Learning by doing

This report from BBC news exemplifies 'learning by doing' which is what introducing blogging into the classroom is about.


Quote:
He built special kiosks where only children could reach the keyboard, and left them connected to the internet. In each case the results were the same.
Without adult intervention, the children got to grips with the technology, even with their limited understanding of English.
Sugata was able to make some important but controversial observations. For Sugata, it is this group learning which is significant.
'We know that in nine months the entire group of children in a village would have reached approximately the level of an office secretary, which means they know dragging and dropping files, they know downloading, they can play video and audio and they can surf the internet".

Moodle Blog

I have learned that Moodle is going to replace the journal feature with a blog feature. This is good news, I think. There are some questions about visibility and privacy though which I am not clear about. The journal was private between the learner and the tutor. The annoying thing about it was that a new one had to be created for each additional entry the tutor required. But they were useful as potential material for a learning portfolio.

My big question is can the Moodle blog be publicly available? Most Moodle courses are, of course, password protected. If the blog is also behind this password then there will not be much of an authentic audience.

It seems to me that a private journal still has a role.

Not a rip-roaring success

If the idea of a blog had grabbed the imagination of my technical students I think they might have reacted by now and they haven't but I see them again in three weeks time so who knows?

I think that I didn't have the time to introduce the idea properly. I was surprised when nobody in the room had any idea what a blog was. I thought perhaps a few would have heard of them. This means that I needed to invest much more time in explaining what it was all about. And this is an awkward area since they are there to improve their technical English simply to be able to follow manuals and procedures so if I stray from discussing different types of pliers (eg. needle-nosed or round-nosed) then they see everything else as irrelevant.

Not being there

On Friday I leave for a week long EU project meeting in Ireland and the week after that I am on holiday so there will now follow a period of inactivity.

I had hoped that the new EU e-learning call for proposals would be published by now so that I could go to Ireland with a concrete idea of what the possibilities were. But instead it looks as though we are in for the usual last minute panic to put something together before the application deadline which is, of course, strictly enforced. So I shall just have to talk with my possible partners in vague terms. A pity that this meeting won't allow me to make the most of the rare face-to-face opportunities we have.

You've got links

Or rather, I've got links, at last. Tried the furl option. I'm not happy with the way it looks but I don't know enough html to make it look nicer and after several attempts at guessing what to do, I have left it untidy. This is a great leap forward for me anyway, especially as I prepare to be away for two weeks.

I can't imagine getting students to do this though. I have had too many experiences where the technology looms larger than the intended task.

A promise is a promise!

As promised I have started a weblog for my technical students at http://www.20six.co.uk/terma For the reasons I outlined before I cannot expect a great response to this but my hope is that 3 or 4 might take up the challenge.

I only have 3 or 4 meetings left with these groups so not much time to develop the idea with them but I thought I could present it as a way of continuing their English once the course is over.

One thing I have to be careful about is that I have 2 declared dyslexics in one of the groups and that is one reason why I cannot present this as more than an optional activity. It is also a reason why I chose 20six over blogger because they offer the possibility of audio posts. (I know blogger does too but, like the pictures, it strikes me as a very complicated process). I also suspect that there may be more with writing difficulties since I had a very strongly worded reaction against a request that they write something down a couple of weeks ago.

My classes don't need to write

It's a strange thing but most of the classes I teach are adults not interested in writing. Thus all the writing they do is in the way of record keeping, memory jogging and such like for their language classes and I don't tend to emphasise written grammar, spelling and so on. How can this be, I hear you cry? Most of them need English for their work meeting and greeting, answering the phone and lately, reading technical manuals and instructions. Therefore blogging doesn't seem appropriate to them unless audio blogging becomes cheaper and easier.

I may have found what I was looking for

Thanks to Alfredo for alerting us to 20six. This may be the mobblog provider I was looking for. It seems to have all the essential features I'm looking for. I've just spent a long time looking round the FAQs. The only thing I haven't found out is whether the blog remains online when you stop paying under the premium options. Usually that means you can no longer edit.

So that's what mobblogging is all about!

Tze wrote to the Yahoo group:
'Moblog, to me, is mobile blog. One way to access it is through ourcell phone via the WAP (wireless application protocol). One greatadvantage of moblog is it enables learning in non-places - idealsplaces to learn. Non-places are in the bus, subway, train, and maybehotel where you have no escape. Since most people have short attentionspan, a 5 - 10 min chunk of information is ideal to be delivered via acell phone. In the ppt slide, there is also some mention about thepopularity of mobile learning in Japan, mainly because of the smallamount of info it delivers at a time.'

Non-places sounds a little negative to me, but the idea of getting out of the classroom is exactly what I am looking for. Until I saw Tze's blog I had it firmly fixed in my mind that mobblogging is about pictures but of course it can be about anything, text, pictures audio and even video.

Working on my outdoor moblog idea

I have taken my daughters out on two outdoor TPR/TPRS type lessons in French. They love it. They think it's tremendous fun, even my elder daughter who tended to get irritated when I slipped in the odd French phrase in ordinary conversation. 'What does that mean?' she'd say glaring at me.

The second trip we had a simple little story which I photographed. Now I'm trying to make a Quia or Hot Pot exercise to match the text to the pictures. But it's not as easy as I thought it would be.

There are many different things one could do with these outdoor sessions. It doesn't have to be a story, it could be a treasure hunt or a commentary on what one sees. But maybe the possibilities are limited at a complete beginner level. The story thread also does not sit easily with a mobblog... or maybe it could.

How can I collect links?

Thanks Bee and Aaron for taking a look at my first post.

A good thing about blogs is the serendipitious collection of links one gets when one reads them. But I'd like to be a bit more organised and collect them down a side menu like I have seen on some blogs. Bloki is very good for this as it has a special place for collecting links. Can I do this on Blogger I wonder?

First Impressions

I'm going to be away 7-20 February but I hope I can keep up and follow the thread.

My one worry is keeping up with a myriad of tools, addresses, logins and passwords, a situation I have learned to try and avoid with my students.

One thing I hope to find out is if it is possible to get a mobblog hosted locally (I don't mind paying). So far all the mobblogs I have found are hosted with the provider. I know you can host locally with blogspot but then their system for getting pictures onto the blog is terribly complicated compared to services like Buzznet and Textamerica.