Multilitteratus Incognitus

 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 ...

This past weekend a story came across my slashdot feed titled  Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses?  I don't often see educational news on slashdot so it piqued my interest. Slashdot links to an EdSurge article where Coursera courses are described as going through beta testing by volunteers (unpaid labor...) The beta tests cover things such as: ... catching mistakes in quizzes and pointing out befuddling bits of video lectures, which can then be clarified before professors release the course to students. Fair enough, these are things that we tend to catch in developing our own (traditional) online courses as well, and that we fix or update in continuous offering cycles.   The immediate comparison, quite explicitly, in this edsurge article is the comparison of xMOOCs to traditional online courses.  The article mentions rubrics like Quality Matters and SUNY's open access OSCQR ("oscar") rubric for online 'quality'. One S...

OK, so today was the penultimate day for  "getting started" types of mobile development workshops. Today's topic, as you might surmise from the title, was Android development.  Today's development environment was Eclipse with the Android SDK.  The nice thing about Android development is that it is all XML and Java, which is pretty nice. I am familiar with XML and I did do Java as part of my computer science BA way back when.  Today the Computer Science curriculum at UMass Boston does use Eclipse as the IDE (integrated development environment), but back when I was in intro to computer science we used TELNET over a 56k modem (eeeek!) to connect to a terminal, use EMACS and compile something with javac which ran in the terminal; thus text-only, no GUI. Having seen XCode and Visual Studio 2010 in earlier "getting started" workshops, I have to say that both Xcode and Visual Studio win over Eclipse.  They both seemed snappier, compared to eclipse; they both...

OK, now some of my fellow Apple people, and some of you Android fanbois will scoff at me for going to a Windows Phone 7 development workshop, sponsored by Microsoft, but I'll tell you it was fun!  I think that as much as I like the iOS , Windows Phone 7 , with the MetroUI  seems interesting as platform and with the backing of Nokia I think we'll see it rise up and be viable competition to Android and iPhone (if apps come out that is...) In any case, the workshop was pretty interesting and it gave me an opportunity to mess around with Visual Studio, something I haven't done in three or four years, since I was a student in the MSIT program.  I have to say that  developing for WinPhone7 seems to be quite comparable to designing iPhone apps. From the top level, and from the quite limited exposure I've had to them, the IDEs ( Visual Studio and XCode) seem pretty comparable at this point. The one thing I noticed is that both Microsoft peeps (hey, I actually met Edwin...

Well, the first workshop was today and it was quite interesting.  As I suspected there were quite a few K-12 teachers there interested in getting started with iOS app development so this can trickle down into the high school computer science curriculum; there were some higher education folks there as well. Even though the workshop was all day, you can't really get that deep into app development in eight hours.  Most of the workshop consisted in getting us oriented toward the apple developer accounts and with getting around xcode.  We messed around with interface builder and xcode and learned how to connect the UI elements to the code - but there was little (almost no) coding involved.  Considering I haven't programmed in close to ten years now, this wasn't bad.  Now I just need to get started with the Stanford iTunesU podcasts on iOS development...and perhaps come up with some interesting idea for mLearning (or something m-related) to develop a sample applicat...