Languages from a Distance

Ok, it is possible that the above title exaggerates a bit…but not by much. Honest!

Like most foreign language teachers I know, for some time now I have heard about Linguafolio and how as a portfolio-based, language-assessment tool that has origins in Europe, it can help students monitor and take control of their own learning. The idea always had an appeal to me but unfortunately I never found the time to delve into it and work it into classroom instruction.

Fast forward a number of years: I am now the teacher of an established K-12 online German program that finds itself in a period of rapid transition as we move away from traditional, lecture-based, one-way instruction. Though I had been taking care to include performance-based assessments in the new courses as a way of providing more context and meaning to the student-learning experience, there still were some sizable pieces missing from the puzzle. And I didn’t even realize it — that is,until I heard Ali Moeller from the University of Nebraska speak this past weekend.

Dr. Moeller was conducting a seminar called: LinguaFolio Review and Classroom Implementation for the Kentucky World Language Teacher Network. She reiterated the underlying ideas behind Linguafolio over the two-day event. In my opinion, the following LF requirements for students are especially ground-breaking and compelling:
• Goal setting
• Self assessment
• Self-reflection and self-regulation

All of these components reveal a focus that is central to the Linguafolio design: that the student become more and more responsible for his own learning.

Of course for any educational scenario, such an objective would be highly desirable. But for K-12 distance learning formats in particular, this is just what the doctor ordered: a way to ‘teach’ and/or instill independence in the learner. Of course the devil is in the details. There is a lot of work ahead – I will be documenting our LF path here- but , following the tenets of backwards design, if we start with where we want to end up (in this case: greater student responsibility and autonomy) then we will be able to build a better road to get there. Right?

My life is saved.

Click here for Linguafolio Kentucky

Click here for Linguafolio Virginia, Carolinas, Kentucky, Georgia.

Click here for Nebraska LF Teacher’s Guide.

Judy Breck calls SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the”sleeping giant” in regards to its still unlocked potential for education. She has a point. The technology, through which websites like amazon.com are able to routinely send personalized suggestions regarding books, videos, or CDs, could allow any student a means of cutting through the messy and confusing cloud of information on the internet and accessing authentic resources instantly for his or her individual learning needs.
But not only has the education establishment been slow to unleash the power of Search Engine Optimization, it has failed to recognize the true source of this power: traffic. Much to its detriment:

Resources without traffic linger in the shadows and lose relevancy – which is awful on several levels for learning.

Because a majority of existing educational resources remain locked behind “proprietary wall of publishers and universities” Search Engine Optimization remains only a fragment of what it could be for learning. But Breck is confident that will change: As more and more traffic goes to resources that are online and therefore accessible through SEO, other institutions will open and “publish into the cloud as well.”

I am all for this process of opening up and becoming part of a global network of learning, although I do see obstacles on the way: copyright, for example. As a language teacher, it is extremely important to me that I include all kinds of music, images, and film in my lessons. I do this for the purpose of demonstrating culture and providing context. Or course I always make a point of giving credit to the author of a work. However I frequently use works in a derivative way to increase their educational value for the moment. I might loop a pop song for example or make a clip from part of a short film to demonstrate something for a particular lesson. If I were to do this on the open internet, I might run into legal trouble and ultimately have to refrain from the practice. And so, I continue my mixes and mashups behind the walls of my online classroom.

And what about student work that serves as material for collaborative projects? Should it all be published on the open internet? I do not think that Breck is advocating this…but how many of these “proprietary walls” will we still require?

I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the middle: Online courses and educational institutions will publish content on the open internet in order to build traffic and remain relevant but will also make use of walls to respect student privacy and to allow a place for all of those things to develop that can make the classroom a special place: creativity, intimacy, and community.

OK, perhaps I was seeing the glass half empty in my last post. In fact, I see it half full most days. I know that we are moving in the right direction. Though success can be elusive, sound goals are in place. It’s worth the continued effort.

In regards to the grouping of the students for collaborative work (on wikis for example), the idea just needs to be tweaked I think to make it work in an environment like ours where students and schools are on different schedules. For example, one could …

• put schools and learners into groups whose participants have similar start dates. They then could work together on certain assignments. (I did this at the beginning of this school year actually. I called the groups Staffeln –squads or teams. It was a promising idea that I think would work with a little closer attention. Again, just need to tweak…)

• have projects that are ongoing and that would require layers of student involvement. Students would be graded not only directly for their work on a particular layer but also on how well they communicated with the students who worked on the project before them and as well as the ones who would come after them. Sure, it would take some time to design such a project….but I think that it would be a great learning experience towards developing skills in collaboration.

Because that’s what it is about after all: allowing students to develop collaboration skills. In order for that to happen of course, they MUST have the opportunity to work together.

Actually, I’ve always looked at collaboration primarily as a means of achieving something else: community—-a very important concern for distance learning. See my C+C=C hypothesis here. But I am beginning to see collaboration more and more as an important end goal in itself. Especially when I read articles like Ruth Reynard’s Web 2.0 Tools and K-12 Challenges in which she cites evidence that today’s employers …

usually comment on their need for employees who have more highly developed “employable skills,” rather than having only content knowledge about specific academic areas.

But what are those skills anyway? Reynard describes them this way:
Students with collaborative skills…

know how to evaluate a problem or situation; assess what information and resources are needed and what others have and can contribute to the challenges; maximize all of the resources and build on what is available to meet and address; and, hopefully, solve the problem or challenge posed.

So, in other words, our students need to be able to do the following when working with others:

Evaluate problem
Assess what is needed
Assess what others have and can contribute
Coordinate and maximize resources
Act! (Meet and address)
Solve Problem.

Wow. That’s what I want for my students. Practice with real-life skills. That’s relevance.

So, ahem, I guess my work is cut out for me. I’ve got to do the following to ensure that my students will have have the opportunity to develop such all-important collaborative skills:

1) Find ways to allow students on different academic schedules to work together on projects.
2) Design projects around real-world problems that will foster student collaboration.

Back to forging a new battle plan…

My mantra these last months has been the thesis from Moltke: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. I say it over and over again – sometimes while chanting ‘Rama Rama’ and ‘Hare Hare’ in between as I light some incense. (smile)

At the beginning of the school year I had big plans not only to introduce a host of new web platforms into the curriculum but also to get our students c o l l a b o r a t i n g on projects. As I’ve stated before, (here for example) the development of community is of the utmost importance in DL environments. We need to integrate community however we can, ESPECIALLY in DL. There are many ways to do this and certainly cultivating student collaboration must be one of them. If students work together on projects, then after a while they will get to know one another and communicate more and more. Before you know it, a new layer of support will develop. That is definitely where we want to go in Distance Learning because it will help put our students on equal footing with classroom learners.

But collaboration can be quite tricky to build into a DL curriculum when students start their school years at various times and follow completely different schedules. Such nonconforming school calendars can be a formidable obstacle to deal with when attempting to create rich student collaboration activities.

I did not take that into consideration when I based my plans for incorporating student collaboration on a model put forth by Kato and Rosen in the November 2007 edition of The Language Educator. (See my take on it here) Their approach was designed for use in a community college context where students are all on the same course calendar.

In such an arrangement, students from different locations, say: locations A, B, C, and D are put together in groups where they post writing on a wiki page and comment on each other’s work. I attempted this approach this past year but I did not consider that it would be too confusing to monitor and assess since students start the school year at different times.

Well that blunder in organization has since been fixed and we now organize the student work on wikis according to school. But I continue to think of ways to have students collaborate on various projects throughout the year. We will get there. I am confident.

As a friend once reminded me, one of the great parts of being a teacher is that each August one gets to begin anew with fresh ideas.