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Use Your Cognitive Surplus to Improve Foreign Language Education

By Carl Blyth

February 28, 2013 4 Comments

When I read the book Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, a writer and  media studies professor at NYU, I thought of the foreign language educator. Check out Shirky’s TEDTalk on the subject:

Clay Shirky’s TEDTalk: How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World

Shirky argues that modern life has resulted in unprecedented amounts of leisure time. And today, thanks to the Internet, people are choosing to use their free time to collaborate in new and exciting ways. Here’s an excerpt from the book cover:

For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what’s possible  when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.

His claim is that the Internet is turning consumers into producers. But is this true of language teachers?

Despite Shirky’s enthusiasm, teachers still view themselves as consumers of pedagogical products. And yet, teachers produce pedagogical content all the time: lesson plans, quizzes, worksheets, activities and so on. The problem is that teachers denigrate their materials as amateurish or unprofessional. Because of this pervasive attitude, they rarely share their local materials with other teachers.

Shirky argues that all forms of digital production–from LOLcats to Wikipedia–have an important role to play in Internet culture. So, here is the point: every educational product, no matter how humble, is the result of a creative impulse that has the potential to benefit others.

To participate in the Open Education Movement, you don’t need to be a professional textbook author. But you do need to realize that sharing your materials is a powerful act of intellectual generosity.

Your thoughts?

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Carl BlythCarl Blyth is Director of COERLL and Associate Professor of French, UT Austin.  His research includes CMC,  cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and pedagogical grammar.  He is project director of eComma, an open-source annotation application to facilitate more “social” forms of reading.

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To read more about sharing your educational creations, read Set Them Free: How to Share Your Materials by Georges Detiveaux. 

Also, March 11-15 is Open Education Week — raising awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. We’ll be participating and sharing the links with you.

Filed Under: Instructional Materials, Methods/Open educational practices (OEP), Open education philosophy, Teacher Development Tagged With: Cognitive Surplus, Language exchange, Language learning, OER, Online learning, Open education, Sharing resources, Ted talk

Remix TED Resources to Teach English Around the World

By Ana Beaven

February 5, 2013 4 Comments

A few days ago a friend of mine who also teaches in Italy asked me whether I could help her look for materials she could share with the foreign language teachers at the school. They wanted to remix the materials and turn them into Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) resources.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language to university students majoring in a variety of subjects, I find TED Talks extremely useful to provide authentic listening on a variety of topics ranging from technology, entertainment and design to economics, biology and the role of women in the world, to mention but a few. Now TED offers these other sites:

  • TEDyouth  Videos from the TEDyouth conferences could certainly be used with secondary school pupils.
  • TEDx  The advent of TEDx — independently organised TED-like events in the whole world — has also extended the languages of the talks beyond English. This is good news for teachers of other languages.
  • TED-Ed  A different but related source of materials that we looked at are the lessons included in the TED-Ed website. These are OER which are designed to teach a variety of subjects. Most are more suitable to secondary than tertiary education and, although they are not designed to teach English as a foreign language, they could easily be transformed into resources for CLIL). In any case, the exceptional opportunity provided within the website – “flipping” the lesson, in other words, adapting it to a different context – makes such adaptations to the foreign language classroom particularly easy to share. A key element in this is, of course, the Creative Commons Licence of the resources.

Here’s one TED-Ed lesson that my friend particularly liked: “How folding paper can get you to the Moon.”

Not only is this an intriguing math story, and a stimulating way to introduce the concept of exponential growth, but in terms of  language teaching, it offers authentic examples of  conditional sentences. The fact that the author, Adrian Paenza, is not a native English speaker makes this lesson particularly appropriate.

My friend and I welcome your help in recommending other open educational resources which are appropriate for CLIL, especially in languages other than English. Thanks!

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Ana1Ana Beaven is a teacher of English as a foreign language at CILTA, the University of Bologna language Centre. In 2012 she organised the Eurocall CMC & Teacher Education SIGs Annual Workshop on the subject of “Learning through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication.” 

Filed Under: Finding OER, Instructional Materials, Open education philosophy, Remixing OER Tagged With: CLIL resources, Language learning, OER, Online learning, Open education, Remix OER, TED, Ted talk

Making Collaboration Easier

By Carl Blyth

January 24, 2013 3 Comments

I first heard about “open source learning” in 2006 from a TED talk by Rich Baraniuk, a computer science professor from Rice University. Rich is also the founder of Connexions,  a global clearinghouse of open-source course materials. People in some 200 countries tap into its vast store of texts on everything from signal processing to music theory, adapting the content as they see fit.

Richard Baraniuk’s Ted Talk on open-source learning.

Rich is a charismatic speaker and his talk motivated me  to learn more about the potential of OER for foreign language education. So, I visited the Connexions website. And I downloaded several articles on Open Education.

One article by Rich (Challenges and opportunities for the open education movement: A Connexions case study) in particular captured my imagination because it described Open Education as a  grassroots movement among like-minded educators:

The Open Education (OE) movement is based on a set of intuitions shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that today’s textbook present. OE promises to fundamentally change the way authors, instructors, and students interact worldwide. (Baraniuk, 2007, p. 229)

Rich’s belief that collaboration should be easier really struck a chord with me. I truly enjoy collaborating with students and colleagues on pedagogical projects. In fact, I have been involved in several such projects throughout my career. But I am often dismayed by how our own professional practices and institutions are impediments to collaboration. I have also discovered that collaboration will not work if the conditions aren’t right for everyone involved. In other words, collaboration must be a mutually beneficial relationship.

As our mission statement proclaims, COERLL seeks to promote a culture of collaboration that lies at the heart of the Open Education movement.  In fact, we started this blog to identify potential collaborators, kindred spirits who will join with us to promote open educational products and practices. So, here are my questions: How can COERLL make it easier for foreign language teachers to collaborate on pedagogical materials? What are the impediments to collaboration and how might we overcome them … together?

Baraniuk, R. (2007). Challenges and opportunities for the open education movement: A Connexions case study. In T. Iiyoshi & M.S.V. Kumar (Eds.), Opening up education. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

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Carl Blyth is Director of COERLL and Associate Professor of French, UT Austin.

Filed Under: Instructional Materials, Open education philosophy Tagged With: Language learning, OER, Online learning, Open education, Ted talk

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