#innoconf21 continued

This post is a continuation of the keynote I prepared for #innoconf21 to acknowledge the many details I would have liked to say but didn't have time to include! 

I used Vevox to garner information from participants during my presentation so I will use the data submitted anonymously in response to my questions to make sure that the participant voices are heard. This is an extension of the approach I took to my keynote which was to open the process so that the recording showed the interaction which would often be left "behind the scenes". 

As you can see in the first image above, the participants had a range of experience of using technology for teaching with over 50% saying they had little or no experience of teaching using online tools prior to the pandemic. Immediately this impacted on my keynote. Seeing this I was immediately very aware of how tired these people must be. Rethinking your usual teaching style and reframing it through computer mediation takes time, to do it whilst juggling a global pandemic is exhausting. As Laura Czerniewicz says in her blogpost :

"the classroom has been made strange"

Despite the exhaustion, they were engaging in an online conference, eager to find out more about mastering the skills necessary. The response to the next question showed lots of experimentation has been happening. 

I see here a mixture of institutional tools such as the VLE Blackboard/Moodle and relatively new internet Zoom and Padlet. Also some references to hardware such as ipads, phone and a router, things that may not have featured in the vocabulary of teaching tools for some until recently. After lockdown many had to get familiar with these pretty quickly. In such a situation, when a technologist tells you to follow a few steps and use this "solution" it is easy to be left with the impression that there is magic in the technology that solves your problem. It was this very mindset that was questioned on the arrival of CD-ROMs years ago, showing the dangers of succumbing to the WOW factor.  I was eager not to further feed this myth of "solutionism" which remains rife in this space. 

I believe that the current pace of change in technology has outpaced the capacity of practitioners, especially if they are isolated and not part of of a helpful Community of Practice. That thought was illustrated when I asked about professional support networks:

Unsurprisingly given the emergency situation we see informal support coming from friends, colleagues and even partners. Social media looks like it has provided a connection to colleagues now disconnected physically. However the immediate emergency has passed so how are we best to proceed in a world which may yet undergo more changes? I would propose that joining an appropriate expert network would be a good first step. Let's get good quality information to ensure that we build on the initial "magic" with greater understanding of what is actually going on in the background. As I tweeted later:

If we are going to bust myths about #edtech we have to see behind the magic curtain. Ask better questions of your tech support and students- what happens to the student data? How much did this platform cost? who cannot access? #innoconf21

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) September 17, 2021

If we are to carve out something using technological tools that carries our values and priorities we have to be more confident that we understand what we are doing. There is a risk that otherwise our work will be carved up. 

Such great work is already happening in languages, driven by practitioners who love to learn and who are willing to collaborate in order to create great learner experiences. I shared examples on our padlet board of produsage (using extracts from media to create exciting learning opportunities) and virtual exchange (international collaborations between practitioners and students). Wider adoption of innovative assessment techniques such as blogging, wikipedia editing and eportfolio use would also be welcomed as they provide meaningful ways of acquiring skills which will shift the balance from students as consumers to students as producers of knowledge. See links document. 

Connecting with folk already doing these things, according to what you think you can change this year will be a useful shortcut to build upon their expertise. My experience of these folk is that they welcome those who take an interest in their work. They are generally open to human centred approaches, we all need to be if we are to sustain our influence and our role in the future of language teaching. It really is in our hands. We need to bear in mind that great carving takes time, Google tells me that even experienced sculptors can take up to 80 hours to make a relatively simple piece. So identify your priorities for the new term, get informed and connected and then make your own masterpiece. 

Recording of my keynote. 

 

#InnoConf21 keynote. Carving a better future from dark matter.

 

Who would like one? Will not be able to send them until mid-Sept. https://t.co/Slwt4Y922c pic.twitter.com/PYJZtg3gml

— Dr. Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) August 25, 2018

 

I'm very excited (and a little nervous) about my next challenge. I will be opening tomorrow's #innoconf21 which is hosted by Reading University with a keynote which will address the use of educational technologies (edtech) in language teaching. I am very grateful to the organisers for giving me this opportunity to curate resources, reflect and present my insights into the work of language teaching and I hope that by the final plenary we will all have a clearer vision for how the next 5-10 years of language teaching could look. 

Here is the abstract for my keynote:

Carving a better future from dark matter. 

A dramatic turn of events beset our lives in 2020, a global pandemic. Everyone had to face a new and daunting reality that touched every aspect of our lives, both personal and professional. Our working lives faced huge disruption and, in order to continue to function at all, we all became more reliant on technical “solutions” to connect us to each other. For some this was a continuation or extension of familiar territory, for others this was a new endeavour. For all it brought huge challenges, long days and complicated negotiations with students and colleagues. The “pivot online” revealed many areas of university teaching which were unresolved, from “delivery” to assessment. Intensive innovation was the order of the day and such rapid change is not without pain. As we face an emerging reality in which ongoing disruption is likely, how can we be better prepared for a more positive future in which our processes and pedagogies support learners and staff alike? 

 

In this keynote, I will not shy away from the very real challenges we face.  I will however offer hope for a more sustainable future for language educators through collaboration beyond our usual hierarchies and borders. 

Slides:

In my preparation I have drawn on the work of many people, curating a padlet wall of resources which includes links to additional sources for those who want to dig deeper. I will be inviting participants to join the conversation in the zoom chat and also respond to some shared questions through the vevox poll. My slides will be shared online tomorrow morning, look out for the #innoconf21 tag.

The pandemic has of course been hard for everyone. Many are now gearing up for further challenges in coming academic year. As I stand on the sidelines now I am hoping to use this platform to inspire and support my colleagues.

In keeping with our focus on shaping the future for modern languages I would like to encourage all participants to arm themselves with the tools to carve out their future, both individually and collectively so we can sustain our important role in connecting the populations of the world for the huge challenges hurtling towards us. Use the force!

 

AULC conference 2021 #AULC2021: What can open badges do for you?

 

The slides shared above were part of a presentation for ALT NE (the North East regional group of Association for Learning Technology). I add them to this post as they provide some useful resources for those who wish to know more about open badges. A recording of the presentation done by Deb Baff and myself is also available on my You Tube channel. 

For the AULC conference Mirjam and I will share how we used open badges in a language learning context. Knowing AULC as I do, I am sure there will be those who would like to try out the technology and the point of this post is to support you in doing just that. Go for it!

Collect a badge. 

We have all managed against all the odds to do all we can to protect each other from a global pandemic. Now you can get recognition for playing your part in making the world a safer place.  

In the slides above, at slide number 12 you can scan a QR code on your phone and pick up a Socially Distanced badge. Or you can simply go here to claim it.

You can display your badge using a free Open Badge Passport account. Just make sure that you have your email address/es in your profile and then follow these instructions to share on your website, social media accounts or make a page for curating your badges. There's more on this You Tube tutorial made for the Open Centre for Languages and Cultures. 

Design a badge.

If you are thinking of creating badges for issue to your students there are many things to consider. These are summarised in an article I've written on Innovative Pedagogy published this month.  

Of course you can do your thinking using traditional technologies such as paper and pens but I couldn't resist sharing a badge planning tool with you thanks to Bryan Mathers and his Fabulous Remixer Machine. The Badge Bloom was useful when communicating our badge ecosystem for Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange. You can see our badge bloom here.

I have set up a private gallery where you can share your badge ideas with each other and get inspired. The most useful part of engaging with badges is the conversations we have together about what we value in our teaching and learning. To create your own remix just click on the example given and change the text and colours to your heart's delight. Save your creation as a new remix on the gallery. You can comment on those of others and share your ideas on social media. 

Let's embrace the affordances of the internet as creators and not merely consumers.  

Collaborating openly when the doors are closed.

I'm revisiting this post made in 2017 during an open course called #BYOD4L which took place in Google + (remember that??) as a result of a suggestion that arose from a twitter musing:

 

lots of reminders of #byod4l in various timelines today - how times change @alexgspiers @neilwithnell @chrissinerantzi @suebecks @debbaff and so many others

— Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) January 16, 2021

Sheila's tweet quickly coalesced into a blog post and brought a group of us back together again to plan a proposal to #OER21. 

Since I wrote the Collaboration post in 2017 many things have happened. 

The Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange initiative lasted 3 years and has had a huge impact as you can see in the reports hosted here.  UNICollaboration.org has been the lead partner on HEI work, delivering recognition through an open badge system based on a collaboratively produced competency framework and providing research into the impact of virtual exchange. This research has been further enhanced by the work of the EVOLVE project  which has shared outputs openly under Creative Commons licences to help HEIs deliver training and support for practitioners and internationalisation officers. So a good deal of concrete support has been available free of charge thanks to the European Commission over the past 3 years or so. 

More recently I retired from my role at Warwick but I am very happy to report that the Clavier virtual exchange continues thanks to the depth and personal engagement of our collaborators. Clavier is now in its 10th year and continues to work as a large scale opportunity for both staff and students to learn together. We celebrated with a badge of course!

The UK withdrew from Erasmus, a decision which shocked many around the world. A decision which has been called out by UK language communities.

The voices of the language community speaking out about the decision to take the UK out of Erasmus Plus:

#erasmust 

So many doors can close at many levels: personal, institutional, political, financial.  How does international collaboration continue when doors close? 

Here is what I have learned over the years. 

• Collaboration can overcome barriers if the purpose of the collaboration is shared and valued by those working together. Clavier has outlived loss of budget, loss of senior management support, even time constraints because we support each other. 
• Working openly helps strengthen collaboration. Choosing tools which are not dependant upon institutional finance and methods which make sharing activity safe but open leads to many unexpected additional opportunities. 
• You can learn lots if you are open to learning from others (including your students). Treading the trickier path described above meant getting a deeper grasp of the technologies we used, sharing critical digital wisdom, listening to all participants and being willing to try new ideas. 
• Celebrate your victories and hug your communities (virtually of course). Virtual Exchange is a hybrid, tougher than the "pure bred" systems which favour either all face to face or all online learning. These strengths have been of great comfort to virtual exchange practitioners during the current pandemic. 

Personally, the Clavier, UNICollaborate and EVOLVE communities have been hugely helpful in advancing my work in virtual exchange but these collaborations go much deeper so I need to acknowledge here the support, inspiration and collaboration gained from participation in these many open online communities of practice:

Open Ed SIG; ALT; Eurocall; #LTHEchat; #BYOD4L; Creative Commons; #femedtech; Open Recognition Alliance; Mahara; Global Education Conference; 

these networks have all been part of my professional and personal development and more importantly perhaps individuals within them have been the key to sustaining my progress whatever happens. Impossible to acknowledge all the individuals but worth saying a huge thank you to all who have worked with me in any way. Some of you have moved on to other careers and opened new doors. 

Collaboration and working collectively touches so many lives and brings so many possibilities that doors are no longer relevant. We've all gone open plan!

Knowledge creation - trouble at mill

As scholars and academics we are knowledge creators often working at the edge of understanding. We have a mission to share and report back on what we find, especially when it can help others but even when we don't really know or understand the significance of what we report. That becomes a shared task, we work together as a community to extend understanding. In my personal case, as a teacher I have spent over 30 years looking for the best ways to engage my learners in intercultural and linguistic understanding, looking to build their curiosity and supporting their lifelong interest in language learning. As a researcher and open educational practitioner I report back to share what I find and others chime in. 

It is therefore natural to me that I would turn my hand to editing Wikipedia as a way of sharing knowledge. I am a newbie but a long time supporter of the project. I have been researching in an area variously described as "telecollaboration" or "Online Intercultural Exchange" or "virtual exchange"  as a teaching practice. It offers much to support my aims as a practitioner. I have published in this area and when I used Wikipedia to search for a reference to it, lo there was nothing. There is a page on telecollaboration which was dominated until 2013 by references to the tools and technical functionality:

(on left wikipedia entry from 2009, cf current page)
now much improved with good references to the academic work in this area, a page on web conferencing which again focuses on the tools and their history. I could find nothing on the educational practice of virtually connecting people from other cultures to facilitate discussion and build those all important soft skills and/or language skills. 

However, my editing knowledge at the time was very limited. Inspired however by an Open Education SIG webinar by Martin Poulter I decided that the best way to learn was through experience (a maxim I hold dear in my teaching). I started an account, drafted in a sandbox and then took myself off to a wikipedia meet up in Oxford where I met some really helpful folk who told me where I was going wrong. I learned much in the few hours I spent in an Oxford pub that day thanks to these guys:

In summer 2018 the page on Virtual Exchange was approved and since then others have continued to edit and add to it. I felt proud to be able to contribute to this project. I went on to set up a Wikipedia editing workshop at the EuroCALL conference in Finland with help from a Finnish editor and amongst our participants was the fabulous Parisa Mehran an Iranian language educator living and working in Japan. She shared my enthusiasm but unfortunately her first post was blocked as it didn't comply with the editor guidelines. This was a newbie error and I was quick to try to get help to get her back on the right track. Help did indeed come from colleagues in Wikimedia UK and I believe she now has a better understanding of a process which quite rightly observes quality controls. 

However, it seems my objection to Parisa's blocking has made me a target of some unwarranted attention on my talk page accusing me of promotional editing. I have read the Conflict of Interest guidelines again and again and I cannot see any reason why I could be accused of flaunting them. I guess you could say that as a teacher I promote language learning (so sue me) but as I have a son with a language disorder I am pretty realistic about the benefits of languages to those who have more basic communication needs. In reading this page I would say that the editor who accuses me is engaging in harassment. I find the tone of his comments offensive and patronising. I have left them on my page "for the record" but this post is also recording my side of his story.

The strength of the Wikimedia project lies in the community sharing of information. That community must be tolerant, diverse and supportive. I am privileged to know many in the community who advocate for Wikipedia, I will always remain one of them despite such experiences because I recognise that it takes time to build an inclusive, supportive community. I will not be silenced or marginalised due to my gender and neither should others. 

After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

New Year, new adventures.

OK, ACADEMICS, IT IS 2018. REPLY ALL AND REPLY DO TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.

— thelitcritguy (@TheLitCritGuy) January 12, 2018

I spent hours on Friday and Saturday this week in Groningen - one of my favourite places. Of course, I was teaching in Warwick too so my attendance at the EVOLVE kickoff meeting was virtual but no less real.

Here you can see my colleagues: Elke, Gosia, Sake, Mirjam, Fran, Sarah, Tim, Shanon, Steve and many more. All experts in their fields, a dream team. I feel honoured to work with them. We share a commitment to a plan - to scale up virtual exchange in order to increase international understanding in a world where barriers to empathy are rife, where "America first" (insert nation of choice) has become a slogan which justifies hate speech and discrimination. 

Of course none of us in the room (whether in real life or virtually) think this will be easy. We are all experienced in the trials and tribulations of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). We are nonetheless up for the challenges. This new project reaches across disciplines, it brings expertise in conflict resolution and social justice together with linguists, learning technologists, researchers and practitioners. We recognise that together we can have a greater impact. We are all heartened by the knowledge that scaling up virtual exchange is seen by the European Commission as a feasible model to support intercultural understanding and to create more cohesive societies. 

We will each be recruiting in our institutions, offering free online training and accredited participation in virtual exchanges, not just in language learning contexts but as an integral part of university curricula in order to show that academia realises the importance of global dialogue above and beyond local interests. Participation supports the achievement of SDG4  , it upholds the rights of all (including those who cannot participate in physical exchanges due to cost or personal circumstances) to engage in sustained, transformational learning experiences. To use today's tools to make the future a better place.

It's good to try to make a difference, especially when everything around you in bleak. I heard that when you are feeling at your lowest, it helps to give to someone in need. It makes the world a better place. 

#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. 

Communication channels

With new technological developments comes a time of adjustment and it was ever thus!

Turns out smartphone addiction isn't new. Samuel Pepys (1665) was unable to stop checking his timepiece 100x nonstop pic.twitter.com/4D8wCreoUx

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) July 20, 2016

Over the holiday period I took a few days away from my laptop but still checked my phone. Getting online is how I interact with colleagues, friends and family. It is how I find out what I need to know (movie times, latest news). Even as I write this sitting in a very cold and noisy home surrounded by 2 heating engineers (boiler broke down just before Christmas and a new one is currently being fitted) I am communicating with my sons (stranded in their bedrooms as the floorboards and carpet are all lifted outside their doors) to check on them. I thought I would try to keep my fingers warm by typing a blog entry which has been in draft for a while. 

New communication technologies are a huge social challenge when they come along. Inevitably they are "sold" to us as the answer to every problem posed by distance, an efficiency we require to cope in the modern world, the industry takes care of that. Up to us then to try them out and express how much more complex human communication is than the software developers would have us believe. 

Humans like to choose their methods of communication differently, what works for some will offend others. Texting (SMS) grew rapidly in popularity and was welcomed by some as a means to encourage written communication between a generation who resisted reading books. However, it was not long before people were being unceremoniously dumped or fired by text message.

Email has become the default for formal correspondence in many workplaces, invoices, quotations and receipts can be emailed whilst "snail mail" has been reduced, business postage bills must have dropped dramatically but this shift has also brought new challenges - we have all had to learn how to manage these in order to stay safe and keep up with work demands. However, those who love email rarely seem to appreciate why others may find it intrusive and unhelpful. 

My hypothesis is email is not fit for work with multiple correspondents. Like all strong relationships it works better between fewer folks.

— Ernesto Priego (@ernestopriego) December 21, 2016

And now we are in the era of synchronous online interactions for work or play. Video conferencing for work has brought some interesting new takes on the meeting, beautifully illustrated in this video . The social norms we have long established over time, the reliance on body language and eye contact to help mediate our interactions, these forms of human feedback are replaced by a new need to understand the workings of our connection, hardware operation and indeed digital audio feedback!  Those who master these challenges, those with "communicative advantage" - especially between global connections - will undoubtedly have an advantage over others if they put their combination of technical and interpersonal skills to good use. All too often we see communicative advantage bring the wrong sorts of changes as we did in London thanks to the realisation of a particular messaging system but we must not fear or blame the tool, the fault lies with those who refuse to acknowledge and engage with the new channels, we only have ourselves to blame. If we do not inhabit physical spaces and leave them to be overrun by those who would do wrong we are complicit in creating ghettos and no-go areas, leaving mistrust and lawless behaviour to flourish. 

In the world of synchronous connection, there is great work already underway to restore the online spaces afforded by virtual connection tools to enable more open interaction and normalisation of such channels. I must mention at this point the work of Maha Bali and others, selflessly supporting intercultural discussions, helping to counter the inequity which blights us. Never has this research and exploration been more important for our world. It needs to inform and educate our young people to use such tools and communication channels appropriately for the good of us all.