Virtual worlds – second life

I’m really interested in virtual worlds especially second life.  It think there is real potential there to reach people from all over the world and I am well, just interested.  I have been in second life now for 2 years.  I have an avatar called shnooze schuler.  I  also signed up to  the ning community teaching languages in a virtual world. The organisation has a wiki which is here Electronic village on line.  NergizK is involved with this but I have to admit I haven’t actually taken part in any of their workshops yet.

I think there are two main problems with second life:

A. You need really up to date technology to access it.  My newish prized notebook has died on me

Disaster strikes..

February 21, 2010

So I am relying on my old laptop, unfortunately it isn’t up to SL standards.  I only get this message telling me my computer is substandard.

I finally  managed to access it on another computer this week but I am always wary because,

B.  it takes so long to learn and navigate your way around second life.  I love the SL parody on youtube as for two years this is really my experience so far of  second life.  Walking into walls, crashing into things, flying into nowhere.

I think these two points make it quite inaccessible even though I know there are worthwhile things happening there you have to invest a lot of time to get there.

However with point B things may be a little brighter.  SL have changed things recently and I really think, as I revisited it this week, that they have made it easier to use! Thankfully.

I didn’t crash once ( well…not so many times), and I managed to teleport places. I still never met anyone or “spoke” to any one or really did anything but I did find the British Council Island and took a self portrait ( I haven’t worked out how to get rid of that hair or outfit!).

There are projects going on globally for the British Council and second life.    Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer are involved with British  Council SL teen grid island and BC SL islands on the adult grid.  I have also heard of the avalon project: In project terms SL is a good idea and I think there is lots of potential.

In class terms though, for me and my classes I can’t see that I could take my students to SL and do any kind of activity.  I’m still interested though and now I know that I can fly and not crash into the wall I’d like to return and find out more about the Teaching Languages in a Virtual World group and what they do.

Games

Card games, charades, bingo, battleships etc etc…The idea of using games in an EFL classroom is anything but new.  Whether you teach adults or children games for vocabulary and grammar have been a staple part of the class since I can remember.  Only with adults, maybe you would call it an “activity” and not a game. The reasoning for that being that adults may think that a “game” is a trivial waste of valuable class time.

I know there is a movement towards making more educational use out of web 2.0 games and computer games.  I’ve recently come across  “reinventing learning though digital play”. I’m also lucky in that a couple of my colleagues are  advocates of using online games to motivate  young learners so I get a lot of ideas and information from them.  They produce Digital Play a site that I use regularly and that I give a big thumbs up to.   Before attending some of the workshops that they put on I had no idea of different computer game types, point and click, role games, simulations.   My gaming history was a short go on Sonic the Hedgehog and Tetris.  Personally,  I’m not a gamer and I don’t really have the patience with games.

Over the last few years though I have used them in class and I have had some really good successes.  One I’ve been using for quite some time now is a point and click game called    Samorost 2.

It has worked well with everyone.   Another one I’ve had really good success with is third word farmer, a simulation game.  It needs preparation to “prime” the  class and I make worksheets for vocabulary and to keep them on task.

However I can’t say that all of my “game” experiments have been so successful.    Recently I used the simulation game “smokescreen” with a higher level class.  It involves a lot of English as it is necessary to read  throughout the game .   For some students this type of game wasn’t interesting.   We  took some of the themes from it for discussion and used it as a basis for written work in the form of a “game review”.  It wasn’t a huge success though in terms of “fun motivational learning”.

Here’s a quote from a student of mine, a boy,  from his game review;

“I don’t really like playing games, but at least I know that I would not recommend this game even though it’s so famous. I think that we waste a lot of time in our lives so I don’t want to be the one who encourages people to spend all their free time playing a game with no point”.

Games can work out really well but I think it’s always worth considering:

• Not everyone likes games, me and my quoted student to name just 2.
• Not all students consider playing games a good way to learn.  Some (like the adults I referred to before) might feel better calling the game an “activity”! Bearing this in mind,  I always explain why we are playing the game and what it ties into.
• The novelty factor.  I have been playing a great game recently with some younger (upper primary) students..poptropica They suggested it to me and it has been great for some students but not all of them have taken to it.  I also used in  class good old fashioned “building blocks in your hand” Jenga, which has been an instant winner.  They also requested “Simon says”…well, I have to say that “simon says” is very very popular.   So,
  
• Games, and online games, can vary quite a lot and so there will be no one game that will be the panacea for all students.

Having said all that I’m going to continue to experiment with online games and activities.  As I get more familiar with them I  get better (I hope!) at using them to add to classroom content.  And, when they work well, they work really well.

What’s all this twittering about?

I love it when I get pleasantly surprised.

I was very nonplussed about Twitter.   I was actually very “anti” it, refusing to join for a long time and only really joining because I am doing this course.  I still haven’t figured it out.  I don’t really know how to send a message to  our home page with that whole hash tag thing.  But I will eventually work it out and I will make the effort to learn it because I have now completely changed my mind.  I think it has great potential for me to use  in my class.

That maths lesson was amazing and I  got a lot of ideas from the Twitter assessment post as well (although I would have said activities and not assessment.)

I was so impressed that I’ve been looking around.

I’ve found these great sites for using Twitter in ELT

Twitter as concordancer

and

Twitter for teachers wiki

and

blog efl twitter

and

Twitter for teachers

In my last post I mentioned time and the lack of it, I don’t have the time now but I really would like to try to set something up  in one of  my classes with Twitter.  I see it more as getting Tweets in to the class after a question that I tweet out rather than my students tweeting each other (for the same reasons as social networking, I may have a problem with permissions).

I was so impressed that I have done the other part of week 6’s task  and joined a new network.  This time I have joined ELT tweet.com.  I think in the future for me this could be a really useful tool.

VLEs and me.

Sorry to go back to week 4 but I have been really busy training for work within a VLE.  Hands on practice as it were.  A couple of years ago I had never heard of a VLE and today I am both a teacher and student on one.

I am part time distance learning student and this gives me the freedom to study alongside my usual work / life whereas  I most probably would have found it almost impossible to study as a full time student in Manchester.  I really appreciate the flexibility to allow me to study what I want,  relatively speaking, when I want.  Blackboard is one tool that makes this possible for me although in all honesty I probably only use about 25% of  what I could use on blackboard.  Generally I only use E-mail and look at course content.  I do like the fact though that everything is in one place and I only have one place to log on to to find all my information.  VLEs usually work well and are a good substitute (and for me it is a substitute, I would personally prefer F2F) for F2F, technical hitches aside, but I do find the actual interface very aesthetically unappealing.

When I first came into contact with Blackboard I was surprised by the time factor that it involved.  It takes an awful of time to work within a VLE (Stefania’s blog).  It is a different way of working and a different way of organising your work schedule.  It is also a different way of dealing with students and teachers.  From a teachers point of view on a VLE  I think it is really important to,

• Keep a constant presence within the VLE
• Keep instructions for activities as clear and precise as possible
• Monitor all the activity.

Working as a student or a teacher in a VLE needs regular input.  I was recently ill.  5 days of hideous flu like stuff.  When I finally logged on to Blackboard as a student there were 260 odd messages waiting for me.  That was  really overwhelming.

I am not sure about all the wonderful claims from politicians and BECTA in the UK about the need for VLEs in state schools.  Schools have them here in Spain but to be honest from what I have seen they  look like glorified versions of Microsoft Outlook.  There are regular arguments that politicians in the UK use to effect changes in the education system and these arguments  usually involve the “parents”.  Who are these mythical parents? The ones that want to look at everything their child has done in school? I have only met a few of these rare creatures.  Quite often than not parents are tired.  Usually  both of them have to work  (and work hard) to support the family.  School is school and as far as they are concerned it is the school’s responsibility to educate.  “Have you done your homework?” “Yes.”  Maybe I’m wrong but I think in a lot of instances that’s a far as it gets every evening in most homes (unless there is a problem and also that is if you’re lucky and your parents are actually taking an interest in your school life).  I’m not saying that VLEs don’t have a very useful place within schools, but I am wary of the spin.

However I don’t live in the UK and I am working in a different field.  There is definitely a growth market in online distance education.  Having recently come into contact with VLEs though I have noticed something that hasn’t really been mentioned within the wiki.  How do you monitor what is a student’s real work or not.  Plagiarism and, in my case as a language instructor, online translator tools, are something that you have to be very conscious of.  In a F2F class you can easily see that the work being done is genuine.  This is harder to accomplish within in a VLE.  Over time you do get a sense of someone’s real voice in a VLE but it is a really different environment to F2F in this respect. To help overcome this I think it’s better to have a VLE that uses some kind of voice thread / wimba room component where there is some degree of F2F contact with the student, albeit at a distance!

Wiki Experiments

I’ve done it!  I’ve set up a wiki project with my class.  I’ve got it up and running, finally after a fair while thinking and planning.  Now I’m looking  forward to seeing  how it will eventually shape and form and what will come of it.

Class profile:

It’s a late night intensive class. That means it runs on Thursdays from 6.45 to 9.30.  They are and advanced exam class between the ages of 15 and 18.  It is a small class, only 7 students.  Generally speaking they come from supportive backgrounds.  They are studying at either at school, for the  bachillerato (pre-university qualification), or at university itself.  They already have FCE, which is the “standard”.   They are busy, really busy students.  And, they are tired.   Often they are facing more “important exams” for university entrance and so on, their schedules are completely full  and they have been studying English for years now.  They are conscious of time and any thing that wastes it. They have certain expectations of class and they are focused on results.  These are the students whose internet habits I described in a previous post “students and blogs.”

With this in mind, and having never set up a full wiki project before I wanted to see what I could do to make it relevant for the students and the class. itself.  To structure it a little but also to give them some personal space on the wiki.

I talked them through it first and we did the online habits questionnaire  a few weeks back.  I actually introduced the wiki itself before but last night was the first time we started to actually use it.

A few weeks ago I started off with a PB wiki but I found  I had some difficulties so I switched to a wetpaint wiki.  For some reason I thought the editing seemed easier to do.  I had some flickers of regret though as the page was messy and when I introduced it to the class on the whiteboard there were a couple of flash adverts on it, which turned the classroom into a kind of disco! The adverts are annoying, last nights was for a “bachelor website”.   Still they are used to this kind of thing and so maybe it’s no big deal.  It seems the ads have calmed down since then and the more we write on it the more the ads become more specific.

As the class went on and they got passwords and uploaded videos (they had worked on film reviews and so I encouraged them to upload trailers) they got more involved.  Soon they were uploading profile pictures from FB and making “friends” with each other (the site has a sort of networking section, which took them no time at all to find and was a real hit).  Their home work is to “comment” on two or more of the film reviews.  Later on in the week I’ll go into it and comment myself.  I think it’s really important to encourage comment making at the beginning to make the site more dynamic and interactive.

At the moment it’s pretty rudimentary and there’ not a lot there but I am waiting to see what we as a class  can make of it, how it will change and if it will meet longer term goals.

This is it here. Any ideas  to help it along would be much appreciated.

Useful links for wikis and EFL stuff

I found this slideshare which is relevant to EFL teachers and also anyone doing the EDES course (there’s a bit of heuristic  stuff in there!!)  There’s a tape script of the actual presentation here.

And…very importantly,  I managed to embed a slideshare into my blog.  A first!

My favourite blogger, Nik Peachy made this post with some very useful ideas on how to use wikis in and EFL  class.

And the site -wikis in EFL- has some comparisons of different wiki sites. to use.  I don’t think it’s been added to for a while but it still has some useful info.

Wikis and competition

I don’t think collaborative learning, and collaborative learning on  wiki would really work in a highly competitive school environment.  The reason I think this is that I came across two very interesting studies which I think raised some very interesting points:

The first was a study on the use of a relatively unstructured wiki project in a London secondary school. (2009)

It is interesting because the author, Lindsay Grant, points to the failure of the  project to fulfill the expectations of the teachers.  The students were given a huge amount of freedom to construct a  wiki.  However problems followed and she highlights many problems that can occur at the this level.

• Schools themselves are by nature (exam result focused) very competitive places, wikis tend collaborative activities tend to falter with too much competition around.
• Students were pared (one pair per page) and the hope was that they would interact with other students pages, eventually creating a collective community.  This did not happen.  The students kept to their pairs and resented any input from other students on their page (and visa versa did not want to “interfere” with other student pages.)   The task therefore remained essentially a  pair-work task. (Issues with           ownership of work).

The paper was in fact called “I don’t care do your own page” taken from a comment one of the students had written,  reacting to comments made on their page by a  student from a different group.

A second study based in Hong Kong is especially interesting to people in the EFL world.  It was a study by Coniam and Lee Wai Kit (2008) of,  as the title says,   Incorporating wikis into the teaching of English writing (in an EFL classroom)

• It was hoped that students would peer correct grammar errors and there learn constructively.  Students however felt that their level of English was not good enough for this task and saw it as the “teacher’s job”
• Not all students contributed evenly to the wiki, there was a varied response.  This sometimes caused resentment.

On a positive note it was concluded that:

• ” A number of weak, and shy, students had actually contributed to the wiki, more so than they usually tended to do on class projects. For these students who tended not to be active participators in class, the wiki provided a platform to facilitate their English learning after class”

I would definitely use a wiki in my classroom, I am in the middle of setting one up.  I see a lot of potential in them.  But I think some of the points above are worth thinking about beforehand.

Wikis and collaborative editing.

I’ve just completed a training module for the UOC. The task we were assigned was that in groups of 4 we had to write a text collaboratively using a wiki.   Our text was  a piece about abortion and we had to present four different points of view.  We were given specific roles and guidelines.  For example there had to be a secretary, two editors and so on.  The editors had to write an introduction and a conclusion, and we each had to write 100 words on one point of view.   We were encouraged to “edit” the document collectively.  I know personally, or will be  in the future working alongside the other participants.

I noticed though that we did not “freely” edit the document.  We did not make changes to any text that was written by another.  If someone did want to make changes they/ I sent a message first to check that it was OK.   Those changes usually related to the organisation of the paragraphs and not the content.   Even spelling mistakes people wrote to each other about first.  And always people said -” Is this OK?  If you want to change it back, please change it back.”  There was a certain etiquette we became involved in.

People freely edit Wikipedia because you do not know the person who has written the text.  The issue of editing becomes more complex when you have a relationship with somebody.  We are teachers, EFL teachers, we work in communication and this is how we naturally approached the task and organised ourselves.

Editing means changing things.   This  has implicit criticism.   It says that you have a better way of doing something, which  at the same time means that you think the other person is wrong or falls short.  I think there is a natural resistance to editing because people are trying to be polite, (being polite – in my opinion-  never a bad thing.)

It seems reasonable for the teacher to consider that students will not freely edit each others work.  If this is  a necessary part of the task  and if the teacher encourages this then maybe they should help the students in this “new terrain” by thinking of  editing guidelines  and / or examples, that will help the students to avoid conflict.

After all, we want to give new opportunities to our students, not present them with  confusing and unnerving experiences.

Disaster strikes..

A technology grumble.

All this technology is great when it works but I have had a mini disaster which is putting me behind. Just when I was really pleased with myself for getting to grips with those funky little RSS feeds I start having problems with my computer (not that the RSS feeds and my computer disaster are connected!).  I have a little Asus eeepc H which is a cute little thing and I can take it anywhere and it has been great for the last year and a half.  No problems.  Thursday I start having problems…the screen keeps freezing. Grrr.  It’s unworkable.  I’ve done a virus scan, a spyware scan and a system restore.  No luck.  The CPU values are all over the place.   Yep technology is great when it works, when it doesn’t, it can drive you crazy. (Well, it drives me crazy!  I should practice some zen breathing).  Luckily I have a back up computer but I want my mobility back.  I think I will need to take it to the computer hospital and get it checked over.  The time I had pegged for looking over the wiki material has been eaten up by me trying to find out what’s going on.     Grrr.  Grumble over.

RSS feeds ..Hurray!

I have managed to get to grips with RSS feeds..already it is helping me to keep up to date with everything.

I don’t think I am alone in suffering from online “space” overload.  I have account names and passwords flowing everywhere.  I have to keep track of, amongst other things:

• 4 email accounts (not including the VLE ones)
• This blog to contribute to.
• A lot of blogs/wikis to keep up with.
• 3 wikis to contribute to.
• 2 VLEs
• Facebook.

I only set up the RSS feeds  a couple of days ago but already it is helping to keep tabs on any changes and help me to not feel  so snowed under with  online spaces.  Now we have a Tweet page on our emerging technologies wiki front page  I may take the plunge and the extra breathing space RSS has given me and join Twitter.