#BYOD4L: Thoughts on collaboration

Student created logo for the Clavier Project

As a language teacher, connecting internationally has always been at the heart of my work. My degree required a year in France (my second year was spent teaching English - mostly pop songs and popular culture) in Châteauroux, France in 1980. When I took up teaching I got involved in regular exchanges with our partner schools and accompanied the various associated trips such as the history department's visit to world war battlefields. 

In my teaching role in Higher Education I wanted to continue to give students opportunities to work on their language with real French speakers. Fortunately we have a very cosmopolitan campus and there were lots of opportunities thanks to a great student network. However, increasingly I was finding that the internet offered me lots of ways of keeping in touch with friends and trends in France and french speaking cultures. The skills I needed were relevant and I thought this provided a good way to cross formal and informal boundaries to support deeper language and intercultural understanding. I got involved in developing a virtual exchange in 2010 having met a colleague teaching in Clermond Ferrand by chance on a blog by Steve Wheeler. Explaining virtual exchange is not easy as many in HE are quite reluctant to take computer-mediated communication seriously. 

Over recent years, through my role as a learning technologist I have been able to bring my expertise in telecollaboration and computer-mediated communication to bear in a wide range of projects and collaborations. Most recently this has involved collaborating with colleague from the Open University to publish on the use of open badges in Online Intercultural Exchange (OIE) and working with colleagues from Australia (Monash) on papers to do with produsage and sustainability of teaching. I really enjoyed these collaborations, but collaborating can be very challenging. The language research community has been instrumental in producing research into the experiences of computer-mediated communication which provides great insights into success factors in this area. I am delighted that it has also now established a cross-disciplinary academic organisation to support all HE colleagues who wish to collaborate internationally called Unicollaboration. Please share the news with your telecollaborative colleagues as this will be a great way of sharing best practice and extending internationalisation in HE. 

Real writing

Why get your language students used to navigating web pages which are largely populated by native speakers of the language they are struggling to comprehend? Isn't the use of techncial language and the culturally specific content only going to confuse them?

Maybe. 

But don't forget, many will be very familiar with finding their way around a website, they will have the contextual understanding to work out which button does what. And they can and will help others. Encourage some exploration.

Plus de deux tiers des Français avouent qu'ils ne connaissent rien au vin http://t.co/IYoQb54bEd
— 20 Minutes (@20Minutes) September 2, 2014

You never know what they may discover and it is all happening in real time!

I have used the French jobs portal ANPE as the starting point for a very real work related vocabulary activity and for a deeper dive into the skills necessary for students wanting to prepare themselves for life in the real world. The short video clips such as this one may be linguistically challenging but they are well sign posted for key words and the similarities between French and UK jobs clear. This opened up their minds to considering placements abroad  and these students had the equivalent on GCSE level French. 

Collecting shopping vocabulary using a supermarket site makes a lovely homework task, you can rest assured that browsing in French will continue longer than the usual 5 minutes! Use the Pointless quiz game metaphore and see who can bring back the item that no-one else found. 

So don't assume that all language your learners come across has to be carefully pre-screened. Our brains are hard wired to work out language, we may only bother if the task is real and sufficiently relevant. 

Ayez confiance!

Open to change!

I have just returned home from #oer15. My first #oer conference but a place where I met and consolidated friendships with many I have known online as like minds for many years. We were focusing on the issue of mainstreaming Open. Let me explain:

Open educational practitoners believe that education is not something you "do to" others, it is participation in a learning community, we are all learners. As such, we share and learn from each other. Few teachers have an issue with this ideal, (although some are less keen perhaps to learn from their students). Most practioners also feel that getting to grips with Creative Commons licences and searching banks of content is too big a task to contemplate. I think it is also too important to ignore. Watch David Wiley's Ted talk if you are unconvinced.

Basically: 

• Learning is vital if we are to survive as a species, the challenges that face us are bigger than we can imagine
• Learning is getting more exclusive, access is limited to a relatively small proportion of advantaged people
• The costs of learning are beyond the means of the many, this is unfair.

Open educational resources are (mainly) digital objects made available for retention, re-use, revision, re-mixing and redistribution. This is facilitated by a set of Creative Commons licences, the most "open" one being CC BY. This indicates a resource that is available for all of the above but the originator should be attributed. This offers a way of ensuring that work you produce (your worksheets for example) acknowledge your intellectual input. For me this is a way of helping to re-professionalise teaching, a "profession" that has largely been diminished, with teachers just the worker ants, a benign interface between the curriculum creators and exam authorities, under valued and bereft of influence.

So, along with my like minded colleagues, we agreed that we wish to support the journey to open practice, international open practice that opens locked minds, overcomes insularity and silos and empowers creativity and enagement. Great learners make great teachers..

Time however is an issue. There's never enough and we all prioritise accordingly. I proposed that we consider how #openbadges could be deployed in the context of the journey to becoming an Open Educational Practioner, recognition of investment in CPD (becoming a digital practitioner) which could become part of your professional credentials. Others also seemed to feel that this would help to go towards recognition of time invested. I hope this idea flies.

If you are a language teacher, please take a look at my contribution to the OpenContentToolkit here (thanks to @theokl) on images for language teaching. Becoming open is a process so you can take it at your own pace :)

Check out @WarwickLanguage ’s page on Language Teaching with images http://t.co/hilg3grnXl < toolkit join code 3KQ97DR #oer15 #ukedchat

— Theo Kuechel (@TheoKL) April 17, 2015

Speaking up!

The point at which I fell in love with the French language is a difficult one to pin down. Undoubtedly I was influenced by the trips my parents encouraged and the role of interpreter which they bestowed on me at just 12 years old. I was terrified of my French teacher but recently took my family to see her home town of Aix-les-Bains because I surely recognise her impact on my life. I went to Oxford Poly to study for a French degree, determined not to "do" literature but within a year I had negotiated more literary study and still have a passion for the works of Mauriac, Camus, Baudelaire, Voltaire and Prévert. (read, discussed and analysed in both my languages). I created a drama project during my PGCE around the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco. Working as an assistante during the 2nd year of my first degree was no doubt a turning point though - I began to understand that language learning is not just intellectually challenging, it is fundamentally transformative - it changes the way you understand others and yourself through interaction. I continue my language learning journey through interaction largely but not exclusively online using #cmc computer-mediated communication.

My community (language teachers/experts in a variety of guises and contexts) are struggling with the realisation that young people are increasingly not choosing to continue language study for single honours degrees, numbers on such courses have been in freefall. It is very upsetting for all of us to see that the qualification we so treasure is not featuring on more wish lists and this has been the subject of countless reports, discussions and soul searching. However, the very opposite trend has been seen in university-wide language study provision so clearly young people do still enjoy the thrill of interaction across cultures. Many of them have done so all their lives but have had little or no state recognition of their linguistic heritage. At a recent school event at my university I asked a group of 14 year olds why they thought languages were useful (expecting the usual list that pointed to employability). This insight came back immediately from a young Sikh - "you can tell someone something without the others knowing what you said". Out of the mouth of babes! Language encodes, linguists decode. That is a human skill, still unmatched by google translate, requiring sophistication, knowledge and skills way beyond those which can begin to be awakened at A level, that is just the beginning. In the UK we have to send a clear message from our community that the journey may be long but it is worthwhile. In schools we need to have the freedom to inspire, in H.E. we must be relevant and move with the times.  Most importantly our community must pull together, for the losses we will sustain otherwise are too terrifying to contemplate. Valuing language skills is valuing human diversity in all its richness, and respect for life gives hope in an era of instability and war.
This post was written to relate to UCML's support for A level Content Advisory Board's recommendations.