The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on July 6, 2010

For Travis Allen the gift of an iPhone for Christmas in 2009 quickly became much more than the increasingly common rite of passage coveted by many American tweens and teens. As you’ll hear in this interview, the iPhone profoundly changed how Travis experienced himself as a learner. At the time, Travis was just seventeen.

We first became aware of Travis through a video he posted to YouTube while still a high school senior, that as of today, has well over 18,000 views. In the video, Travis outlines his vision of mobile learning which he calls the iSchool Initiative. One year later and Travis has turned his iSchool Initiative into a non-profit organization that includes:

• a student team that tests, evaluates and recommends educational applications for mobile devices
• an iSchool community that connects learners and educators around the world who share a common interest in the educational potential of mobile technologies
• a Facebook group and newsletter that posts events and project updates
• and a website that pulls everything together

Why is Travis’ work important to us as language educators? As we noted in a previous post, not only do almost all of our students come equipped with mobile phones, but, when used appropriately, they can provide our students with differentiated learning options, access to anytime, anywhere authentic resources, and the ability to connect and collaborate with other learners, native speakers and content experts inside as well as outside the classroom environment. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills ranks world languages second under the core subjects deemed essential for students in the 21st century and global awareness first under its key interdisciplinary themes. And under vital Life and Career Skills they list initiative, self-direction, leadership, and adaptability, as well as social and cross-cultural skills. If we strive to help our students appropriately and effectively engage with the global community and direct their own learning, then we language educators need to listen to and learn from students like Travis Allen.

For additional information on Travis, his initiative and how you can participate, check out the following links:

• The iSchool Initiative Home
• The iSchool Initiative’s YouTube Channel
• Our archived LearnCentral session with Travis held in ElluminateLive! Scroll down to ‘Other’ and click on the ‘Post-Event’ link to access our recorded session.
• Travis Allen’s Blog: The Life of a 21st Century Student
• Travis on Twitter
• The iSchool Initiative Facebook Group
• Huffington Post Article: Helping Students Learn How to Enjoy Learning: An Interview With Travis Allen
• Kennesaw State University Students in Free Enterprise Team

The three educational applications Travis mentioned in our interview can be found here:

Sundry Notes
Cramberry
iStudiez Pro

And don’t forget the power of a community—join the iSchoolinitiative Ning community to share and learn with others the ways in which mobile technologies can support our language learners.

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!

 

 The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Travis Allen [36:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (68)

cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Travis Allen 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

Category: Podcast | View Comments
Tags: allen, Barbara, iPad, iPhone, iPodTouch, ischool, mobile, Podcast, travis, Travis Allen

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on March 13, 2010

On March 12th I presented a plenary session at the MAALLT-SEALLT 2010 joint conference, in which I shared my thoughts on the concept of thirdspace, the university and teaching as we know it. I first began thinking about thirdness in the context of Spain’s transition from a dictatorship to a democracy and the fiction it produced from the late sixties to the early eighties. When I began my research about twelve years ago, I noticed a tendency to use theatrical space in fictional works in order to experiment with new social paradigms that often escaped the stage and disrupted the dominant order of things.

Even though I had been thinking about thirdspace in literature and culture for quite some time, not until recently did I consider the thirdspaces of the traditional university system. Institutions of higher education have typically constructed their spaces into teaching spaces (the classroom), living/studying spaces ( the dorm/the library) and community spaces such as labs, theaters and eateries.

In my session I spoke about the rich learning experience that occurs in between these spaces that are often ignored by instructors. Study abroad and internships exemplify just two of these third places. Language faculty not only encourage students to study abroad or participate in an internship, but also suggest that a student’s education remains incomplete without such experiences. In fact, one might be hard pressed to find faculty who would not agree that time abroad constitutes a more rich learning experience than classroom instruction. Since we know learning takes place in thirdspace, should we then be teaching there as well or does teaching in thirdspace inhibit learning?

In the talk I explained the process of thirdness and disruption in politics, business and education. I also provided the audience with examples of the latest disruptive technologies and ways in which a space-time shift in the role of the teacher has already produced positive learning outcomes in higher education. I make my audiovisual material available here for your consideration and I look forward to your comments and ideas about thirdness and education.

Category: Teaching, Teaching and Learning | View Comments
Tags: Gaugler, Kevin, MAALLT, SEALLT, third space

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on January 31, 2010

The other day Wesley Fryer had some wonderful comments on his blog about my thoughts on the iPad. I figured I would repost his ideas here along with my response. How do you feel about Apple’s gated model of distribution? Will it ultimately imped access to information and consequently teaching and learning?

Wesley Fryer:

I hope you’re right about the iPad and Apple’s emerging role as disruptors of the textbook industry, and I’ve shared similar hopes/predictions on my blog too. I think Apple’s view of DRM is key to this question, however. Timothy Lee’s post yesterday, “The case against the iPad,”  is a good read on this topic since he takes issue with Apple’s vision of sharing in our web 2.0 world. At this point, I don’t think we see Apple truly embracing the disruptive power of Open Educational Resources. I do acknowledge that Apple is a corporation naturally focused on quarterly profits, just like every other corporation, but as a company it has historically stood for values far bigger than “just” profits. I’d love to see Apple officially embrace technologies which support OER. I’m concerned that most the Apple advocacy I’ve seen in the past year for iTunesU is done because as a company Apple wants everyone to get an iTunes account with a credit card. That was something Steve Jobs mentioned in his presentation this week. That comment was significant, as well as the opening comments about how many billions a year Apple makes. I think Apple stands at an important crossroads when the textbook industry COULD be constructively disrupted, and OER could play a HUGE role in that process. Hopefully this will happen, but I think Apple will need to place emphasis on OER formally and not just promote the iBooks store.

My response (Kevin Gaugler):

As I write this response to your thoughtful comments about the iPad, the Grammy’s are being shown on CBS. I’m struck by the iPhoneOSque design of the special effects. It’s remarkable that in less than a decade the iPod  and it’s OS has become synonymous with mainstream music.

One certainly does wonder if the iPad will do the same for the publishing industry and I certainly share fears about one company such as Apple filtering all media from music to games to movies to books and magazines. Perhaps Google’s open Android platform and devices such as the newly announced MSI tablet that run on it will prove to be competitive alternatives to Apple’s product-line.

However, I cannot help but think about how essential my iPod has become to my own learning since I listen to podcasts every day during my commute or through my AppleTV. The iPod has led to the birth of podcasting and world of free audio and video content that has flattened mass-media as we know it giving rise to Web 2.0 superstars such as Kevin Rose and Leo Leporte.

Similarly, the iPhone was released without an AppStore and it appeared that it might remain a completely closed system. However, indpendent developers can now make a living selling their work on this new platform. Many simply give their creations away.

One can perhaps expect that the iPad, similarly, will constitute a new publishing platform for unknown authors and their work including open texbooks. It is conceivable that within a few years a student, with one $500 purchase, could have the remainder of their academic content “padcasted” to them at no cost. Remember, it was Apple’s gated system that changed the music forever only because the music INDUSTRY saw the platform as a profitable endeavor.  So too must publishers see profit in the iPad in order to for the disruption to take place. Only then will they embrace and make such a delivery system commonplace. Since Apple now sells DRM-free music, I suspect so too will the long arch of reason bend toward a more open publishing paradigm and the gated-learning system of which we all currently belong will some day truly be democratized via really simple syndication.

Frankly, I’m excited by the possibility of rethinking learning materials beyond the book to more interactive, more multi-faceted learning products that are so  simple to use that few teachers will be too intimidated to use them. This is what Apple does best: it simplifies and beautifies complex technology so that anyone can use it and so that everyone wants it. Only that Apple-gated combination can cause such a disruption in the education industry. Once it occurs, there’s no turning back.

Category: Creativity, Teaching and Learning, web 2.0 | View Comments
Tags: Apple, iPad, Kevin