CMC

For me the main benefit of CMC is that it allows a lesson, or a group, to continue outside the rigid confines of the lesson. 

One of the difficulties is that unless students are involved and interested in the content of the communication they will not continue: communication for its own sake is not enough. I think it is relevant that all the email / discussion possibilities in Blackboard on our course have rarely been used. I did send one email to everyone but didn't receive any replies so I haven't bothered since. In a classroom the students are in front of you - cannot easily leave - and can be instructed to "communicate." If students are going to give up their free time, voluntarily, the purpose must be useful and the process must be interesting.

There is a tendency for new devices and tasks to be popular for a short time before falling rapidly into disuse. It can often seem exciting to the teacher because the technology gives us the ability to do things in a different way and to create highly polished material. The students, after a short burst of enthusiasm, may be less impressed. I can understand this. 

Also, if I were a refugee in this country and needed to learn English to function here I think I would ask you to help me learn English, please - computer skills can wait, thank-you. On the other hand, many students have existing computer skills which can be used to aid their learning.

Areas which anecdotally seem to involve and motivate students are those which allow students to review material that may be useful to them over a period of time (eg essay plans / help for IELTS), and material which uses audio / video in a way that is impossible with a book. I know that Simon has experimented with both these areas.

I use very simple techniques to share audio files with my students so that they can do spelling tests / dictations at home, check their results, and then try again later. 

I believe that one way of looking at the internet and its possibilities is as a variation of a classroom, rather than as a variation of a coursebook. Some Universities (MIT) for example, make all their material freely available online - the equivalent of Manchester University allowing anyone to access the Blackboard system without paying a fee! This is clearly a fantastic resourse for students, but when I looked at the Spanish course each module had only approximately 4 hours of video. This is a small fraction of the amount of teacher talking time in a classroom, and is, I think, a legacy of the days when video was mainly distributed by CD.

Now there is virtually no limit to the amount of video that can be uploading and distance students could have the option of nearly as much "teacher time" as on-site students. The communication can be synchronous or not, but the feel of the communication can be live or near-live as it is called in broadcasting. I feel that this is a promising line of development, and certainly it is one that interests me a lot.

Sites like www.wiziq.com are making this easily available, with up to 500 students in a virtual real time lecture theatre. (I've joined the site but have never tried giving a class using the site - but I am going to!)

Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts. Unfortunately I won't be there tomorrow as I have to teach every morning this week - the old-fashioned way. Have a good lesson.

Paul

How to use a blog?

I don't believe it is possible to make an a priori decision about the uses of a blog for a particular group of students. Testing it in practice is likely to produce different results with different students. I say this from experience. I use an online class journal with one group of students: this is not technically a blog (and is in fact based around google documents) but it shares many salient features with a blog. About half the class really enjoy it and find it a useful way of extending their use of English outside the classroom, a quarter occasionally use it, and a quarter more or less don't bother - or require firm prompting. For me this is neither surprising nor disappointing. Next term I will continue with the experiment. I am trying to test different ways of giving feedback - either commenting only on the content, or including comments on their language. 

Synchronous communication

Hi everyone
I just read the transcripts of the conversations which Diane asked us to look at and it was interesting to see how much language was generated. I think it's noticeable how topics are broached and dropped quickly if the other person doesn't react - like, in the second one, the NS's comment about 'David Beckham and his wife and the other woman'. The NNS either didn't know about or wasn't interested in DB's life outside football :) so the conversation just flowed on without interruption really. I find that too when I'm on MSN with my friends and family - topics get raised and dropped much more subtly than in conversation when it would be quite rude to ignore someone's remark or question.
My other feeling was that I don't like reading through the transcripts really. I'm not sure why but I think it has something to do with the fact that conversations like that don't seem DESIGNED for reading and it feels embarrassing that your rapidly written fragments of conversation are then thrust in front of your nose to see how silly they sounded.... I'm happy to enter the language complete with typos and false starts if I think it's just going to be quickly read and then the other person will move straight on - I think if I knew there would be a transcript produced for later scrutiny it would inhibit me very much from entering into the spirit of the thing. Hope that makes sense.
Julia

Learning Resources for children

Hi everybody,

I do agree with Aga that the idea of CMC is really interesting and challenging, and I will for sure use it with my students when I come back to Indonesia in the future. I do believe that my students will love the idea of learning English mediated by computer. I have totally different students from Aga, my students have been very much familiar with the computer and internet, so e-mail, blogs, facebook, and chat room have been a part of their day to day life, and probably they use them more often than I do. So, it think it will be really exciting and challenging to try this with my students.

By the way, since last week, I have been thinking of what to post in this blog, and as I see what other people have posted, I am so amazed that many interesting things have been posted here and I get more in doubt about what to post here. After thinking for sometime, I remember that there is a website, connected to onestopenglish.com, containing free resources for children including songs, games and flashcard, some links to other sites with tales, stories, and also articles. I used to use this website a lot to find materials for Children for my husband's English School and some articles for my work.

the link is
http://www.the-bus-stop.net

I don't know how to make the hyperlink ;-) so I just write the address. Hopefully it will work.

Experiences CMC

Hello,

I must say that developing the electronic literacy is a lot more difficult than just developing the literacy. I think computers can be treated as speech and are subject to ‘critical period’ as well. Or at least to some extent. Those younger students, up to the age of 30, seem to pick up the computer skills rather quickly and naturally. The older students are very often afraid and do not experiment so freely any more. I only find the young students on the ‘forbidden’ sites ;-) or somewhere where they shouldn’t be.

Hi there

I've just tried to comment on Aga's post but it wouldn't let me leave a comment - it kept saying that anonymous comments weren't allowed even though I kept filling in all the information asked for! So I'm trying a new post instead rather than a comment.

Your point is really interesting - it's too easy to assume that everyone is familiar with computers. It's just not the case. I was surprised last year by how many of the extremely professional, highly qualified and experienced English teachers in my MA class at Salford had NO experience of computers at all. Having to write assignments on computers was so difficult for them as even using a mouse was a real problem. We can't afford to assume that everyone finds using computers easy! Your approach sounds fantastic - letting your students gain confidence and feel more comfortable with keyboard and mouse before you ask them to do anything too scary!

Experiences of CMC

Hi

I have decided to put something on ‘paper’ so it will not look like I am doing absolutely nothing ;-)

I must say that I find CMC extremely interesting and would implement it a lot more from now. With my students I have at present limited possibilities to use computers; not because I have no access to computers (we just got a new computer class) but because the students have mainly never used them. I teach refugees and asylum seekers from all over the world and computers are still for them a thing from the future. I start completely, and I mean completely, from scratch.

However, I have managed so far to give them a basic introduction, and allow them to play on the BBC web page to get confident with the mouse and keyboard. Soon we will set up email addresses for everybody and the play shall begin ;-)

Maybe we can even start wiking.

Writeboard

Hi all

This is a collaborative writing tool - another example of social software applications.

I set a text up here
http://123.writeboard.com/1c4e26d555cf2f47d/v/new

login educ7006
p/word manchester1

Check my text, correct anything, add or make changes to make it more readable or more advanced:-)
Then see how you can track these changes.

Any potentials here?

See also Nik Peachey's trial wiki space on Cinderella at http://cinderella-their-story.wetpaint.com/page/The+Cinderella+Story

I really like this creative writing idea that could easily be adapted for online collaborative writing activities. Nik invites you to join in an experiment too.

BW
Diane

Experiences of computer mediated communication in language learning

Those of you who have taken a look round have, I hope, got used to the features of a blog, an example of asynchronous communications.

As this has developed, it begins to feel very much like a VLE - as Julia says it's almost like setting up a web page with links to different resources though the centre of gravity here is the communications function.

Of course as with all CMCs and indeed all technologies, we need a reason to exploit the tool. Can we collect stories of your own experiences with CMC technologies? This might be as teachers or indeed as learners. Tell us what the purpose was; what role the tool played and any positive effects and challenges you think might be useful for others to think about. You might think back to how I narrated the research with the children using email to develop writing last week.

Remember recounting challenges is an important part of learning. Julia made some interesting comments about the public nature of this blog and I think we had similar comments when we did the group enquiry activity requiring reorting back on BBrd:-)

Can we also think ab out the nature of language production too? we did this when we thought about email. What expectations do we have in this tool? Might these define how we integrate it too?

Look forward to your thoughts:-)

Setting blog options when you post

Hi all

I've been fiddling with this and can't see how to change this feature permanently.

I noticed that when Julia posted, therewas no comments facility. I now see that when you open a new post, there is a Post Options link bottom left of the editing screen and you need to change that to Allow Reader Comments

I'm sure we must be able to set that as default but can't see where

anyone help?

BW
Diane