Working on the early stages of the draft of sections of the Guidelines on text directionality. Found a couple of useful sample texts we can use, and wrote for permission to use one of them (it includes calligraphy); got permission from authors, and now waiting for response from publisher. The other one is straightforward and doesn't (presumably) require permission, since it's just a paragraph. Both will need transcribing (one Japanese + Romaji + English, the other English with embedded Arabic in both Arabic and roman script).
September 16, 2013
September 9, 2013
Working through a resubmitted article -- sent off some questions to the author.
September 6, 2013
I went over the proposal for text directionality guidelines again, and decided that half of it was actually wrong; instead of recommending new @rotate* attributes for TEI, we should be recommending the use of CSS 3 Transforms. Drafted a message to the workgroup and Council, and a discussion has started.
Starting a review of the Lodel TEI schema, and at the same time testing out change-tracking in Oxygen.
September 3, 2013
More copyediting and proofing. Tedious but necessary.
August 30, 2013
Editing work on Issue 6 content.
July 22, 2013
EK of ENGL 500 requested a presentation to her class that is shorter and puts less emphasis on the specific technology of markup and more emphasis on the editorial and planning issues to be considered in participating in a project that will likely use a lot of markup or other digitizing technology. Martin, Greg and I all tossed our two cents in, and we'll get together the first week of September to discuss how best to handle this request and put together a proposed outline for EK to review. Actual presentation is towards end of October, so we have time.
July 19, 2013
Got a couple of emails from JSR with notes and budgets coming out of July 10 meeting of Landscapes of Injustice. Read through them, posted a couple of issues that he should address before submitting next stage of paperwork. Also some back and forth with Martin about how to deal with the "contractor vs partner" situation, especially with regards to in-kind vs chargeable hours etc.
July 16, 2013
Summary of my notes from other sessions I attended at WorldCALL and from software demos and poster sessions
One theme was that the CALL world does not have a robust definition of what constitutes good data, and such a thing would advance the quality of research in various ways. Also findings the utility of various kinds of technologies.
3D collaborative environments (virtual worlds) - nothing new under the sun
Long term sustainability of projects : just getting to where HCMC has been for a while on including in project aspects that immediate research objective doesn't really care about, but other users of data or researchers might
Sylvi Vigmo sylvi.vigmo@ped.gu.se Student languaging in social network sites
- social media allows student to adopt a persona they choose towards the other participants
- thus it exacerbates the problem of the persistent minority that will take a perverse stance
- i.e. 'ironic' or 'meta' participation aimed at impressing actual other participants rather than sincere interactions as a persona
Beatriz do los Arcos b.de-los-arcos@open.ac.uk "Suitability of MOOC for sustaining community of language teachers and learners"
- 5% of those who hit first module hit last module, so no formlized groups can feasibly be maintained
- likeliest approach is to treat a MOOC "like the web, but paced", but what MOOCs do and are good at is typically not what's needed for language teaching and learning
Diane Larsen-Freeman "Language as a complex, dynamic system and new technologies"
- complex : emrgent patterns of simpler, lower-level behaviours, e.t. flocking of birds vs pecking of birds
- dynamic : output of each iteration is (partial) input to next, recursive
- favours "embodied dynamism" (John Searle) over "computational" (Dan Dennett), but I didn't get distinction
- language is a system of just-in-time negotiating the world vs ever-more-elaborate modelling of the world
Jozef Colpaert jozefcolpaert.net "sustainability and research challenges in CALL"
Contextual Issues:
- academic evaluation : way off
- academic value : lack of dedicated research method
- myths/hype :
- public perception : underestimate complexity of language / overestimate ability of technology
Methodological
- research design : poor, largely anecdotal
- replication : necessary but hard
- slow research : hard to do in publish or perish environment
- transdisciplinarity : complicates research method issues
Epistemological
- open :
- psychological :
- smart : trend is embedded smartness rather than explicit expert systems
- sustainable : hard to be all things to all publishers/developers/users
Engineering approach
- a system to get the best change in uncertain situation within available resourcese, then iterate and test against hypothesis
- if you need advanced stats to prove a difference, the difference is not significant enough
Linda Fellag lfellag@msn.com Flipped Class
- each student writes draft, small groups collaborate to create group summary, submit to rest of class for reading, class then focuses on argumentation
- informal collaboration seems to work better online than in-class or face-to-face
Ciara Wigham ciara.wigham@univ-bpclermont.fr "LETEC data model and repository for research into multimodal interactions"
- hard to compare results or do meta-analysis because studies have idiosyncratic characterization of context, data, interactions, technology
- model for structure of research raw data already exists in other academic fields
- create an XML structure that captures all the possible interactions which occur in an online environment (screen sharing, chat, text, audio etc.)
- corpus serves as source data for any research publications, so reproducible
Mike Levy / Caroline Steel c.steel@uq.edu.au "Change in language student use of technology 2006 - 2011"
Top technologies used by language students in 2006
- online references
- chat
- email
- LMS
- translation services
- video
- music
- forums/blogs
Top technologies used by language students in 2011
- online references
- translation services
- youtube
- social network apps
- mobile apps
- conjugation software
- mp3/blogcasts
- language games / flashcards
Trends:
- more use of language-specific / topic-specific
- centrally provisioned services less dominant
- email, wikis, blogs, virtual worlds weaker
Language students wanted:
- more face to face time; less reliance on technology
- 80% would not take an online-only course; 50/50 on blended - all over the place on preferred technologies
Context
2003 - skype
2004 - Facebook
2005 - YouTube
2006 - Twitter
2007 - Apple SDK (mass creation of small apps feasible)
2010 - iPad
I attended a number of presentations on mobile technologies in language learning at WorldCALL 2013.
Overall gist I get is that mobile phones are not treated by students as just another distribution channel (but teachers and administration tends much more to see them that way). Students use mobile more for push-based interactions (updates) and short, user-directed, non mandatory exposure to material and conventional computers for pull-based interactions like focussed schoolwork.
Caroline Steel c.steel@uq.edu.au "Student Perspective on mobile apps"
- estimates about 75% of undergrads use mobile apps for language learning
- primarily for reference or practice, not for communication or task-completion i.e. not for elaborate games or social interaction
- like to see summary of accomplishments, comparison to larger group
- small chunks, pick up where you left off
Isil Boy / Gary Motteram ? / gary.motteram@manchester.ac.uk "Does mobile learning need to move?"
- teachers use mobiles much like previous technologies (laptops) rather then essentially personal device
- i.e. just another distribution channel, rather than exploiting unique capabilities
Frederik Cornillie frederik.cornillie@kuleuven-kulak.be "Seeking out Fun Failure"
- within drilled practice, aim for interesting practice vs demotivating drills
- low-level skills learned on an inverse power law pattern (lots of benefit quickly, but true fluency takes a great deal of practice)
- games take getting motivation out of failure to the logical extreme
- all actions, even if "wrong" have an impact on the "world" you're in
- immersion proportionate to cognitive load, students like immersion in some kind of context but want minimal cognitive load
- best to create at least a very simple "world" which is affected by user behaviour doing practice because
- "vivid" microworld no more motivating than "plain" microworld, both more motivating that simple drill presentation
Heyoung Kim heyoung2010@gmail.com "Effective MALL - implications of empirical analysis"
- students like "light demand" exposure to actual English (level n-1), to confirm fluency
- students choose for content, not academic skills (prefer more controlled environment for learning new, difficult content or language skills)
- ideal is to provide scaffolding (dictionary, media controller, sentence-level chunking/replay) because students overestimate slightly their ability
- even with practice-type material, focus on mastery of already half-done material, rather than challenging material
- students (Korean) preferred audio-lingual approaches and no SMS, collaboration, communication; opposite of preferences stated for non language-learning use of mobile tech
Glenn Stockwell gstock@waseda.jp "Push" mechanisms for out-of-class mobile learning
- exploit small amounts of time and space; expect use to be fragmented and in distracting environment
- assume device is part of everyday life - student has at destination as well as in transit
- does push technology increase use of mobile device
- sent out daily, individualized message to student at end of school day (to catch them in transit home)
- 60% of students turned on push reminders, even though 72% of students used only PC (not mobile) to do homework
- reminders did not increase use of mobiles to do homework, but may have increased use of PCs (further study to be done)
- learners use pull tech (and prefer PC) for planned activities - schoolwork is seen as such an activity
- learners use push tech (mobile) for spontaneous activities, including updates on planned activities