EVO08

The session is now drawing a close, and we hope that you have found it profitable and enriching with lots of food for thought.

Before we say good-bye here, though, we’d like to pass on this invitation:

There is an interactive closing gathering at Worldbridges with Jeff
Lebow on Sunday, Feb 24 at 17:00 GMT. We will hear all the "stories"
from each of the 13 sessions from moderators and participants:

-)

You will need to use Skype and also have a microphone/speaker set up
because it is an audio conference.

We have now entered our last week of this year’s EVO session and although we know many of you are still going through the material and exploring the different tools, we would like to ask you to give us a bit of feedback on this session. Please take a couple minutes to fill out the survey at this link:

EVO 2008 survey

We would also appreciate any feedback you have on the different fora and would like to let you know that if you are interested in further contributions to dekita or smielt, we will gladly welcome you to continue this journey with us. Just let us know.

The SMiELT team would like to take the opportunity here to thank you all for contributing to this session and we hope you have found it a learning experience.

The SMiELT team

Week 4 started slowly on Ash Wednesday, allowing for Carnival time and jet lag recovery for some :-). We engaged in intensive work in the past three weeks, opening accounts, getting acquainted with / connecting to other participants through these different tools/environments, reflecting and sharing with each other our doubts, questions and expertise. Congratulations on the hard work and the great posts and reflections on the blogs.

We are not in a hurry. We all need some time to digest all this food for thought. On the other hand, we must transform all the energy generated into concentrated action. This is why we have suggested getting together in groups according to your tool preferences, so as to discuss, explore them in more depth and hopefully envisage a repository of good practice and some learning sequences incorporating one or several of them for use in the language classroom. There is a lot of talent and experience gathered here, so we expect some very fruiful exchanges and knowledge sharing. We will be using the different fora for preliminary reflection and discussions and the SMiELT "hysterically hierarchical" Wiki for tips, links and collaborative content building.

If you feel like making an informal synchronous presentation of your own experience with a certain tool or practice demonstration, we could envisage meetings on Wiziq, Ustream or a tool of your preference in the next two weeks. Let us know if you are interested in the comment area of this post, giving us date/time GMT/topic and the conference platform you would like to use so we can organize it together.

In yesterday’s presentation ," Building Open Content on Wikis", Wayne Macintosh recapitulated some of the main points of the Commonwealth of Learning vision for using Wikieducator to produce open learning content. He also gave examples of a number of related projects and partnerships which strive to build open /reusable content to make it available to those who do not have access to it. He invited participants to join one of the monthly wiki training courses offered by COL and said they are not restricted to Commonwealth members only. In order to participate, attendees commit to developing lessons on a topic of their choice, using the WikiEducator development platform. Here are some of the FAQ and the tutorials for autonomous learning. He demonstrated interest in a project for ESL teachers and although the working language is English, he mentioned nothing prevents participants from creating resources in their own native languages.

So, let’s join the different fora and start brainstorming and sharing how we can use these tools in dynamic, open and participatory ways. Looking forward to it!

This week we are pleased to announce an online synchronous meeting with Wayne Macintosh, who has graciously ceded some of his very busy time to join us for an open conversation on wikis, WikiEducator and open content projects. Wayne has also suggested, depending on the interest of participants, that COL (Commonwealth of Learning) could run 10 working days of online training (about 20 minutes per day required) on basic wiki editing skills.

The meeting will take place on Wednesday 6th at 21 GMT. We will be using the Elluminate platform generously set up by Leigh Blackall from the Otago Polytechnic University in New Zealand. Leigh, whom I met f2f during the Future of Learning in a Networked World event in 2006, has been heavily involved in open content projects both with WikiEducator, Wikiversity, Wikibooks and more recently with OER Handbook.

Please check details in the Primer as to pre-activities/readings and how to join. Write down any questions or concerns you may have so as to have them answered during the meeting.

While I was checking the survey you were asked to fill in to join SMiELT, I thought the information would be helpful to better perceive our collective background. There are presently 60 participants enrolled, EVO moderators excluded. I have played with Create a Graph to illustrate participants’ linguistic and teaching environment. Note that I have not added the EVO moderators nor all participants on the list (just those who answered this specific question in the survey) Besides, as many participants work in two or three different places at the same time , the numbers in the pie chart and the bar chart do not coincide.

You will clearly notice that we have a multi-lingual and multi-cultural community here, who usually operates in two or more languages, one of which is English. Monolingual native speakers of English seem to be a minority.

This reminds me of a teleconference with David Graddol I followed in 2006. David Graddol is a British applied linguist, writer, broadcaster, researcher and consultant on issues relating to global English who was comissioned by the British Council to write two reports In the Future of English (pdf file) written in 1997, Graddol shows the possible long-term impact on English language of developments in communications technology, growing economic globalisation and major demographic shifts at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. In English Next (pdf file), he analyses demographic and economic trends in the Twenty First-Century which affect Global English and language policies worldwide and will influence its future and suggests global English may mean the end of English as a foreign language. (taken from British Council Site).

During the event in 2006, Graddol predicted that in 10 years time the world’s leading economies would be (in order) China, US, Russia, India & then Brazil and that English would continue to be challenged by Spanish in Brazil for example, (‘a gentle threat’) but would remain very widely used. He mentioned EFL & ESL "are two sides of the same coin and this coin no longer has any currency" and that English will probably be seen as something as a basic skill instead of subject on its own, with other subject matters being taught through English medium. This does transform our role as teachers of language, doesn’t it? Listen to this audio snippet (Real Player). Food for thought and discussion.

Participants’ Native Languages

Number of Languages Spoken

Teaching Contexts