Multilitteratus Incognitus

It's been a week since the CIT conference where I presented on academic communities of practice and engaging students outside the classroom. I have to say that the experience was pretty enlightening. I do like getting in front of people and sharing what I know with the group, but this particular experience has encouraged me participate in future CIT conferences and in other conferences both at UMass Boston and elsewhere. Now all I have to do is to think of a topic. The interesting thing about the CIT conference is that presenters can choose to create a written account of their presentation and submit it for publication in a peer reviewed journal -sweeeeet! I've been wanting to do the whole research and publish thing after I graduate, but I've decided that since I already have the subject matter (some in my head, some in slides and some on note cards) I can sit down over the next few months, work on the different sections, edit and submit!

I came across this article a while back on TechDirt (quite a few comments on the techdirt take!) Now the idea here is that any material or intellectual property created by a district employee, with either indirect or direct support from the district, would belong to the district. This may sound like a good idea, but it is an inherently bad idea - and it's bad on so many levels. From a philosophical point of view, knowledge should be freely available. Our libraries are here to safeguard that. How one helps others gain knowledge should also be available free of charge. Great ideas come from collaboration, and being able to freely exchange materials with fellow professionals improves the creation and refinement of great products and methods. Second there is the whole issue of tax-payer dollars. The school, be it K-12 of Higher Education is getting money from the state and probably even the federal government. If the school is private it probably is a not-for-profit and (if I am n

Welcome back to the last part (for now) of the discussion on learning and theory inspired by a video blog that I saw recently (more on that in part 1). In the aforementioned video blog, the blogger (Steve Kaufman of "The Linguist on Language") said that Language learning depends on learner, not research. I suppose that when it comes down to it he is correct. Language learning (or any learning for that matter) does depend on the motivation of the learner. That motivation may vary. Some people like the challenge, others want to converse with long lost relatives, and other may want to seek employment opportunities abroad (or one of a myriad of other reasons). Research findings aren't geared toward the learner but rather toward the teacher. If you are one of those lucky teachers that has super-motivated learners in front of them you are very lucky! Your job is much easier! The fact of the matter is that many people take classes because they have to, not because they wa

Alright, so here is part 2 of my little examination of learning and the role of theory plays on learning and teaching. This was fueled by Steve Kaufmann's semi-recent video blog (see part 1 of this series for link). This part has to do with Research, Politics and the role of linguistics in language learning. First off the bat, we have a comment that research can project just about anything depending on the parameters of the study . Well, I am not really sure how to approach this other than to look at statistics as a parallel. An old professor of mine used to say that: there are three types of liars: Liars, Damned Liars and Statisticians. Of course this was a bit tongue-in-cheek as he was a math professor. The way you determine if a study has any bearing on what you do, or if it indeed is a credible study, is to look at the instrumentation, the methodology, the participants, the sociocultural settings and so on. No study is absolute because they can't test for everything.

I guess here's a small blogging arch that deals with linguistics. I was viewing Kaufman's semi-recent video blog on how theory muddles education and I was getting the vibe that he just doesn't think that we should be doing any research into how people learn languages, or if we do we should keep it to ourselves. That's just all a bunch of hogwash, because theory divorced from practice is useless, and practice devoid of theory (why we do what we do) is dangerous! (or at the very least bad pedagogy). I was going to write just one blog post as a response to this video blog, but as I was taking notes to myself on the things that I disagreed with, I saw that there were a lot! So, I've broken them up. One of the issues was that research on second language acquisition is taking place in English speaking countries (or maybe it's predominantly English speaking countries). OK, I would agree with this to some extent, there is a lot of research done in English but there

Every year (or at least at the end of a decade) people feel compelled to pronounce certain things obsolete - let's toss them by the way side and move on proclaim the pundits! This year is no different. Recently Inside Higher Ed had their own obsolete learning technologies list - which I obviously completely disagree with. Here's the bird's eye view: Scantron Sheets Overhead Projectors/Transparencies Classroom VHS/DVD Players Course Packs & Course Readers Photocopiers Microfiche Language and Computer Labs Paper Journals and Periodicals So here's why I disagree: Scantron sheets are still useful and relevant. Why? Well, if you're teaching a few classes with 60+ students in them (or even if you're not), you don't always have time to take your questions - which your probably formulated into word, copy and paste them into an LMS quiz module, select the correct answers and make an answer tree out of them. It is much, much, simpler to develop a good multipl

I think that Thursday might be my Instructional Design day and Monday will be Linguistics Monday - at least for now. It seems like I am devoting a lot of days on ID and not enough on linguistics ;-) Anyway, a while back there seems to be this big broo-ha-ha over the culture clash between MBAs and Learning Professionals (instructional designers). One post was at Gina's blog - there were many others but I did not really bookmark them since Gina's blog sparked this thought. One thing that I felt that's going on here is that there is a lack of clarity in speech (man linguistics is ingrained in everything!). Many instructional designers talk about learning and human performance professionals or specialists and they don't generally think twice about it, while in the same breath not really getting the Evil MBA speak of ROI (return on investment) and IOB (impact on business). What I find ironic is that it is the MBA that gave us jargon like "human performance professiona

The first post of the new year (that's actually academic), is a response to (or rather an addendum to) Steve Kaufmann's recent video blog entry . While I don't agree with Steve (as always) in everything he says, I did find some of what he said on the ball. For example he said that the brain always learns - I agree. However, I do believe that whether someone learns the language "naturally" (i.e. something like immersion - like babies learning their first language) or something more like a classroom, the processes are quite similar. It is true that kids learning their mother tongue don't have to pass quizzes in vocabulary or grammar in the traditional sense (i.e. sit down and take a pen and paper exam - that would be hilarious though) but they do have tests whether one wants to admit it or not. When a kid utters something like "DOG!" when the kid really means "cookie!", this impedes the kid's ability to communicate - in essence failing

2009 is out, 2010 is in! In the past couple of weeks I've been reading a lot of news relating to Educational Technology, Linguistics, Language Learning and Academia in general - but I was saving it for the new year :-) Until next week (when I start writing again) - Enjoy a traditional Greek New Year's Carol :-)