduling (usually 55 minute classes,) or even a combination thereof (alternating between 90 and 55 minutes.) Some schools offer shortened class periods of 45 minutes. Others provide no time at all during the regular school day for German DL classes. Interested students have to meet before or after school and count on office staff somewhere in the building to help act as facilitators to download tests and enter grades. And then there are the students that are learning from home, either through home-schooling or cyber schools (like the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School.)

W H A T has been going on here in the last ten years??!! A revolution?

And it appears that it is just the beginning. This trend in education towards individualized learning with more choice and greater local control will not be going away any time soon. Distance learning programs will have to keep pace.

Ironically enough, live broadcasts back in the nineties allowed for a more interactive format than what we have today. Back then, individual classes at the various schools were encouraged to call in to ask the teacher questions during the broadcast. Each episode featured a “school of the day” that would remain on the line for most of the lesson. Students interacted with the teacher as well as with other students who called in. In addition, KET pioneered a wonderful technological tool to allow student input: the KET keypad, a fully patented device that helped the KET distance program win national recognition (have a look here and here.)

But it was inevitable that the format had to change. School schedules were rapidly diverging from the norm. Dependence on satellite service also became an issue. It became necessary to go to pre-recorded video tapes.

That leads us up to today… Fortunately we can now rely on other means to achieve the all-important interaction that we need. The read- write web, or Web 2.0 , provides all kinds of possibilities. The question here is: Will video instruction continue to play a role, given the changed environment?

I think it can.

One important advantage of the video format is that it brings the image of the teacher to the learner and thus helps remove the distance out of the dl equation. Providing students a way of “getting to know” their teacher can’t hurt and may even make them more receptive to the course content. As different teaching styles work for different teachers, there is probably no one right way to approach video in a K12 DL course. Nevertheless we could probably come up with an outline of best practices for effective video teaching in the 21st century.

What items would be on such a list? At this point I can only come up with a few descriptors for an unfinished list, but I’d definitely like to expand on it. Here’s a start:

Video instruction in K12 distance learning should be…

-divided into shorter segments

-organized in a way that encourages student exploration

- easily accessible (available online)

-focused on student needs in DL (not driven by a textbook agenda)

-conducted by a teacher persona students can relate to

I started teaching when the mimeograph machine had been out of use for only a short time and still remember years earlier as a student smelling the freshly run-off dittos as the teacher passed them out. For these reasons and more I think you would agree I am entitled to provide a brief one-paragraph account here of the evolution of technology in our schools from 15 years ago to the present. Here goes:

Web 1.0 brought a universe of authentic content to our fingertips. It was liberating because it helped open up the walls of the classroom to the outside world. But it was just a first step. We still managed things pretty much as we had before…viewing content as something to be studied, static and separated from our touch. But then a whirlwind began to stir….or, rather, a tsunami? By allowing us to interact with content and create our own, Web 2.0 set off the revolution that we are now in the midst of.

Ho hum. It’s already an old story, I know.

But we need to rise to the occassion. With all the activity and innovation out there today, we have an opportunity as never before to MAKE UP for the distance in dl. We can provide our students–most of them in rural and remote areas–the opportunity to experience something that is a rare find even in the best schools: more personalized learning, collaboration, and interaction with the outside world.

We had better take advantage of this chance.

Sure, I understand the phenomenon of mass collaboration. There’s no rocket science involved. It makes sense as a scientific theory. Why the hype?

Well, whenever you experience its workings first hand, you can’t help but feel a little awe-struck.

Case in point: As I’ve l been experimenting with a myriad of wonderful web tools out there — for the development of a new, single-year of curriculum (and desperately trying to narrow down my focus,) it has become clear that it will be necessary to keep things as flexible and open-ended as possible. There’s no way around it. Things are changing so quickly.

For some time I’ve been carrying around this urgent but vague notion about what is needed: something flexible and open-ended…okay, but what? And now I find that many others have been working on this idea all along: it’s called loosely coupled teaching. Last week I first encountered the term in a post on Scott Leslie’s blog edtechpost and found out that there is even a whole group of educators who blog about LCT ! Some great ideas there!

Loosely coupled teaching makes use of loosely coupled tools, i.e. individual platforms that exist on the public internet. On his blog, Leslie is compiling a list of best practice examples of courses “taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system.” Leslie concentrates his interests mainly in the arena of higher learning, but no matter. LCT shows great potential for K12 and dl as well.

And so I am awed and thankful that this conversation has already been taking place. The ongoing collaboration could bear some substantial results.

The rate at which amazing educational tools are being created and refined in just the last months is beyond comprehension. I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is no way that you will be able to keep up with it all– especially if you are a teacher (i.e. you ALREADY have no life.) The good news is there are some great edtech bloggers out there who do a lot of important investigative work for you. My favorites are Will Richardson and Wes Fryer. In the end however you will have to decide on your own which technologies work the best for your unique circumstances.

Where to start? Well, what are the priorities you’ve set out for yourself in your teaching?

As a world language teacher, the idea of helping my students establish connections with young people in the target culture has long been a central part of my approach to instruction. But now that I have gone into distance learning, connections play an even bigger role. Connections are part of what has become the triumvirate of top considerations for me when deciding the road ahead. The formula I’ve come up with goes something like this: connections+collaboration= community. For years, research has shown us that community is essential to students’ feeling of success and satisfaction in distance learning. See here. Thus we have to urgently seek out means of connection and collaboration for our students to ensure that a community can establish itself.

New web technologies provide us with so many great tools. In the last month I have narrowed my focus down to a small assortment that I’m monitoring closely, some older and more familiar than others: Facebook, Ustream, Voicethread, Gabcast, Mindmeister, Google Earth, Yugma, Skype, and Second Life. Though the list is long, I think that each platform offers something unique..and yet is easily accessible and user friendly (Second Life may be a bit of an exception here.) Many of these tools and platforms can be used in conjunction with others. I’ll be commenting on my experiences with them in future posts.

Doubts? Plenty. I do worry about what happens if the community that we’re aiming for does not materialize….Students seem so “maxed out” these days. Will they be willing to set aside time and get actively involved?

How to avoid failure? We’ll build towards community slowly. Providing students opportunities for connections comes first. Of course we will push the opportunities through incentives…. And then collaboration will be required as well.