The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on June 13, 2009

I just finished watching the 1 hour and 20 minute demo of Google’s new product, WAVE, to be released to the general public later this year. What might speak volumes about the product is that the video held my attention for that long. The Google team that developed this application set out to move organizational communication beyond email and instant messaging without becoming a social network. Just as a wiki is much about the creation of a collaborative document with multiple authors, Waves facilitate both synchronous and asynchronous group communication using a variety of media.

In trying to describe a Wave I feel much like a Spanish conquistador writing back to the king attempting to describe an Aztec city. We’ve seen some things like this before but never quite on this scale. A Wave, as best as I can describe it, is part-wiki, part-instant-message, part-email, part-threaded discussion. It combines the features of many of these tools to create an all-in-one, up-to-date conversation. The best way to learn about Wave is to set aside an hour and watch the video below. If you don’t have that kind of time, I’ve listed five reasons why I believe Wave will revolutionize classroom collaboration and one reason why it might not, at least not for a while.

Five reasons why Google Wave might revolutionize education:

1. Wave is open. Google Wave is a platform; it’s not a tool. Google has gone through great lengths to make sure it’s an open platform and to encourage others to build extensions that work with Google Wave. For example, the video demonstrates how one might manage one’s Twitter account completely within a Wave. Too, a Wave can be embedded in one’s site so that such collaboration can be viewed and edited by the public. Imagine your school’s classroom management system having the ability to communicate with Google Wave as well as the ability to embed a Wave in your classroom’s closed space.

2. Wave is multi-lingual. The video demonstrates the ability to write right-to-left or left-to-right as well as in non-western characters. There is also a demonstration of Rosi, a translation robot that Google claims uses semantics and context to provide real-time translations of Wave communication in 40 languages.

3. Waves are both synchronous and/or asynchronous. Possibly the most striking aspect of a Wave is it’s ability to manage real-time communication as well as time-delayed messages. For example, the system includes a “playback” feature that allows one to watch communication unfold through time. Google also promises to include soon options for playback so that one can watch the creation of a single sentence, paragraph or document. One might imagine watching one single user’s contributions as one moves through the timeline as well. Imagine how educators might design and assess student participation in group work with the ability to view and understand the history of a document from multiple angles.

4. Wave integrates a variety of media. Once can easily drag and drop photos, links, maps and videos in real time into a Wave, This practically allows one to share a screen with participants in the Wave. Online courses will never be the same. And I’m thankful to Google for that.

5. It’s Google. When Google rolls out a product (or buys one) people take note. However, it’s not every day (but maybe every other day) that Google announces such an ambitious project to the world. I’m willing to bet this Wave thing has real legs in the educational world.

The one reason why educators might not ride the Google Wave:

1. It’s hard to describe a Wave. One reason Twitter is so popular is that it does one thing well, so it’s easier to explain what to do with Twitter. A Wave, on the other hand, constitutes a myriad of communication possibilities and such a smorgasborg of options might prove too much for the average educator. Wave might be the tool of early adopters for quite some time. However, I would not expect Ashton Kutcher or CNN to open accounts in the first year after Wave launches.

What about you? Would you use Wave to communicate with your students? Let us know. Simply click on the title of this post and scroll to the bottom of the post to find the comment box.

In which the next wave in language education might be Wave; 5 reasons for and 1 against by Kevin Gaugler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Category: Creativity, Teaching and Learning, web 2.0 | Comments
Tags: communication, community, Google, platform

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on May 25, 2009

On the Friday leading into the Memorial Weekend here in the U.S., Kevin and I had the pleasure of speaking with Enza Antenos-Conforti, a professor of Italian at Montclair State University in New Jersey. You’ll notice some issues with the recording in a few sections, but we hope they won’t detract from the quality of the discussion.

We had discussed the power of Twitter in a previous post and had listed Enza’s e-twinning project with her Twitter colleague, Seth Dickens, as an example of how you could use Twitter educationally. We were eager to hear more about Enza’s Twitter projects from her perspective as a seasoned classroom instructor and active researcher. Enza’s research on her use of Twitter in university-level intermediate Italian classes can be found in the 2009 Calico monograph, The Next Generation: Social Networking and Online Collaboration in Foreign Language Learning and she writes frequently about her teaching and research on her blog, An Academic at Work.

In this interview Enza shares with us how her use of Twitter with her students evolved through observation, feedback and reflection, the role her own Twitter community played in the construction and implementation of her projects, as well as her new iPod touch project slated for this coming fall. Enza’s work shows how a transparent, accessible and collaborative approach to teaching and research, made possible through the judicious application of web 2.0 technologies, can have a profound impact on teaching and learning that extends far beyond our classroom walls.

In that spirit of collaboration and sharing, here are some resources Enza mentioned in the course of our conversation that you will want to check out:

• Enza’s inspiration for using Twitter in the classroom as described in her blog post, Twitter’s “what are you doing?” is making families
• Enza’s initial thoughts on the e-twinning project with Seth Dickens: E-Twinning: NJ & Trento
• Seth’s post project reflections: Skype Calls for e-Twinning in L2
• Enza’s post project reflections: How We Skyped in the FL Classroom
• Martino Martini and Montclair University wiki for e-twinning project
• Crowdstatus to manage twitter groups
• Skype in Schools to find classes to communicate and collaborate with
• Enza’s Twitter accounts: profeac, ivenus and profenza
• Research project by Professor Monica Rankin and graduate student Kim Smith of the University of Texas, Dallas that influenced Enza’s upcoming iPod touch project: The Twitter Experiment: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas
• Monica Rankin’s follow-up conclusions: The Twitter Experiment at UT Dallas
• Howard Rheingold’s post on Twitter Literacy
• Twitterfone: Send Messages to Twitter with Voice
• Learn10: Learn 10 new words a day

As always, if you know someone who is doing great work integrating technology into the language curriculum or have a tool to share that would be of interest to our readers, please let us know!

cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.worldatways.com/suggest-topics/.

Music for our podcasts is courtesy of George Wood and is called Travelogue. You can find more of George Wood’s music at podsafeaudio.com

 

 The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Enza Antenos-Conforti [53:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (76)

Category: Podcast, Teaching and Learning, Twitter feeds, social networks | Comments
Tags: antenos-conforti, Podcast, twitter

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on May 4, 2009

It’s been almost a month now since my son, Benjamin, received word from the Office of the Consulate General of Japan in Boston that he has been selected to serve as an Assistant Language Teacher in the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program for next year. As those of us who have been fortunate enough to live, study and work for an extended period in another country know, this will be an exciting and profoundly life-changing experience for him. Considering the unfamiliar linguistic, cultural and geographical territories Ben will soon explore, he (and his future students) would benefit from more advanced preparation than our friends Phileas Fogg and Passepartout were allotted. Not so very long ago—and certainly back in my day several decades ago—figuring out what to expect and how to plan for this adventure meant searching for and contacting local program alums. Depending on the questions you thought to ask, the number of alums you could reach, their helpfulness and the usefulness of their responses, you were more or less prepared for your journey.

But Ben and his cohorts have much better options now, courtesy of the Official JET Programme Online Forum, a web-based, moderated, global discussion group, where over one thousand community members of future, current and former JET participants share information on an exhaustive list of topics related to the JET experience. Even before Ben submitted his application way back in November of last year, he already had a very good sense of whether or not this opportunity was really for him, what the interview process would be like and what to expect as a program participant. But this forum is much more than a simple FAQ site. This is a committed, purposeful community of practice that “gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity” that, in conjunction with planned JET orientation sessions, mid-year workshops and various support resources, is focused on creating an environment conducive to success. And so months before he leaves for Japan at the end of July, he already is a connected, vested member of this particular group. As Ben moves from being a peripheral participant in this forum, taking advantage of the knowledge and insights of his peers, to acquiring and then sharing his growing expertise, he will in turn sustain and nurture the collective learning enterprise of this community.

Isn’t this what we want to see in our own programs—a community of engaged, resource-sharing, resource-building practitoners? And not just in our study abroad programs, although if any university study abroad program out there is providing the kind of collaborative, ongoing, participant interchange that the JET program does, we would love to hear about it. Instead, what I see are programs for our majors and minors designed around courses that address content and proficiency standards with little or no thought to finding ways to promote what could be very powerful, inclusive learning communities.

If we expect our graduates to become members of our communities of practice, we must provide them with the experiences, the venues, and the models to do so. Online forums, wikis, and other social networks are easy to set up and use; so it’s not the technology that is difficult. In fact, most course management systems include, at the least, forums or threaded discussion lists. But if we truly want to support and promote lifelong learning and create communities of practice, then we need to be willing to learn with and from our students as well. That means being willing to go beyond our comfort zone at times, ready to assume the roles of novice and developing expert alongside our role as expert and accepting of our students in those roles as well. And we need to bring our communities out from behind those university course management walled gardens so that everyone—faculty, students, graduates and future students—can inform the learning that takes place there. The Jet Program approach might be a good starting point.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Photo credit: Teamwork by Buddy Venturanza

In which community improves practice by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.worldatways.com/suggest-topics/.

Category: Teaching and Learning | Comments
Tags: community, learning, Teaching