Archive for the ‘English’ Category

Kwansei Gakuin University

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

This weekend I had a chance to visit my good friend Paul Hays up in the Sanda area of Kansai (think Kobe-north); he teaches media and policy studies at Kwansei Gakuin University. I got a chance to visit and participate in his seminar on Ambient Findabilty (a book that coincidentally has a reference to one of my confluences). One student was in charge of one of the chapters and led the discussion which was held in Japanese and English.

The campus is beautiful. The relatively new buildings have that Mediterranean feel and the well-manicured lawns have, how can I describe them?, “Stay off the grass!” signs. Built during the bubble years, the campus is a little out of the way and a bit hard to get to. The train line stops about 6 km. away and one needs to catch a bus the rest of the way. I understand that, for some, it can be quite a commute, but then I have at least one student commuting from Fukuoka. I guess it’s all relative.

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JALTCALL 2007: Second Life in the Language Classroom

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

The second workshop I chose was by Forrest Nelson who talked about using the virtual world Second Life (SL) for learning languages. We were given an overview of what it is and how it works. We got an idea of the technology necessary to run the simulation, and what to expect in the future. Forrest stressed that the language of the simulation is important to know, and we were quizzed on some of the terms used and the nuances important to know in order to survive and thrive in that huge world.

Forrest then showed us some of the user-created videos describing SL and talked about some of the famous people and companies using SL for promotion. We learned that even the political parties of France are using SL, not only for promotion, but also to lob virtual rockets at each other. Forrest moved onto buying space and creating such objects as microphones, buildings, and even guitars. He finished up by talking about some of the implications for using SL in the classroom to teach languages and showed us a video he created of a group of students he took on a virtual class. He noted that privacy could be a concern, but that teachers can use SL’s privacy settings and create a space for friends-only.

SL looks a bit overwhelming and appears to have a steep learning curve. Maybe I’m getting old, but I would need to do a lot more research before I step out there with some students. I hope to see more of what Forrest is doing in the future.

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JALTCALL 2007: MASLE

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

The conference kicked off Friday evening with six workshops held in two computer labs in the very modern Building 8. For the first one, I choose Brian Teaman’s machine-aided spoken language evaluation (MASLE) presentation. The system is designed so that students can record their voices on their computers according to some predefined texts. Then the results can be evaluated in one or two ways: by hand by the teacher or other evaluator, or by machine. Brian has added a speech recognition engine to check student recordings. Evaluating with the group at the presentation, the sample of ten recordings took us just under 5 minutes to do ‘by hand.’ The machine evaluation took about 2 seconds! The output still needs to be massaged into a readable form, and the machine’s results should use more of the available range (most of these results came out either .01 or .97, with nothing in between). However, once these are taken care of, the time factor of evaluating hundreds of your students’ speaking tests could be reduced greatly.

We were then given a chance to try the system ourselves. There were some technical difficulties because of the university’s network/firewall/gremlins. We were able to record our voices using the system, but we were not able to upload the files for a machine evaluation.

Interesting work, Brian! Keep us posted.

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JALTCALL 2007: Web 2.0 Tools for EFL

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Here we are at Waseda University in the middle of Tokyo. Several of us are now at our third workshop at JALTCALL 2007 looking into the world of Web 2.0 Tools for teaching and learning English. Some of us are blogging about the experience, and we’re going to link them together. The presenter is Marc Sheffner from Tezukayama University. We started with creating a Blogger account, moved on to changing the language, and customizing our templates for that cool look!

We then moved to Google Reader to sign up the blogs that we wrote. We were asked to get the feeds from our neighbors and add them as well. I now have a nice list of feeds to go nuts with. Students can then add each other’s RSS feeds to keep track of what everyone is writing. Bloglines is another reader that was mentioned.

We then moved on to another Web 2.0 tool: del.icio.us. This is the place to keep your bookmarks. At first it may seem like a lot of trouble, but if you use different browsers or move between different computers, you can access these bookmarks anytime anywhere (as long as the Internet is up where you are). Another bonus: tagging. You may have created many different folders to keep your bookmarks, but the sites you want to bookmark may fall under several categories. Tagging your bookmarks allows you to have multiple categories for your bookmarks. You can also share selected bookmarks with selected friends, colleagues, and students.

Thanks for the interesting presentation, Marc. I hope we weren’t too noisy over on the side. :-D

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