LLU just found out it has been nominated as one of the top 100 Language Blogs of 2009 (in the category of Language Technology) by the folks over at Lexiophiles.com

Public voting will begin July 8 through the 27th. Here is a bit more info on the process. And yes, I have already nudged Ryan for a “vote here” button for the front page of the blog

What a terrific way to end the academic year! Thank you for your support!

Lesson #3: Marc Prensky got it all wrong

Marc Prensky’s famous and yet false binary that says our students are digital natives and the rest of us are digital immigrants has addled me for years. As -if- we needed to create any more barriers between us and our students….as if we needed to distance ourselves any further from our students. They are more like us than we actually realize.

This semester in HISP 205-09 hammered home a point for me: students will use a tool if they are certain you, as the teacher, can explain to them what the tool will help them learn, see, discover, experience. Do you have research to back that up? They will want to see it. Can you prove that you are not wasting their time? They’ve been burned before by well-intentioned and poorly-executed tech infusions…how can they be sure that this won’t be the case here as well? Huh?

My students this semester were mini 50 yr olds. They are skeptical, busy, harried consumers of education. Yup… education is now a consumer good for our financially strapped students and their families. Faculty need to get used to their hard questions, especially if your class is an elective.

Some background: Each of my students had to come up with three personal language goals or “metas lingüisticas” in the class. The first was to be the easiest, the second a bit more of a stretch, the third…something more long term, something for the future. Metas 1 & 2 needed to build towards 3. Only two requirements: #1 each student had to make contact with a native speaker to move towards those goals (in any way they felt comfortable doing so) and #2 they had to blog about it on their class blogs

I spent class time showing them some of the tools (they didn’t like this…they wanted class time for speaking, I was soundly “learned” by them and I won’t make that mistake again!). They included Skype +Mixxer, Ways to find blogs in Spanish, ways to use Second Life to talk w/native speakers, and how to play World of Warcraft on European servers with Spaniards and using the Spanish language pack.

My students found Skype +The Mixxer extremely useful. There were immediate, tangible, focused benefits. Most of them had no qualms about setting up a language exchange with a complete stranger and doing so outside of class.

Second Life, however…that creeped most of them out. I had thought that having an avatar would help them visualize their interactions better. Nope, most of them were quite happy being a disembodied voice at the other end of a Skype call in Spanish**

(** which of course we know is MUCH harder than a face to face conversation, but time and time again they chose making mistakes with complete strangers, rather than having those mistakes following them throughout the rest of their day, week, semester here on campus)

And I did not have any gamers in this class so WoW turned out not to be an option (I did have another student from a 2nd year class come to the lab and play… basically, starting over from the beginning and running raids she had done before in English, now in Spanish and with Spanish speakers. She enjoyed it)

Did they take to the technology like fish to water because they were under 30 yrs of age? oh heck no. They chose tools that made sense for them — based on their comfort level and their intended outcomes in the language and the course.

And the results were remarkable.

Up next: Lesson # 4 or, what I learned about assessment

Lesson # 2: It’s not about you: actually, it’s always been about them

I believe that before you apply any of these new, disruptive, innovative, learner-centric tools to your teaching, you -yes you- have to embrace these tools first. They have to be a part of your daily life, something you not only know how to use and troubleshoot, but something you use yourself as a way to create, express, play…only then will you know what kind of potential they might have for your students’ learning. You need to do your homework… map it out, think it through…and then get out of the way and let them take it from there.

But that doesn’t mean you have to be an expert. Nope. You can (and should!) mess up right alongside everyone else. And you need to model messing up and getting support and learning from those mistakes for your students. Scary? Yeah… I’ll talk more about fear later.

Using these tools to their fullest potential is not about how pretty your class’ WordPress templates are or even how clever their iMovie Projects came out at the end of the term (even though they DO perk up the departmental website, now don’t they?).

It’s about using these tools because they fit your teaching, because they fit your ethos, because they mesh with your pedagogy, because you believe that in your students’ hands they will allow THEM to push themselves deeper into the culture, the lives of the people who speak the language you are studying.

Use these tools only if you are able to accept the idea that you cannot control what will happen when your students use them…and you cannot control how, if your students learn. You can guide, you can nudge, you can advise… but you cannot control. Learner centric technologies are just that… and if that makes you uncomfortable as a teacher, well, maybe this is not for you.

My students craved opportunities to create, speak, use the language in realistic, actual, messy, chaotic situations…my role was to support, nudge, prod the learners as engaged in the very same real-life sticky situations where they might find themselves in a few years time….but for the moment via blogs or Skype.

Your knowledge of the subject matter is important, but, brace yourself: it’s not about you. It’s about them, and about listening to them, and about engaging them, and about letting them engage with each other and with native speakers in real-life contexts.

It took my students a dog’s age to realize that I said what I meant and I meant what I said: that I wanted them to establish their own goals for the class. As long as we agreed that they were do-able and presented realistic challenges, my job was to keep them on track, remind them to document their progress …and get out of the way.

Teach as you live, live as you teach. If there is a disconnect between what the tools provide and what you want to control, you will know it, your students will feel it. It won’t be pretty.

It’s that’s simple. And that complex as well.

So here goes:

Lesson #1: Blogging is hard work. Period.

It’s hard to blog regularly in your own language much less doing it in a second or third one. And even thought I had given myself the “incentive” to try and blog as I went along this semester, the reality was it was almost impossible for me to do so in any fashion that did not, for me, seem contrived. And since I try to model for my students that blogging is about sharing your passions, or about writing when you feel motivated to do so (vs being required to do so) well, I realized that this was trickier than I had anticipated. Because I got myself into a bit of guessing game and yes that ole imposter syndrome kicked in at the worst of times (is this saying what I need for it to say ? Oh of course its not, leave it in the draft bin…forever…ugh)

Which mirrored my students anxieties about their own words seeing the light of day, being published, being seen. It was really hard for them to see this as low stakes anything… writing for “school” had always been high stakes. Write about what matters to me vs what you want me write about? huh?

Yet another free fall moment…

So lesson learned: if you want your students to produce blog posts that are a true representation of their thoughts and interests… you need to let them be. The writing will come, in time, but not always in an anticipated, measured, 2 blog posts per week manner.

And if you are the teacher blogging about your practice, that is extra hard. And yet, its crucial to walk the walk. Oh yes it is.

Teach The Teacher by Paper Lace (yikes) has just come on Pandora, and my roommate is restless. It’s 1 a.m. here..who knows what time it is where I live. Time to tell my body to shut down. More to follow…

Indeed, an upgrade to our header is in the making.

Fear not, gentle reader, no more scary doggies.

(Thanks, Ben, for the nudge )

I work in the turret of a castle-like building built in 1885. The building was scheduled for demolition several years ago, but thankfully the funding came together to save it. She is a beautiful place to work.

The language departments are housed in this building. The computer assisted language learning center where I work is housed here. The office of Study Abroad is here, the Office of International Students is here. So is the amazing Shansi program. My office is in the corner turret.

My office is the place where the language faculty invariably end up when they have questions about technology, or when they wish to try a new tool. Or if the remote in the smart room doesn’t work (yes, I field those questions too). 90% of the time when they ask for assistance in using technology in the teaching of languages, what they are actually asking me to do is to help them extend their lesson plans outside of this building, this county, this state… and help their students make connections with the people and the places where the language they teach lives and breathes.

We have had great success with tools such as Skype and the Mixxer for making connections with native speakers. Classes have blogged and have made some amazing connections with the outside world as a way to stretch their linguistic and cultural knowledge. This semester in my class has been given the opportunity to experiment with Second Life and World of Warcraft as other ways and other contexts for making connections with native speakers. More and more I find reasons to use technology to bring the real world in to the classroom, to bring authentic speech to the often hermetically sealed classroom, to help offset the language textbook’s representation of “culture” of a monolithic blob vs a varied and complex set of contrasting and conflicting scenarios.

Oh the ironies.

Irony #1: I find it funny that I work in one of the most solid, impenetrable buildings (did I mention the 6 foot thick sandstone walls?) — and yet the programs and the majors reside in this building — by and large– are all about busting down walls and reaching out to the outside, creating connections with the world, looking for a way to honor difference and to celebrate the similarities in worlds far from the snowy tundra of Ohio.

Irony # 2: We have the means to make connections around the world and we do so on a daily basis. So why is it we can’t figure out how to communicate better within our campus, with our fellow residents within our academic bubble, to share what is going on in our classes, etc.??

I have a better sense of what my colleague in Chile is asking her students to do than what the colleague in the building next door is teaching, what resources s/he might be using in his/her syllabus… and whether there is some amazing overlap that would enrich my students’ knowledge of something I might be teaching. Our students are making connections between classes and buildings and network on their own. I love it when a student applies something s/he has learned in one class to something we are exploring in my class… and to do it in the target language? more wonderful still… And yet the more I hear about what they are learning elsewhere, the more I wish I had known about that potential parallel universe before the semester began…

Irony #3: that in a school as connected and as fearless (don’t ask) and small (<2500 people) as mine that we don't have a better sense of the teaching, the scholarship, the interests, the talents of my professional peers that happens behind closed doors, within departments, across campus.

I am not asking for a new calendaring, messaging, content managing system. There is no --tool-- that could solve this problem. No, this is not about finding the right widget. It is about coming together and acknowledging how much better it could be for all of us if there were more ways for us to educate ourselves about colleague's talents and abilities.

Something odd seems to be holding us back. Is it the fact that in graduate school we are taught about the primacy of one's research, one's ideas...and how that research defines your worth on the job market and as a member of the academic community? That it must be protected, guarded, hovered over until you have job security (aka tenure) ?

Its a puzzlement. And it's also an epidemic in Academia. I was delighted (?) when last January I found this opinion piece by Gerald Graff in Inside Higher Ed called “It’s Time to End Courseocentrism.”

He writes:

At a time when amazing new forms of connectivity are made possible by new digital technologies and when much of the best recent work in the humanities has made us more aware of the social and collective nature of intellectual work, we still think of teaching in ways that are narrowly private and individualistic, as something we do in isolated classrooms with little or no knowledge of what our colleagues are doing in the next classroom or the next building and little chance for each other’s courses to become reference points in our own.

Graff reminds us that the closed classroom is (more appropriately, WAS) a luxury of a bygone (read: wealthier) era in American universities…an era that, if you check the news, is rapidly evaporating. Indeed.

Sigh.

I wish that there were an academic equivalent to the story project that the College has begun , a project that culls anecdotes from community members about their campus experiences . I wish there were a similar set of stories for and by professors, stories that would tell us what is happening right now and inside the four walls of the practice rooms, the labs, the seminar rooms, in the studios… stories we could re-purpose, learn from, reflect upon, learn from.

I wish the tools we use to collaborate and communicate with our professional peers (and even with our students in the classroom) could be used for sharing knowledge among colleagues.

I wish we could tag…everything and everybody. And then make one huge clickable tag cloud. I wish I could find like minded, fast thinking people here as well as on Twitter or in the blogosphere.

I wish the academic calendar and the class schedule didn’t crush us to smithereens as badly as it always does.

The Academy along with Graff’s -centrism has divided us into little bits and boxes and divisions and departments. And created walls. Lots and lots of walls. And impossible vertical hierarchies where it seems if you do not work for someone then its unfathomable that you might actually be able to collaborate with them, even if its outside of your job description…

Silos. Turrets. Walls. Pods. Cubicles. Reporting lines. Verticality.

For the sake of doing what we need to do, and in order to do it better, and in order to undo years of what has preceded us…we need to bring them all down.

Indeed, it didn’t feel great to read and then report about some of the negative stuff, but if I was going to show them that their voice mattered, and that I would indeed respond to what the majority wanted to have happen, then I had to share that info back with them. I pulled together common threads and strands, and then I asked them if that seemed like an adequate assessment of how they felt. Lots of head nods. And then (as shown in the last post) we re-tooled, we planned a new line of attack, and we turbo-ed back into the course.

But the assessment them was not over yet. Simultaneous with their informal assessments of me, I had prepared informal assessments of each of them and handed them out as they handed me their evaluations of me.

Here was the format I used…

My thoughts on your participation in class conversations:

My thoughts about your participation on the blog:

General comments:

Ball park estimate of what your grade would be right now based on all of the above:

I felt weird about the “grade” part, but I wanted to accomplish two things… acknowledge that they were doing work in a variety of areas for this class… and that there were strengths and weaknesses in all of them (just as they had shown me about my work in the class).

I also wanted to give them a benchmark, a starting point, to see what my grading scale kinda sorta looked like. I come from the school of thought where a C is average and a B-is above average…a sentiment that is NOT shared by my students…insert horrified looks here)

As we will later see, the grade I suggested mattered little, but the assessment and the suggestions I made on their work in their class, for some of them, was like a wake-up call. It demonstrated rather convincingly that I may not be interjecting myself on their blogs (I almost never did) but I was reading (as many of their readers also were) and I was observing… and I was also there to prod, cajol, push, nudge, remind, and celebrate them along the way, both in class, but also in our once a week 15 minute meetings in my office.

The semester is halfway over. And the best is yet to come.

Up next: final projects, setting goals, and the tasks ad the timelines to meet them

This past week, our dear friend and colleague Pete Smith from UT-Arlington invited Barbara and me to take part in his university’s Digital Institute. For two days we caused trouble, asked as many questions as we answered, and had many wonderful discussions with a range of folks, from faculty to campus IT. One of those discussions we recorded and now present to you as Language Lab Unleashed #24:

Download audio file (LanguageLabUnleashed24.mp3)

[02:30] What should language learning and culture learning look like in 2009 and beyond?
[09:45] Promoting Authentic Cultural Understanding
[17:25] Lots and Lots of Work: Digital Literacy
[29:20] Generational Difference, Discomfort, Revolution, and Complexity
[38:20] Informational Technology vs. Educational Technology
[41:35] Tenure and Technology Use by Faculty
[44:15] Linear Learning, Lederhosen, and Creating More Informed Thinkers and Scholars
[54:00] Living with Assessment: Barbara’s 12-Step Approach
[57:20] Formal vs. Informal Standards, Voice, and Register
[72:15] A-ha Moments, and Preparing Students to be Promoted

Thanks again to the wonderful folks at UT-Arlington for participating, and to Pete Smith and his team for being such gracious hosts to a pair of troublemakers!

My students express their frustration about the lack of comments frequently. And yet, it never cesases to amaze them that there are hits, and that those hits come from all over, and that they keep coming.

No this isn’t the Huffington Post nor do we have any delusions of similar grandeur. But these numbers are important. Even when you weed out the spambots, the facts are telling: People are searching, people are finding us, and some people are even staying and commenting.

It’s the getting those visitors to stay and comment that’s the hard part. It’s learning to write (in a second language) so that others feel their comments are useful, that they are welcome to comment. Those are difficult things to do in English. It is wonderful to see some of my students accomplish that very subtle and yet important skill when they blog in Spanish.

But still, we are glad people are visiting. Very glad. We are even happier when they stop and engage. Ecstatic even.

The College wants to know whether students are in peril of failing. No surprise: no one is failing. How -well- they pass remains to be seen.

But something is not gelling…something seems a bit off. Something needs to be fixed. The time has come for disruption, and hopefully some much needed repair.

Let me explain:

Outside of class, the students have been working on their blogs, trying to articulate realistic, reachable goals to be accomplished (mostly) by the end of the term. We meet once a week to talk about

There’s been a bit of juggling going on during class time, and I don’t feel as if I am handling it as well as I should. I had originally intended (in the published course description) for my students to anticipate a weekly tech drop in help session to try and handle questions that might emerge about the tools we use in class. The best I could do was tell them it would be expected, and highly encouraged, but I could not mandate it. I tried finding a common time when everyone could meet using “When is Good”. Nothing meshed. And yet it would have been irresponsible of me to -assume- that everyone could negotiate the blog tool, that everyone would know how to use the Mixxer site, or Skype, or be able to get themselves out of Orientation Island in Second Life without needing to be tele-ported to safety.

I’m torn and it shows. This class isn’t about the technology. It is about how the technology can help make connections outside of the classroom conversation. They need to know the basics of each item, and make them work for their purposes. I have been struggling to keep them informed, to answer their questions in a timely and efficient way, and yet doing so without using up class time.

I had thought about dedicating a class to doing tech training, in the lab, and doing it entirely in Spanish, but then it dawned on me that this, again, would shift the focus from the learning that could happen via to tools to the tools themselves. They would have to know special words for the tools, and that in the end could make the technology seem more distant, more unapproachable.

Despite the hand outs, the info pages on the blog, etc…they were struggling with getting things to work. I had never presumed that it would be -easy- for them to adopt the blog (much less Second life or even Skype) but I also did not anticipate it would take so long for them to become acclimated once they started. So, alas, I did use class time in the lab to review the tools, answer questions, troubleshoot. I did not like doing it…and as my informal, anonymous mid term assessments revealed, my students did not like it either.

I forget, and then quickly remember, that blogging is hard work. Expressing one’s thoughts and opinions is hard to do in one’s L2…much harder, I belive, than learning the formulas for writing a report in an objective, academic, disinterested voice in one’s L2.

Blogging asks its writers to write to an invisible audience that might read what you have to say, but you may not ever know what they think or feel. That is really hard for students, especially when as an academic community are used to getting prompt feedback, and when the majority of their writing online for other classes is behind a password and a closed CMS (and where they are read by people they can identify vs people they may never know)…

It is hard for me too. I forget how much longer it takes me to blog in Spanish vs in English. There’s a reason this blog (LLU) sometimes goes silent when I am teaching…it is because it takes me more time to write in Spanish -and- because I am concerned about English interference (word order, false cognates etc) when I am doing the two languages together. It’s hard for me, and I have spoken Spanish for 25+ years longer than my students, so I acknowledge and appreciate how hard this is for them as well. And yes, it is humbling when some of them take off and start writing in torrents. It is as if they have connected with something and they need to express it, no matter what the obstacles, no matter what the audience may (or may not) say. They have thoughts, and they are ready to defend them. In my mind, those are the students that will go far in the Real World…they are intrepid, they are passionate, they do whatever it takes to learn, and they put their thoughts out there and hope for feedback.

I am a big believer in short, informal, anonymous assessments. Even when you think things are going swimmingly, there is always something in the class that can be improved, tweaked, reconsidered. There are always people in the class who have an opinion and want it to be heard… and this is how it an happen. I believe that these informal assessments are a highly effective and powerful means of giving students a voice in the organization and pace of the class, as well as an invaluable window into what your students might not be willing to tell you in the open about how the class is gelling thus far. In these assessments –which have 4 questions, take 5 minutes to complete, and are handed out at the end of class– I asked my students to be honest, and I promised them that if there were a majority asking for change in one area, I would work it make happen. I also knew that this would be seen as a test. Would I –really– disrupt my lesson plan if enough of them felt something had to change? hmmm.

The questions are simple:

1) What do you want to do more of in this class?
2) What do you want to do less of in this class?
3) What can -the teacher- do to help you meet your goals in this class?
4) What can you do to make sure you meet your goals?
5) Additional comments.

Not knowing what would emerge from this survey, but feeling a little out of sorts myself about the class, I waited to see the results. And here they were:

As I expected, 80% chafed at the lab/class sessions that were in English and about the technology (exclusively). Duly noted.

The students wanted more opportunities to work in small groups, especially before a full class discussion of a topic. They wanted to talk about movies (movies in Spanish with Spanish subtitles if possible). I agree. Would that I could find relevant films in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. English? no problem? Spanish..not so much. And oy, the remote for the DVD player: one piece of technology that totally befuddles me. Consistently. But yes, point well taken.

They asked games that would enforce vocabulary and make them use the language in context. Seeping through here in their comments was the idea that community building did not have to be a serious enterprise, and the games could have a purpose, a focus. The stduents recognized they not be just idle entertainment. It was becoming quite clear that they wanted to have fun, they did not want anyone to waste their time, and content-focused games would be a welcome infusion of fun & challenge for the class.

One student wanted the class to review grammar. Sigh. That is -so- not what this class is about.

My favorite: “Talk less about what we are going to do…and just do it” Amen. And here we go:

Above is the calendar, the syllabus for the upcoming 4 weeks of the class. I knew I had to travel (China!) and I wanted to make sure they were in contact with the language, and that they were covering material that (according to their responses) made sense to them. There were opportunities created for both student led discussions (something they liked after a recent series of conversations led by students re: the elections in El Salvador) and large group discussions.

They expressed their opinions, I compiled them, I reviewed them with the class, they accepted them, and I responded.

Up next: the effects of these changes.