Since the Notre Dame fire, I’ve had lots of interesting conversations and fielded many pertinent questions. I thought instead of endlessly repeating myself, I should write some of this stuff down. Here goes: What exactly was lost? How do we fix it? The cathedral itself took the brunt of the damage: most of the artwork […]
Tag Archives: technology
On moving away from Facebook
The idea is to post once a week here on this blog, with all my thoughts for the week, and then link to it from Facebook. So I am not giving up on FB completely, but only
I have noticed, though, that my outrage is mitigated by posting to the blog instead of FB. It requires a bit more contemplation, some thought, and more consideration. The zing is less, but that, in my opinion, is a good thing. Zing is addictive and destructive.
Instead of having FB open on my phone, I have WordPress ready to go. I have reworked the site here, mostly ignored in 2017, but ready for a resumption.
What you guys can do to move away from the FB ecosystem is to use one that I have used over the years, and you may have done too. RSS. Get a reader. I use Feedly, Mac people like Inoreader. You can even set up Flipboard as an RSS reader if you are using that. You will see, after the initial investment to set up your feeds (the websites you monitor), that the control you get is well worth it. I end 15 minutes of FB enraged; I end 15 minutes of Feedly enlightened.
And if you do make it over to my blog at kevinryan.com, you are welcome to make comments. I have to approve your first comment (this is spam control), but once approved, you can comment any time.
iTDi Interview Follow-up
Last Tuesday Steven Herder, of the International Teacher Development Institute, or iTDi (itdi.pro, YouTube, Facebook) was nice enough to include me on the list of people interviewed for their Teacher’s Room series. Steven interviewed me online using Zoom conferencing software. It ran almost exactly an hour and was really exhilarating. I started to realize I may just have some things that are worth telling people.
I went on far too long about my own history of language learning and teaching, how I discovered at 11 years old in Mexico that there were some people who did not speak English. I didn’t get to tell the story of watching Batman in Spanish, and how two little bilingual kids about half my 10 years of age could translate the dialog on the fly, all the while giggling. I wanted to do that. So you can go through my notes if you don’t want to watch the first 30 minutes.
More interesting was the last half where we talked about teaching and learning languages, along with tech (I am a tech guy). We did a few minutes at the beginning on RSS feeds and (one of many readers) Feedly software and how to use that to collect (aggregate) blog posts from across the world. I didn’t have time to note that after 20 minutes of Facebook, I am angry, and after 20 minutes of RSS (Feedly) I am enlightened. (Facebook is like porn, which, as Bruce Springsteen notes, “Just makes me mean,” because the enticement is there, but no real interaction.)
But after my history of junior year abroad in Barcelona, returning to teach English, studying for DELTA (in those days RSA Dip) and working my way into the field, my move back to Chicago for an MA (under Elliott Judd, great mentor), then to the TESOL meat market to get a job in Tokyo, meeting my wife at work, China for a year then daughter and university job 3 days apart 34 years ago, we finally got to the real discussion.
We talked about influences like JALT as a professional development network, but I did not talk about the Tokyo PC Users Group where I learned how to learn with other people and without a textbook (there were no guides to PC use in the early 90’s, things were moving too fast). The thrill of arguing about the best way to improve speed on the BBS software (a precursor to the Internet) to avoid high telephone bills when using a modem at 300 “baud” was eye opening in that we could create our own knowledge and help each other as a group. Following the Hacker Ethic has guided my teaching too. (Look it up. Hackers were good before some went to the dark side.)
Now a list of links because I was too excited and talked too fast about too many things, so you can follow up here. MIT Conference on Connected Learning netted a new tool for Augmented Reality software (for iOS) and Interactive Storytelling ARIS. We talked about Stephen Downes and his contributions to MOOCs and Connectionism. Do note that right now, he has just started a new MOOC taking it to the next step, E-Learning 3.0. Do take a look. The future of learning with tech. We talked about the JALT CALL SIG and how that paralleled my experiences of the TokyoPC in that we were (and still are) creating new knowledge, this time about teaching languages with tech.
We talked about frameworks for teaching. Steven liked that we had come up with similar ideas about having a variety of approaches to vocabulary learning, some with tech, others not. Developing a set of tools is something the learner has to do on their own, with support of course. I talked about using small groups and having students teach each other. Here are slides from a presentation I made last year on the topic. I didn’t get to talk about Socratic Circles (pdf) where you ask questions in the SIR order (Summary, Issues, Relevance) and SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments of Sugata Mitra) to develop learner autonomy.
Language learning is 90% motivation, 10% autonomy. If I am doing my job correctly, students will not see most of my work, which is developing and fostering an environment conducive to learning (languages).
More in upcoming posts.
Zotero Groups & Fair Use
As I’m beginning to prepare for my American Environmental History course next semester, I’ve started a Zotero Group containing a bibliography of some of the books that contain chapter readings and some journal articles I’m going to assign, or that are available for students working on term papers. So far, these are just books that are in BSU’s Library (I’ve given them a list of a few more I’d like them to get). This is a public list, so if other people start joining the Group and contributing titles, I’ll probably add tags that will indicate for my students which books are available locally and which they have to order via ILL, or in the case of articles where they can get hold of them. I normally attach pdfs to my own Zotero entries, but I can replace them with stable link URLs in the public lists.
Does anybody else use Zotero Groups? I believe if you click on this link (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2242171/envhist_oer ) you should be able to see the bibliography, but please correct me if I’m wrong?
I’m thinking about the additional readings I may assign in this class. Many of them are chapters in monographs, which I believe I can assign and students can go to the Library and read or scan the chapter. We have a really cool, fast scanner, so I may put the texts on course reserve. I’m curious about how other people doing OER deal with content from copyrighted (all rights reserved) sources. I’ll be talking with a Librarian later today about the Minnesota State University system’s fair use guidelines, but if anybody has experience they’re willing to share, I’d love to hear about it. My thought was there ought to be a way to replace the printed course-pack with some type of digital one, but I realize there may be objections to that because it’s easy to limit the printed course-pack to a finite set of students in a particular class during a particular semester…but even so, there’s got to be a way to update this idea for the 21st century. I guess making these types of pointers available in Zotero is a first step, for people who have access to an academic library. It’s not ideal for folks who don’t, however; but maybe that’s a battle for another day.
A new idea
LOL the two minutes ’til end of work day and I DROVE THE CAR THING so I can’t even think about it well on the way home.
Here’s my next magic grant request. Hey. I really should figure it out and at least plop it on a few other blogs.
So I’m doing all this totally tedious CRAP in Canvas — I want a quiz with images and a quiz without. (Sigh, I broke my lurk promise and posted a blog onto “Math Ed” about the tediosity.)
Well, I want a quiz with number bars and a quiz with domino icons and.
Wait… repeat activities should be done by computers.
Object oriented programming.
There will be lots of lessons that will want an “image” version. (I’ll actually want a “drag and drop and manipulate” version but I can’t make that yet.)
There should be a program to walk me through that design so I can just input the questions and the images and the progression and … it should generate the interactive experiences.
Can I get a grant? Can I make it open?
#openlearning
Watched a video interview with the ‘connectedness coach’ or something like that for the course.
Truth be told, if I hadn’t had 15 hits on my little equity post, I’d have forgotten about #openlearning. The semester has started so my job is actually serving students. (Yesterday was a day I wished I had a way to keep track of what I did all day. I was regaling it to my friend and kept having to say “Wait! Wait! There’s more!”) There’s also the stuff of death and taxes that has eaten much of my focus.
Still, the “first week” of that cMOOC (‘connectivist’ so “learn from each other” rather than ‘here’s some lectures from MIT guys, aren’t you lucky?’) doesn’t start ’til tomorrow — I suppose there are things in their LMS that will “open” then because right now it just claims (falsely) that each week listed on the syllabus will link to its details.
So far (right, xious… it hasn’t even **started** yet ~ ) it still feels like a whole lot of academic talk about the academic world and ‘openness.’
We are having some of those issues out on the front lines. Friday’s anecdote #7 was a kiddo not being able to find courses to enroll in (starting at midterm since it’s too late for Spring)… I told him about our new online independent skill-building options and he said that well, he needed a course. He knew that he just didn’t get things done independently.
(OTOH, anecdote #3 was the Brazilian who listened to a chunk of Modumath and said, “It’s perfect! He talks slowly and explains things!” — and we’re trying to make that more open)
Lots of us on the edge of open — we’re the ones who *do.* So … it’s easy for us to project that onto the rest of the world… a world of people who benefit from a lot more structure. I actually remembered to ask people coming in for that independent stuff (it can be done on the internet anywhere but — guess what!! — they want to *go to school.*) about making a folder and logging time and progress. (I have qualms. I cannot remember things like folders. So far, though, *they have.* All of ’em…. I really should get that other guy a folder…)
Why does that belong in this #openlearning blog post? Because “open” should be better than “okay! open for swimming!” on the open seas.
We don’t have a “course” because … then we’d need students to be “in the system.” They’d need the right kind of email address. Even if it’s open to everybody, they have to do a mess of paperwork and … some of the folks in some of hte groups who’d use it are undocumented. I’d like to see us set up “houses” like Hogwarts and … you can pick your character. (Didn’t Second Life do something like that?)
Then *if you so choose* you can find ways to connect with your identity and get credentials.
If “open” is open to people with the right tech equipment, the right tech skills, and even then there are hoops to navigate… per the section in Fifty Shades of Open about “open means use,” that’s not really open.
How to provide the structure so many people need for good learning … without that structure turning into insurmountable hurdles? Let’s explore…
Moving to Medium
There is a new blogging platform, one that I think is better than WordPress, and I am moving there for future posts. I will add pointers here, but the content will be there.
Why am I releasing total control over my feed here, with my own domain name and wordpress installation? Two factors, curation and convenience.
Medium was developed by one of the co-founders of Twitter. Understanding social media and applying it to content, Evan Williams put together a platform that allows any user to blog, limits the format options to make the content the draw, and allows for readers to decide easily what should be highlighted and promoted each day. Add to that paid authors of note, like Steven Levy on Crypto War Redux, to draw the public.
There are other alternatives to Medium, outlined at Lifehacker, but they don’t put the author at the center, supported by the readers, in a symbiotic relationship that is an evolution from what publishers used to do. Medium acts as a medium, but is, in its current state, almost invisible. Something I like.
As an occasional blogger in the days of fading RSS use, I cannot expect people to come to my domain to read what I have to say; it gets lost in the shuffle of a million other blogs. With Medium, I have a chance that they may get linked or looked at more often. As well as the convenience of web-based posting. Find me at https://www.medium.com/@tokyokevin
UPDATE: about a year later. Medium is going through some changes. I am back here. Sorry about the leave.
The Graduation Thesis: Insufficient and Outmoded
This the title of a recent article I wrote for my university research journal (Gakuen). In it, I advocate for subsuming the Graduation Thesis, common here in Japan among undergraduates, among a collection of other possible ways for demonstrating ability to work in a field. Notice how I don’t use the word “mastery”, as that is not really possible in a foreign language at the undergraduate level (I work in the English Department).
This collection of what I call Graduation Projects (sometimes called Capstone Projects) could entail a variety of different ways to demonstrate that one can use tools (not understand a field), as tools and skills are what will be needed in this world with the entire sum of human knowledge is constantly at our fingertips (OK, I exaggerate, but not by much). Knowing stuff is no longer as important as being able to learn new stuff by yourself.
Read more about it in the article which I have attached here. Another thing I argue for is that all students should learn programming, or at least enough to be able to understand the thinking behind programming. Authoring is no longer just about writing words, and the people who program are creating a world that the rest of humanity has to live in (or will have to live in, soon). So if you want to control your creative production, you have to learn how to program.
Since the article came out, a number of new events have reinforced the points I made. The most popular major among women at Stanford is Computer Science, along with the most popular course at Harvard, Computer Science. A recent article is going viral about how virtual classes can be better than real ones. Another thing I advocate is for Open Source Publishing, or Open Education Resources, and now the entire staff from a linguistics journal has quit Elsevier in protest over the policies that make huge profits selling things produced at universities back to the faculties.
Lots more issues, but no time here. Let me attach my article, maybe we can get a discussion going.