Multilitteratus Incognitus

  A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is  going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it... Annnyyywhoooo🙄 The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's  Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning.  In his follow up post, Wiley is  open pondering/brainstorming about OELMs, Wiley discusses a separation of form from content, similar to how text on the web is separated from the formatting CSS layer . Wiley's original posts are intersting and do provide some points to ponder. I don't necessarily agree in whole with what  he proposes, but I can see a grain of something interesting there, and certainly worth pondering and discussing. Maybe I've gotten a bit more "get o...

I came across Sarah's post on blogging questions (which I think was something started on the Reclaim Discord, so I thought I'd jump in. I was a bonus opportunity to post this Super Simple Badge , which I also created a while back, but didn't have a place to put it that made sense ;-) I guess this is a "tag you're it" sort of thing that I am just butting into. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Back in high school I had penpals. It was fun to keep in touch with my old town, get to hear about what my old friends were up to, and in turn share my own new adventures in my new city. When we all graduated from high school, many left home to go to University, and people's mailing addresses changed.  Keeping up with where people were those days was too much, and everyone's new adventures meant that there was little time to do the penpal thing.  Some old friends made the transition to email for asynchronous communication and IM for synchronous chat...

 Alright...alright... bad pun 😅 But to be fair, CALL (computer-assisted language learning) does lend itself to some bad puns... And that's before I even get into other acronyms like TELL and MALL😹. I promise to spare students the dad jokes in the fall😅 Anyway, last week I decided to answer my pondering  as to what my course redesign should cover, and I settled on designing an Introduction to CALL course. I decided that the course number (685) doesn't matter all that much considering that our course numbers over the past 30 years have drifted to an extent that they make some sense, but they aren't (as a whole) totally coherent, and that's not my problem to solve. The next part of my mission is to determine learning objectives (which I more or less have) and determine what kinds of assessments and activities I want to include. The universe of possibilities feels rather endless, so I need to find the right size for semester activities and assessments. One of the thin...

New Year, New Projects! I am taking this spring term off from teaching, partly to re-energize my batteries which have been rather low on account that I've been going full speed (🚌) since 2018; the pandemic didn't help because teaching increased around that time (not that I am complaining, the cosmos provided something I needed at the time).  Another reason for the break is partly to work on a new course development for the Fall term. While course development shouldn't take 8 months to complete, with so many other irons in the fire, it's a part-time endeavor. For the first time, in a very long time, I  get to mix edtech with applied linguistics!🥳 The last time I did this was a long (long) time ago. It is rather exciting, but also daunting because, over the past 10 years, I haven't kept up with the CALL (computer-assisted language learning) world.  Before I started my dissertation planning, my thought was to do something CALL-related, so I spent a few years doing a ...