CivieBlog

This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is on: To-Learn Lists. The results this far have been really interesting to me.

It appears that most of us (as is the case with me) don't keep a formal / tracked to learn list. Rather its an informal, ever changing list. It is impossibly long and things naturally fall off the bottom.

However, the danger of not having a more formal list that is tied to goals means that likely they are not getting integrated into the to-do list and into daily lives.

Who has time for learning that is not tied directly to formal work activities and to-do items?

For me, I generally put to-learn items in my to-do based on specific projects or preparing presentations, writing, etc. In these cases, my To-Learn items are not distinguished from my To-Do items. I think this is the case for lots of knowledge workers.

If items are not specifically tied to work deliverables, then I find myself not having a formal to-learn list. Instead I make progress based on allocating time for blog reading, posting, commenting. This is time allocation based rather than to-do list based. This may be a mistake.

One thought I have here is to get involved in activities that somewhat force you to learn. Being involved in finding speakers for organizations, preparing presentations, etc. All of these put deadlines on learning activities that move them right into a To Do list.

Great line from Michael Hanley

I would categorize myself as a "learnivore" - I continually acquire new knowledge and information through my Web-, book-, podcast-, and presentation reading, blogging (reading and writing), academic study and research, and work-based learning-related tasks. These activities are drivers for the information I to take on board in my attempts to enhance my skills, abilities, and expertise.

I'm certainly a learnivore as well. Actually, I might better say I'm an Infovore. This definitely helps with keeping a learning list going.

In the past, I've had a few posts around how you can test your courses under an LMS:

• SCORM Test
• Test SCORM Courses with an LMS

One of the problems cited was the lack of available LMS test environments. Recently I've seen two possible approaches that seem quite interesting - although we've not yet tried them (so I would love to get feedback).

One is ClassRunner.com a Moodle installation that allows teachers to get up and going cheaply. You can use a free-trial and then test.

Probably the most interesting is: Open Source CMS - a site that has a whole bunch of open source tools installed so that you can play around with them. The site is reset periodically and has a count down timer. Anything you do will get lost after that timer. But still it's a great way to show people the basics of what an LMS does. And I believe you could then get your courses tested.

The eLearning software I saw was:

• ATutor
• Claroline
• Docebo suite
• Dokeos
• DrupalEd
• Interact
• Moodle
• SyndeoCMS

It also has a bunch of content management systems, a CRM (SugarCRM) and others ...

• Wikis:
• BoltWire
• DokuWiki
• MediaWiki
• PmWiki
• WikkaWiki
• Blogs:
• Dotclear
• Eggblog
• FlatPress
• Globber
• LifeType
• Loudblog
• Nucleus CMS
• Serendipity
• SimplePHPBlog
• Textpattern
• WikyBlog
• WordPress
• Zomplog

I hope someone will play around a bit and let me know how this works out for them.

Two of my startup development clients have recently discussed adding video conferencing to their web offering. Both startups use have two kinds of users involved who are going to want to do 1-to-1 communication through a variety of different communication approaches (text, phone, etc.) and now they want to explore providing video chat between the parties.

An equivalent example (drawing from my eHarmony days) would be providing video chat in a dating site. Since you don't know what users of the site have installed and you would prefer that there's not a lot of downloading required. In looking out there, it seems like there are some flash-based solutions like Sightspeed, ooVoo, SnapYap and Tokbox. Skype would seem to be out because of the fat client download. I even would think that someone having to do a download like WebEx does would be annoying enough that users wouldn't want it.

On the flip side, I would want the system to "call" the person to see if they are available to receive the video chat and/or show them as "not available" if they can't receive a video chat at that time.

So, how could I provide easy-to-use video chat to the users of a dating site?

I'm likely going to need an API to set up various "channels" that will allow on the fly chat sessions or to associate sessions with manually created channels.

Being start-ups and given that we don't know the usage levels, we'd like to keep things cheap.

So, some questions I'm hoping to figure out shortly:

1. Are there examples out there of sites who are already doing this for their users? I'm not asking specifically about dating, but rather having integrated video chat.
   
2. Am I missing video services that would work?
3. Do I need an API for integration or are there other ways this could work out?
4. Is there a good way to make this as nice a user experience as possible?
5. Finally, any thoughts around the viability of video chat for something like a professional networking site? Make sense or not? Are we too early still for the technology?
   

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

Earlier this week I posted a short article to my Quick Shout blog about a new site called Virsona that enables teachers and students to develop their own AI ( Artificial Intelligence) chat bots.

Since then I have been trying the site a bit more, developing tutorials and thinking about how we can use it with our EFL ESL students.

To get an idea of what a 'chat bot' is, got to this page and start asking Abraham Lincoln some questions: http://www.virsona.com/ecchat.aspx?cvid=212
The chat bot has beeen programmed with lots of information about Abrham Lincoln and each time you enter a question the bot searches it's log and tries to match key words from your question with its log information.

This all sounds very compicated, but the site actually makes it quite simple to create your own bot which can either be yourself, a fictional character or a historical or real person.

The students can add information to their chat bot in a number of ways:

• Write diary log entries
• Email in the information
• Add answers to random questions
• Type in questions and answers
• Ask the bot questions and then correct the answers.

Here are a couple of video tutorials showing how it is done:

• Teaching your chat bot
• Testing your chat bot

So how do we use this with our EFL ESL students?
All of these ways can be very useful for generating meaningful language practice.

The virtual you - Get students to recreate themselves as a chat bot. They can upload a photograph of themselves and generate random questions to answer. You could also get them to write diary entries for a week or two. Then at the end of term you could get the students to share their chat bots and see which one is the most convincing. this is a noce way of combining a range of personal information questions with a learningg diary. You could also create one for yourself which students could interegate or get the URLs of your students' bots so that you could find out more about them.

Your virtual celebrity - You could ask students to do research on a favourite celebrity or person from history and then use the information they find to create a chat bot of that person. A number of these are already under development, though Lincoln is the only one open for you to chat with at present.
Grammar bot - You could get your students to create their own grammar bot with infformation they have learnt about various grammar points.

Vocabulary bot - Likewise you could try to get students to create a vocabulary bot that has definitions for the new vocabulary they are learning.

Topic expert - You could ask groups of students to create topic experts based around various general knowledge areas then they couldd work in teams to challenge each others' bots in a test of knowledge.

Interview Lincoln - Get your students to interview Lincoln and see what they can find out about him. See if they can decide if it is a real person answering them.

What I like about this site

• It's free and obviously aimed at educationalists
• I'm fascinated by AI and how it can be applied to language learning and language production so..
• It's great that they have ma de it easy to create your own bot, with out having to know about the technology
• I like the selection of random questions it can get students to answers (a task in itself)
• Looks like it could develop into a novel way of sharing knowledge

What I'm not so sure about

• The site is obviously still under development andd a few things don't always work (I had a few problems trying to upload questions and answers in the 'Teach' section
• The site carries some advertising
• Not sure about the ethics of creating bots of real people (not sure if i would want someone else putting words in my bots' mouth)
• Bots aren't real people and sometimes they make stupid mistakes, but as long as our students are aware of this then we could maake it part of the challenge. It might well be worth telling your students about 'The Turing Test': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test a challenge designed in 1950 to try to trick people into thinking a machine was human.

Well for all the problems I still think this is a site that students can enjoy and which can encourage them to produce a lot of accurate language in text form (bots don't understand bad grammar or spelling).

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• AI and Chat Bots for EFL ESL
• Video conferencing for EFL
• A Virtual World for Facebook Users
• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

In the first part of this series aimed at sharing the sources of the information I blog about, I focused on sites which spread the word about new technology or websites. In this second part I'd like to spread the word about some of the more ELT and Educationally orientated blogs which have provided me with a wealth of information and professional development.

First of course has to be Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day……For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL
This site is a huge and constant source of information and new sites and resources. Larry also produces categorised lists of resources so it's well worth searching through his archives.
The blog is up dated a number of times each day, so to really get the best of it and to stay informed you should sign up to his RSS feed.
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/

Free Technology for Teachers
This is another great blog. It's aimed more at general education than at EL teachers, but a lot of the sites and activities it mentions could easily be used with EFL ESL students, especially if you are using a CLIL type of approach.
Again, the site is up dated at least everyday, so again this is a good one to subscribe to.
http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com


Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day
Again this isn't an ELT specific website, but is the source of quite a few interesting links to educational software and websites. A new item is added each day along with a short descriptive text (often taken from the site being recommended) so it's well worth subscribing to. Not all of the resources recommened are non commercial though, so be sure to check.
One of the best things about the blog though is that the resources are all added to a directory that now has thousands of useful tools to help with learning, so if you are ever thinking of buying some software, be sure to check the directory first as you may well be able to find something free there.
http://janeknight.typepad.com

Technology and Education Box of Tricks
This is a blog that I've only started tracking more recently. Again it is aimed at general education rather than being ELT specific, but there are lots of useful tools there and it's really well designed and well written with some good tips about how to use the resources in the classroom etc.
http://www.boxoftricks.net/

Instructify
This is again a more recent find for me, but one that has a real wealth of information. It's updated regularly and has a mix of content between links to educational sites and information on new web tools and software.
The content is well written, informative and goes into some depth, so well worth reading.
http://blogs.learnnc.org/instructify

The English Blog
Last but not least, is this blog which is written by Jeffrey Hill. This one is aimed at EFL ESL teachers and has links and comments about useful resources, videos and news and opinion from around the web.
This is one of the blogs which I've been subscribed to for the longest and it has a real wealth of information in the archives, so well worth a browse.
http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/

I hope you enjoy these blogs and find them as useful as I have. If you write a blog and it hasn't been mentioned here, well then look out for part 3 which you should see in a month or two.

If you want to get the best out of these blogs or any others then I recommend that you have some form of RSS feed reader or personalised homepage. If you don't have one you can download a step by step guide to creating a personlised homepage from my article: Creating a personal homepage

If you know of other blogs which are regularly updated with useful content for educators, then by all means post a comment at the end of this article.

Related links:

• Creating a personal homepage
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Quick Shout
  

Thanks and best wishes

Nik Peachey

Steve Wexler who runs eLearningGuild research has been producing some really interesting information recently. All of the data comes from surveys to the eLearningGuild membership (which is more than 30,000) and typically they have 2,000 - 3,000 respondents on surveys which is large enough to get pretty good indications.

He recently provided me some information about what learning delivery methods were being used and particularly if they were trending up or down. The way he did it was by assigning scores to responses that were - Often, Sometimes, Rarely, Never. So, if you see a 4.5 that means that people were between often and sometimes. A 2 is between Rarely and Sometimes. It's a bit complicated, but it effectively judges the trend - not necessarily the amount.

So here's the graph showing all of the trending information ...





Some things that jump out at me:

• Contrary to a lot of what is being said out there (The Death of the Classroom), classroom still dominates as a delivery method and is actually going up.
• Synchronous (virtual classroom, virtual meetings, etc.) and Asynchronous (self-paced, online courses/courseware) are both going up a little, but actually shows slower rate of growth than classroom.
• LMS - Learning Management Systems - are growing at one of the fastest rates of any of the established methods. I'm not surprised, but I'm sure there continues to be pain (Learning Management Systems (LMS) Gotchas, Tracking Without an LMS, LMS Dissatisfaction on the Rise,Do You WANT an LMS? Does a Learner WANT an LMS?, Leading with an LMS - Harmful to Your Health).
• My prediction about Games ... (Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008), I took a bit of heat, but looking at the trends - Games down! So are simulations and virtual labs. Any kind of training that requires significant upfront effort is going to come under increasing fire. Oh, here was my prediction ...
  

Prediction #8 => Serious Games - Seriously Sorry, Not for You

They will continue to get talked about A LOT. And people will continue to be interested and excited. Likely YOU will get to attend a session on them. But YOU won't get to build one, or buy one, or participate in one.

• While I'm claiming victory on my predictions, might as well point out that mobile learning also showed a big drop which lines up with another prediction from the beginning of the year (Prediction #5 => Mobile Learning - Continued Scattered Examples and Disappointment). I actually believe that mobile delivery will become more important over the next few years, but the form of it will be web access, not specialized mobile learning applications. That likely will make the numbers around a term like mobile learning a bit problematic. If someone can get to your online reference (stored on a wiki) through their smart phone's browser, is that mobile learning?
  
• Big winners: Communities of Practice, Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts. Warning that on Blogs and Podcasts, the numbers are so low that any adoption looks bigger than it really is. However, that's still impressive. And I would expect that Wikis will continue to grow - actually my guess is that this is the fastest growing item over the next couple of years.
• What was my biggest surprise - online mentoring / tutoring shows a drop. What? How can that be. There is so much more of these kinds of systems being created. There is so much more informal learning through these techniques. I'm glad I didn't predict those trends at the beginning of the year. I would have been wrong.

Corporate Training Methods

But what about in corporate training? What are the trends for methods in corporate learning? How do they possibly differ from overall trends shown above? Here's the graphs for corporate (non-Government, non-Education) training methods:





Surprisingly little difference between Corporate and Overall in terms of the training method trends. A few notes:

• Virtual Labs - which certainly are used a lot in distance IT training, show no drop off here as compared to a 4.8% drop overall.
  
• EPSS shows a small increase as compared to a drop overall.

Training Methods in Corporations 500+

Often the size of the corporation makes a differences, so what about when we only look at corporations above 500 employees?





Again, this is pretty close to overall, but a few differences:

• Blogs, Podcasts, Communities of Practice, and Wikis have jumped even more in larger corporations than in smaller corporations.
  

Training Methods in Education

How does this compare to Education?





Again pretty close. Some differences:

• Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) show greater increase in education - good luck with that. I wonder what could be behind undertaking things that have been so problematic in the past and seem to have lost out to emergent knowledge capture solutions.
• In-person tutoring/mentoring shows a drop in education while it shows an increase in overall and corporate. This is a surprise to me. I don't even have a guess why you would see a drop in education both for in-person and online tutoring and mentoring. That seems like a really bad trend.
• Look at mobile learning in education. 23.5% drop!
• Games, EPSS, Simuations also dropping fast in education.

I also noticed that education is showing more dropping and corporations are showing more increasing. Not sure what to make of that?

Training Methods in Government

How about with Government?





Some notes on Government training method trends:

• Online mentoring in Government shows a big increase. This is what I expected overall. I don't get this.
• Classroom instruction is trending up even faster in Government.
• Simulations are trending up in Government.
• Wikis are almost flat - weird - especially given some of the well known government case studies around use of Wikis.
• Synchronous eLearning is trending down? What?
  

Questions I have:

• Why is online tutoring / mentoring showing a drop overall? And why are both online and in-person tutoring / mentoring dropping in Education? And why is Government trending up in both and especially in online?
  
• Why is education showing more stuff trending down than corporate?
• Why aren't Wikis showing a bigger jump in Government?
• And what's the deal with synchronous eLearning dropping in Government?
  

Keywords: Conference Calls, In-person mentoring/tutoring, Online References, Online Assessments and Testing, KMS, Learning Content Management (LCMS), Knowledge Management, Portals, Print-based materials, Video Broadcasts, EPSS, e-mail, Chat rooms, Instant Messaging.

One of the things that I really like about Second Life is the rich visual imagery and the creativity that many of the builders there have put into designing their Islands. We can exploit this along with the Second Life snapshot tool to create stimulating projects for our students.

Here's a quick video showing you how to take a snapshot.



Here's another showing you how to access and use the snapshot controls so that you can get better camera angles.



So how do we use this with EFL ESL students?
We can use this in a number of ways to enhance writing activities.

Send a postcard activity - One of the options on the snapshot interface is to email the images we take to other people. When we do this we can add an email text telling them about the image or what we have found at that place etc. We can ask our students to imagine that this is a postcard to the class and to write about an imaginary holiday they are having.

Photo journalist - We can send our students on photojournalism assignments. These could be to report on events that they attend, or on islands or installations that we've asked them to investigate. The students can save the images to their hard drive and then either import them into a word processing document or create their own Second Life News blog about the events.



Photo stories - Students can work together using their avatars to create a sequence of images that tell a photo story. They can enhance the images by using a word processor to add dialogue bubbles to the images. This encourages them to collaborate both in class and while they are in Second Life.


Research Assignments - We can send each students to a different location in Second Life to do a research task. They can then send an email with an image and a report from that destination telling other students what is there and why they should visit it. In class the students can then read the reports and decide which place they want to visit.

Photo Fashion - You can ask students to work in pairs to dress up and take photographs of each other in different Second Life clothing. They can then use a word processor to import the images into a fashion column, describing the clothes etc. Again these could be published on a blog or printed up as a class project.

Working with students in Second Life needs care, so always be sure to set tasks and check your locations for suitability before sending them anywhere. If you are working with teens then be sure to use the Second Life Teen Grid.

To see more Second Life video tutorials go to my YouTube playlist

Related links:

• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Teaching English in Second Life
• Second Life Teacher Training Videos
• Looking at There.com
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• 3B Village 3D browser

The videos used in this posting were originally commissioned by The Consultants-E and are part of an introductory course for teachers they deliver on Edunation Island II and are used with their kind consent.

Best

Nik Peachey