Note: This blog post is most likely to be of interest to readers interested in online learning, languages and CALL.
These are some reflections I wrote during the recent EuroCALL 2011 Conference at Nottingham:
This was the first major conference I had ever attended. And I was presenting a paper (I may try to publish it in the conference proceedings). I was a little nervous until my presentation was over.
Xerte toolkits:
I attended this workshop anxiously, as I became interested in the Xerte toolkits about a year ago, but access to the tool was not available unless one had attended the relevant workshop (which was not possible for me as I'm based in Mexico).
The tool looks good, although I was slightly disappointed when I found out that textboxes cannot hold text in them (a problem I came acrosss when working in Moodle and Blackboard environments before). This function is something I find very useful when designing online tasks.
I had a quick go at using the tool and found that the quality of the text produced using it is not great. But I must find the time to use it properly before I can assess how valuable it can be for me and my colleagues.
Ana Gimeno
The outgoing president of EuroCALL, Ana Gimeno, from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), has been very active in the last few years in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). She leads the Camille research group and has developed the Ingenio authoring tool, which doesn't seem to be publicly available on the web.
I was interested in the fact that all students at UPV are required to reach a B2 level in any foreign language to graduate.
Graham Davies
It was good to see him still actively involved in the conference.
Mike Sharples
I found his keynote presentation highly motivating. His work with public-private partnerships seems to be very productive. He recommended the BBC Janala Bangladesh project as an example of good practice.
He then referred to forvo as an example of the power of crowdsourcing.
Marie-Josée Hamel and Catherine Caws
From the University of Ottawa and the University of Victoria, Canada. I was very impressed with their work on tool development. I liked their concept of ergonomic CALL. I attended a conference on ergonomics at ISCAR 2011 Rome which was also fascinating (more on that later in a new blog post).
Useful references: on dictionary use (Laufer and Hill 200; Varantola 2002); on Stimulated Recall (SR) (Thumb); Tono 2011, 2001; on computer tracking (Hamel 2010, Hubbard 2005, Fisher 2007); on usability tests (Hamel & Caws 2010 Calico 27(3), on education ergonomics (Raby 2005); on collecting objective multiple data (Hubbard 1992, 1999; Levy 2002; Colpaert 2006); on focusing on process (Felix 2005); on understanding changes (Chapelle 2003);
Hamel has looked at the CALL triangle learner-task-tool.
The concept of usability tests is interesting. Usually used with six participants.Task-based usability tests v. interesting concept too.
They have developed a dictionary: Dire autrement.
Caws distinguished between critical and digital literacies. The concept of literacy seems much broader than I thought. The translation in Spanish as 'literacidad' is interesting.
It was interesting to see how Hamel and Caws' research focus changed from tool to learner behaviour. The same happened to me. Why?
Caws, like me, also found that cultural annotations to video transcripts are underused by learners. Why?
Pujolà et al
Pujolà and his colleagues talked about their experiences using Moodle and Mahara to help learners visualise their learning using eportfolios. They talked about copyleft and digital communicative competence. What I liked about Mahara is that students can choose the colours in the elearning environmnet, something my students had always asked for in Mexico.
Christine Appel
It was very nice meeting Christine and finding out about her new project, SpeakApps. Something to get excited about!
Mike Levy
He gave a fascinating presentation on his work in progress. He's interested in micro-analysis, in moment-to-moment actions. Lenhart, Madden and Hitlin 2005 on 'harnessing small moments'. He also referred to Hubbard 2010.
Check his recent articles in the Pragmatics journal (2010) with Gardner, and his forthcoming article in the Language & Society journal.
He rescues the concepts of input-output-repair from SLA research. Smith 2008: self-repair.
He's using Conversation Analysis (CA) tools.
He emphasised that collecting data is easy, but interpreting it is not.
Multimedia discourse analysis was mentioned (Kresses, Tiebolt), but he argued that he feels more comfortable with his CA approach.
Finally, on the topic of theory, Levy suggested several options: developing theoretical CALL, borrowing theory, adapting theory (Smith 2008), or synthesing theory (Levy and Stockwell 2006).
More good references:
- Svensson 2008 on types of ICT
- Look at Blin + Appel 2011 in CALICO
- Check Claire Aviña who is doing her PhD with Robin Goodfellow using activity theory
- Check Levy and Hubbard 2005
- Bax 2003, 2011
- Larssen-Freeman 2003
- Verspor, de Bot, Lowie 2011: second language development
- The Shallows (a novel)
Some random thoughts:
- The conference reminded me of the value of team-teaching
- Why is it that the time participants spend on something on the computer is sometimes used in research as a be-all-end-all variable?
- Idea: designing CALL tasks for research and academic purposes can be powerful (for instance, with in-built features that avoid the need for students to press 'record').
- Etwinning was mentioned as a very powerful new tool. Unfortunately, it is only available in Europe.
- Someone mentioned that learners wanted a particular elearning environment to look more like YouTube, and that's what the task designers did. Should we please students by given them tasks that look and feel like Facebook, YouTube, etc? Danger of trivialising or oversimplifiying learning?
- Class size in distance learning is an interesting topic. The OU has 8,000-9,000 language learners overall. The UNED in Spain takes 9,000 in a single first year course (unknown subject).
- Concepts: I still have a hard time remembering the meaning of 'ontology' (what is it that we want to know), 'epistemology' (what can we know about this), 'methodology' (how can we find out). 'Ontology' might be what I'm struggling with in my thesis. As Sofi Oksanen says, quoting the poet Paul-Eerik Rummo: "There is an answer for everything, if only one knew the question."
- CALL and language learning are a part of Applied Linguistics.
- I was very excited with the notion of replacing the concept of 'second language acquisition' with that of 'second language development'.
- I must look into complexity theory.
- What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
- Next EuroCALL: Gothenburg 22-25 Aug 2012
- Bot: robot in Second Life.
- Transcribing in multimodal environments is a real challenge. Is it right to try to put the interaction on paper? Could the analysis not be made in a multimedia environment?
- A good quote from Beckett mentioned at the conference: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." —Samuel Beckett, "Worstward Ho," 1983
- PLE - personal learning environment
- DBR - design based research (Reeves 2000, Brown 1992, Collins 1992)
- On open educational resources and open courseware, check LORO (The Open University), XPERT and UNOW (University of Nottingham)
