Tools for Connecting Through Voice and Image

As part of the Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012 session Becoming a Webhead, I am trying out various audio and video tools to evaluate their usefulness for teaching languages.  As I progress I will be adding to a Googledoc called Communication Tools which I created.  It is open to the public for additions or changes.  Feel free to contribute.

Right now I am embedding a short message that I created using AudioPal.  It was extremely easy to create, but what I want to figure out is whether it is possible to set it to mute.  I don't think it's a good idea to have audio turn on as soon as people open a blog because sometimes they are in a public or group setting and it can be distracting to everyone else.  So here goes the message I recorded using text-to-speech on AudioPal.  (BTW I discovered that in text-to-speech it is better not to use abbreviations because the voice doesn't produce them clearly).




OK. I can see that you have control over the playing of the audio. Now I'm going to try Voki.
Here's a link to a character and recording I created.  But I am also going to embed the same thing here to see what happens.



Ok.  Now let's see what Audioboo looks like.

Connections

In A New Culture of Learning  Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). The New Culture of Learning, the authors extol the benefits rather than the difficulties of the relentless pace of change that we are all experiencing.   In their eyes, A growing digital, networked infrastructure is amplifying our ability to access and use nearly unlimited resources and incredible instruments while connecting with one another at the same time (p. 17).

Two essential elements they focus on for purposes of learning are collectives and imagination. I'm going to comment a little on collectives and save imagination/play for another day.

In collectives constant interaction among group members, with their varying skills and talents, functions as a kind of peer amplifier, providing numerous outlets, resources, and aids to further an individual's learning (p. 51). ... But equally important is the ability to add one's own knowledge to the general mix.  That contribution may be large, such as a new website, or it may be a series of smaller offerings, such as comments on a blog or a forum post.  It may even be something as trivial as simply visiting a website.  But in each case, the participation has an effect, both in terms of what the individual is able to draw from it and how it shapes and augments the stream of information (p. 52).

This concept of learning through a collective sounds similar to George Siemen's theory of Connectivism which he posits in A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.  In this 2005 article Siemen's says, The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.

In rereading Siemen's article I discovered that Siemen's actually refers to John Seely Brown.  He comments that John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few. The central premise is that connections created with unusual nodes supports and intensifies existing large effort activities.  And Siemens concludes, This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.

As I participate in several of the courses offered by Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012, I find that I am learning through interacting with the participants in each course.  I can see that the participants in each are eagerly forming collectives.  As Thomas and Brown say, Unlike a classroom where a teacher controls the lecture, the organic communities that emerge through collectives produce meaningful learning because the inquiry that arises comes from the collective  itself (p. 54).

MOOCs

I am attempting to organize my links and get set up for the EVO (Electronic Village Online) courses that begins on January 9.  In the syllabus for the first week of Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments, I found a link to the video above in which Howard Reingold interviews George Siemens. 


In the video George Siemens gives a detailed explanation of a MOOC (massive open online course).   I have  tried to participate in some MOOCs in the past, but I think that I didn't understand the concept behind them well enough to get much benefit from them. I am now lurking in the 16th week of a MOOC called Change: Education, Learning and Technology and from here on I will  have a better idea of how to navigate the chaos, expand my own learning and contribute to the conversation.

Transformational Tasks

The focus of José Picardo's blog post, Teaching and Learning with Social Media: A Case Study, really struck a chord with me.  Usually when discussing the use of technology in education, we talk about how tech tools can "enhance" teaching and learning.  However, Picardo discusses the use of social media not only to enhance but  to transform learning tasks.

He says, Most interesting to me was the transformative potential of blogs, Web 2.0 applications and social networks, not only to enhance existing practice, but also to create new technology-based tasks which would have been previously inconceivable ... 

Picardo refers to Transformation, Technology, and Education a 2006 presentation by Ruben R. Puentedura  who divides learning tasks into 4 types, two which enhance learning and two which transform it.

Image from Ruben R. Puentedura

Enhancement type tasks
Substitution - Tech acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change
Example:  Word processor used as a typewriter

Augmentation- Tech acts as a direct tool substitute, with functional improvement
Examples: Use of word processor functions such as spellchecking and cut and paste

Transformation type tasks
Modification - Tech allows for significant task redesign
Example: Textual, visual, audio tools for construction of shared knowledge

Redefinition - Tech allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable
Example: Tools for visualization and simulation, social computing, digital storytelling, educational gaming

I decided to try to apply Puentedura's  typology using the 2 broad categories of enhancement and transformation to the Activity Types posited in World Languages Activity Types which I found in Grounded Tech Integration: Languages an article in the  ISTE Connections online magazine, Learning and Leading.  My conclusion was that the transformational aspect of tasks lies in the ability of language learners to do one or both of these things:

• Have more control over their own learning
• Interact  and receive  feedback. 

Here are some examples: 

• Instead of playing an audio recording in class, the teacher posts a link to the podcast on a class blog and asks the students to post their responses to the podcast on the blog.    In this way, the students have control over the number of times they listen to the podcast and post a response which is available to a wide audience for further feedback.
• Instead of asking students of deliver a presentation for the class, the teacher asks the students to create a video podcast which is then posted online for feedback.  Since there are many devices now available for creating and editing videos, the students would be able to create a product they were satisfied with before posting it for feedback.
• Instead of having students send letters to a pen pal, the teacher can set up exchange emails with a speaker of the target language.  (Sites like Edmodo and ePals allow for teacher monitoring of exchanges). Or to provide language in context, the teacher could develop Skype exchanges with students in a target-language country through a site like ePals.
• Instead of taking students on a school -sponsored  field trip, teachers can provide links to sites where students can take virtual field trips to sites not otherwise available because of distance and expense.
• Instead of giving students access to written material in the target language in the classroom or library, the teacher can ask the students to  materials such as FL newspapers online and write comments directly on those sites.
• Instead of asking students to write text-based stories in the classroom, the teacher can ask students to write digital-stories using  photos from Flickr on sites like Bookr, Bubblr or Stupeflix.
• Instead of having students fill in speech bubbles on teacher-supplied comics, teachers can ask students to create their own comics using sites like GoAnimate or Dvolver.

There is no doubt that Puentedura's conceptualization of how technology can not only enhance but transform  teaching has helped me immensely.  You can go to As We May Teach on iTunes to learn more about his ideas.  #change11

Image Attribution

Images add a lot to blog posts but people often don't give attribution to the authors of the images.  Here is one way to give credit to the author of a photo from Flickr.
1.  Go to Flickr.
2.  Click Explore from the top of the page.
3.  From the drop down menu click Creative Commons.
4.  From one of the license groups, click on See More.
5.  Use the Search box to find a photo.
6.  Click Share.
7.  From drop down menu be sure that HTML button is selected.
8.  Copy the HTML code from box.
9.  In your Blogger post click the Edit HTML tab at the top of your post window.
10.  Paste your previously copied code at the very top of your post.
11.  Click the Compose tab to write text in your post.
12.  Now when you mouse over the image, you will see that the photographer's name appears and  if you click on the photo, you will be taken to the Flickr page where the photo appears.

What is a Content Curator?

One of the best definitions of a content curator that I have found is in Rohit Bahargava's Manifesto for the Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job of the Future.  In his 2009 post Bahargava offered this description of content curators:

To satisfy the people's hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others.

Anyone  who works online has already felt the overload of the information explosion.  Although we try to stay current through blogging, tweeting, and social bookmarking, the tsunami of information often overwhelms us.  Hence, the birth of the concept of content curators, people who cast a wide net for information, filter it and offer their own perspectives on the gathered material.

In The 5 Models of Content Curation, Bhargava suggests 5 fundamental elements of content curation: aggregation, distillation, elevation, mashup and chronology.  These elements sound like tasks already performed by many people in my own PLN (personal learning network).     

However, it seems that the tools for accomplishing these tasks may have improved.   Steve Rosenbaum suggests some in 4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web.  Barbara Bray offers a good example of one of these tools on her Scoop.it page called Curate your Learning. 

Although I appreciate the concept of content curator, I'm not sure that many edubloggers or gloggers don't already do the same job with existing tools.  It will be interesting to see if the newer tools used by content curators really offer any advantages in managing information.  Are we witnessing an evolution of an online "content manager" from blogger to tweeter to content curator or are we just renaming the job already being handled in other ways?

Critical Thinking

 I just read Michal Coughlan's piece, Thinking Deeply about the Shallows in which he discusses ideas from Nicolas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.  For me the main issue he is raising is whether the young learners of today are losing the ability to do vertical learning ("singular, in-depth focus on one topic") because they are more immersed in horizontal thinking "(multitasking possibly in connection with networks of people").

Personally I find that I tend to read blog posts and tweets more often than I write blog posts myself.  This is definitely because of the time and deeper thinking involved in producing a reflective piece as contrasted with finding intriguing snippets of information and retweeting them or putting interesting new websites in my Diigo account for further analysis.  (Unfortunately that further, deeper consideration often never occurs).

I think as educators we need to ensure that learners practice  both types of learning.   Some learners need to learn to utilize social networking sites for educational purposes while others need to learn to do read, reflect, and write.  Each type of learning serves a purpose.