TIFLE final project proposal

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I realize that many of you are not reading these blogs anymore now that the TIFLE class is officially over. Still, I wanted to upload the Power Point presentation of my final project (proposal), in case anyone would like to give me any comments or suggestions. As usual, it's all deeply appreciated.

I enjoyed working with all of you, and I wish you all the best in your future academic (and non-academic) endeavors.

Best, M :)

Thoughts on Evoca

Here's my podcast, which I'm not expecting any of you to actually listen to, so I wanted to just go over some of the things I spoke about in text form, in case you're interested in hearing what I have to say, but not in listening to me say it. I was very disappointed in evoca, mainly since I have had experience with other podcasting sites in the past that I found very simple to navigate. The interface, to me, was very confusing and jumbled and I found it rather difficult to get to the point where I was actually able to create a recording. The recording process was fairly simple, although I was annoyed by the fact that the player does not allow you to rewind or fast-forward, nor does it allow you to record over what you had previously recorded, which is why, in the podcast above, you will hear my "test, test, 1, 2, 3" recording right at the beginning. The biggest disappointment to me, however, was the fact that evoca only allows you 15 minutes of free recording. This seems pointless since other sites exist that allow you to record and store an unlimited amount of recordings for free (sites like mypodcast, podomatic, odeo, etc.). Also, with the free Audacity program, you can create your own podcasts while NOT ONLINE and then modify or edit them to your liking and upload them to other sites. I think the advantage of evoca is that it offers a cross-platform service, in which you can make recordings from a phone or from skype, which could be very nifty for something like an on-the-fly recording while abroad or something, but to me, it's not really worth paying for that type of service. I think for now I'll just stick with the free services...there are just so many of them available.

And just one more quick note, not necessarily related only to evoca: interface is everything.

50 Cosas: Project justification and explanation

**NOTE: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN BELOW TO NEXT POST TO VIEW VIDEO.

The TIFLE project
The video we created is based on a series of very popular videos that have recently been appearing on video sharing sites such as YouTube. These videos are typically called “50 Things” and consist of the author reciting a list of 50 things that he has done over the course of his life. Since the subject matter (i.e. the “50 Things” video) is current and most likely familiar to many of our students, we chose to use it as the basis of our project, and considering the fact that it would allow us to expose the students to a large number of single sentences in the past tense, we chose the preterit/imperfect distinction for our pedagogical focus. In regards to the composition of the video itself, we wanted to create the least possible amount of visual distraction so that the students would be primarily focused on the words we were saying, so we chose a simple white backdrop with a heavy focus on our faces.
Although we originally had planned to create a more sophisticated video, we opted instead to create a more casual video that would be similar in style and composition to the other videos that are appearing on YouTube. We also hoped that the casual atmosphere would allow the students to more easily relate to the video. We spent a fair amount of time deciding on background music, since we did not want to include anything that would distract the students from the oral input, and we finally decided on an upbeat and catchy tune that we rendered voiceless using the audio program Audacity.

The activity
This video-based activity is designed for a beginning level Spanish class (equivalent of SPN1131 at the University of Florida) and the pedagogical goal of the activity is to offer the student comprehensible input on the uses of preterit and imperfect tenses, as well as to create a forum within which they can later produce these forms when they make their own video. Since the project is intended to reinforce the distinction between the preterit and imperfect tenses in Spanish, it should be delivered to the students immediately following explicit instruction regarding this particular grammar topic. The activity will be delivered and completed in the three stages listed below.
In the first stage of the activity, which should be completed immediately following explicit instruction, students will view the video in class two times in a row. During the first viewing, they will simply watch the video without taking notes or making any comments. During the second viewing, immediately following the first viewing, the students will be asked to complete a cloze activity in which they will complete the sentences that we are using in the video (worksheet can be accessed here). The blanks will only contain the verbs, and will be intended to enhance the spoken input and force the students to focus on the grammatical forms of the preterit and the imperfect. Once the video is completed, the instructor should review answers with the students to ensure comprehension.
The second stage of the activity involves an in-class writing activity in which the students will work in groups of three to write out their own list of fifty things that they have done in their lives. It should be noted that the group will collaborate to create ONE list of 50 things, not three separate lists. This list will be turned in at the end of class period for the instructor to revise and return to the students, hopefully creating a final draft using the correct grammar. After receiving their revised script from the instructor, the students will move on to the third stage of the project.
In this third and final stage, the students will film and edit their own “50 Cosas” video at home in their same groups of three, using the revised scripts from the instructor. The students will be given one full week to complete the activity and upload their video to YouTube. This project will also make use of the social networking features of YouTube by requiring the students to all use the same tag when the upload their video (“SPN1131_50Cosas”, for example). This will allow the videos to all be easily searchable, as well as allowing the students to easily find each other’s videos. The students will also be required to send a direct link to their video to the instructor for assessment.

The theoretical justification
The pedagogical facet of this activity can be justified by means of the theory of Constructivism, which Hansen-Smith (2003) notes emphasizes “learning by doing and creating meanings, particularly by using the tools of the computer”. Since the students will be intimately involved in the creation of both a video focused on the preterit/imperfect distinction, as well as a script for that video, it is hoped that they will benefit linguistically through the opportunity to construct and take responsibility for their own language learning experience. Likewise, it is expected that the distinction between the two tenses will become more personal and notable to the students since the main topic of the video is their own intimate experience in life.
In regards to SLA theory, the activity is deeply connected to the concepts of noticing and awareness, as introduced by Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis (1990), which contends that input can only be processed in the long term memory once the learner is aware of the input, and learning, within this construct, cannot occur without noticing. The cloze activities in particular are intended to direct the students’ attention towards the forms in questions and enhance the input, while hopefully increasing the chances that the students will notice the forms and therefore convert their input into intake.

References
Hanson-Smith, E. (2003). A brief history of CALL theory. The CATESOL Journal 15, 21-30.

50 Cosas: video for TIFLE class

Here's the video that Delano and I have made for our Mini-Project 3. The justification/explanation will shortly follow in a new post. Enjoy (and leave comments if you so desire!!).

The (lack of) connections between Pedagogy and VR

"...there are some more interesting lessons to be learned from Second Life...than the obvious one: that it’s much easier to send out a press release about your trendy online marketing strategy than to come up with a strategy that really works."
- excerpt from the article "Marketers twittering, but not about Second Life", published in the New York Times on July 16, 2007

Substitute all of the marketing terms above for educational terms, and you'll easily understand the basic gist of my blog post this week. As you all know, for our hands-on in class we visited Second Life and milled around in there for a while. It was a very interesting experiment for all of us (I believe), and it completely confirmed all of my previous opinions about the usefulness of Second Life in the FL classroom. Dr. Lord made a comment at the beginning of the class about how the Sims had started out as a positive virtual reality world but then it quickly degenerated into a seedy world filled with drug dealers and prostitutes. We all chuckled at that comment, but then before our 30 minute session was over, we were collectively assaulting random members and passing mega-joints. Of course, we weren't actually trying to do anything valuable, but it just goes to show you...

The experiment in class was fun and we all laughed a lot, but I'm not quite sure how applicable it could be to a foreign language classroom, and to the learning experience. Some of the positive things about Second Life are that it allows more advanced body clues than simple text chat (via gestures) and it also gives you some sort of visual image to respond to, albeit completely invented by the owner of the avatar. Another positive thing is that it could potentially give the students access to native speakers of the target language...although this point can also be rendered negative, in the sense that the restriction on scope of the topic, and how germane it is to foreign langauge education, is severely limited. Also extremely relevant to mention is the fact that the target audience for Second Life is somewhere in their 40s, and this clearly does not match up with the general ages of our students.

If you read the NY Times article I linked to above (which is very interesting), you will see that we are not alone in trying to find the link between these technological tools and our field. It appears that many people, in fields ranging from education to marketing, are struggling to find out what is making this tool so popular (apparently), and how we can manipulate it to serve us in our professional endeavors. That being said, I think it should most definitely be noted that these tools (Second Life especially) are inherently meant for entertainment and leisure, which may be exactly the reason that we are finding it difficult to establish a link between the two worlds. I think this statement can be generalized to include many other tech tools that we've mentioned: cell phones, PDAs, Twitter, podcasts, etc.

As academics, we seem to have this ritualistic problem of trying to extend our investigative rigour into every area of not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone else as well, and I think that this is one of the things that compels us to try and usurp all of the world's resources into our particular field of research. I don't necessarily think this is appropriate. Although Second Life does have particularly interesting implications, I think we are better off dedicating our time to investigating what we can do to better the more permanent aspects of FL Pedagogy. To be completely honest, I have sincere doubts about the real use of virtual reality tools, although I will concede that it may be simply that we are getting ahead of ourselves with research...in other words, the real 'advent' of Second Life may still be yet to come.

Taking all of these ideas into consideration, I think it is in our best interest that we not spend our time and efforts in this FIRST life on trying to discover the usefulness of Second Life, but rather on attempting to better ourselves and those in our field as educators.