The U.S. Library of Congress has decided to begin making available thousands of its photos through the photo site flickr. For the time being, the ownership of these photos are being designated as having “no known copyright restrictions.” There is a more complete description of this designation, the photos, etc. here. This is a new classification, so we’ll have to watch how it plays out. In the meantime, they are asking that the online community view the photos and add comments and tags, so that they can be further classified. That seems to be a reasonable request, and it could be a lot of fun for those of you with lots of time on your hands. 
Posts Tagged ‘online’
Library of Congress Photos on flickr
Thursday, January 24th, 2008So you think you can spot a phishing attempt?
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Phishing, or using a seemingly-real web site or email message to gather personal information, appears to be causing people quite a bit of trouble. The folks at McAfee have put together a quiz to test your skills at distinguishing the real from the fake. Take the test yourself and see how you do. I scored a 9 out of 10. No hints on the one I missed… 
JALTCALL 2007: moodle Remains King of the Open Source LMS
Thursday, June 7th, 2007Since I was away from teaching and researching in Japan for a year, I have missed out on seeing what’s new with the learning management system (LMS) moodle (most tertiary institutions in the U.S. have a commercial LMS like Blackboard already in place; no need for people to look for their own solutions). JALTCALL 2007 was able to fill my moodle jones in a positive way.
There were three moodle workshops on Saturday and a moodle reader presentation on Sunday, and I’ll try my best to do them justice here. The morning workshop was put together by William (Bill) Burgos of manabu3, a moodle partner. He talked about adding multimedia files to moodle’s quizzes (the quiz function is one of the modules in moodle). Bill described some of the basics for file sizes and manipulation, and recommended some freeware and/or open source applications to help out. He demonstrated uploading multimedia files of various kinds and showed us how to link to them for particular questions in quizzes. He showed a nifty trick by adding a space character so the file is embedded into the question itself. This trick is on my list of things to try out. We were all able to log into a sample course and try some things out for ourselves. We were also provided with a helpful handout and a CD chock full of material. Thanks for the cool workshop, Bill!
The afternoon session started off with a great workshop on adding to/modifying/tweaking moodle for your own purposes. This was a fast-paced workshop, so my notes (and often the handout) do not include a name for an attribution. At one level, modules can be added, deleted, and modified to suit users’ needs. Some of the modules with an English-teacher-in-Japan background include Hot Potatoes, lecture feedback, project, and self-study. I do not understand why a Hot Potatoes (HP) module has been created. HP restricts users to quizzes which are open to the public only; why bother with this when the moodle quiz module works fine? Paul Daniels talked about his development of several modules. The presentation module allows teachers to convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash for easy viewing. The media blog module adds voice recording and other media support to the blog modules. He also talked about seating chart and freemail modules. I believe none of these are quite ready for primetime, but they are well on their way. Gordon Bateson then took the floor to show off some of his very, very cool tweaks. How many times have you spent teaching your students to register with moodle using a capital letter for the first letter of both first and last names and ended up with all small case or all large case? Gordon’s cool tweak not only changes it to the proper format, but it also eliminates the long vowels that are unnecessary in romanized Japanese. Gordon got a big oooohhh during the workshop for that one. He also had a tweak for unique cell phone addresses that is a kind of override for moodle’s email address check. To be honest, at this point, my head was spinning from all I had seen in this workshop, and my notes come to an abrupt end. But if you want to see some of this stuff, the workshop materials are available at: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/jaltcall2007/. I have to conclude this section with a two thumbs up on this presentation, as it was the first that I saw that went far beyond the “moodle has forums, and quizzes, and…” so typical of recent JALTCALL conferences. At the party on Saturday, I put in a request to the JALTCALL powers-that-be to have more of these higher level presentations and workshops. I am always ready to take my skills to the next level. The future indeed looks bright for the moodle platform.
The final moodle workshop of the day was by Peter Ruthven-Stuart on how to get moodling. We got two handouts on moodle and one for a reading activity, and lots of hands-on time with moodle; my notes are sparse on Peter’s presentation for that reason. The first handout (sorry, I cannot find a link to it) describes in clear detail (without the technical parts) what one should do to get a moodle installation up and running. If you don’t know how to do this, you might want to contact him to get his handout. The second handout walked everyone through logging into a moodle course that was already set up. Peter set up accounts beforehand with user names, passwords (that were the same as the user names), and some fake names. For anyone setting up their own workshop, this seemed to be a great way to do it. Once users logged in, they could change both their fake names and their passwords. I’m guessing these were all created in a text or spreadsheet file and uploaded later. We were then led through some of the many activities that were set up for us: various pre-reading activities for a short article, vocabulary-building activities, quizzes, and many others. All in all, it was a great workshop, jam-packed with lots of hands-on activities.
On Sunday, Tom Robb, of Kyoto Sangyo University, talked about the development of his moodle reader module. This module, not yet ready for prime time, is designed to help students keep track of what they have read as well as give teachers a way to check students’ progress. Students will be able to use the module to choose the book they read and take a quiz on the book’s content. Students scoring more than 60% will receive credit and be awarded points based on the level of the book. Tom is working with publishers to use the tests that publishers have already created. This module could go a long towards helping students and teachers keep an eye on reading progress.
Whew! I guess that’s about all I have on moodle for now…
JALTCALL 2007: Second Life in the Language Classroom
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007The 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.
JALTCALL 2007: MASLE
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007The 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.
JALTCALL 2007: Web 2.0 Tools for EFL
Friday, June 1st, 2007Here 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. 
Online Learning Communities as a Topic for Research: A Dead Horse
Monday, February 12th, 2007I wrote before I left that I would write about my research while I was on sabbatical. I wrote one excuse below for not blogging in general. The other, bigger one is that as I dug into communities more and more, I realized that the topic has been researched to death. Who wants to go into a major research project knowing that there will be no significant difference? Most of the stuff I was looking at was on using discussion forums, but the same research results exists for blogs, and the same results will be found for wikis and whatever other community-based technologies are developed. Let’s move on…
I am looking into something fresher and more interesting for me (and I hope others, too). I cannot write about the topic yet, because it’s not yet ready for primetime, i.e., I’ll wait until I’m closer to being finished. Film at eleven.
Lifehacker: Technophilia: Get a free college education online
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006The good folks at Lifehacker have put together a great list of resources to help us get a free online education (albeit without the paperwork annoiting us with an actual college degree). Reading the comments below the actual post, I see that our mileage may vary on the actual content. However, this blog provides us with a good starting point to see what is available online for free. There should be much more out there, so get those browsers and search engines working.
moodle 1.5
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005Although there is no official announcement on the http://moodle.org homepage (it’s still linked as a beta version), the download page shows moodle 1.5 has reached stable status. I uploaded it last week, and I really like its feel. 1.5 has added a message feature which allows users to send an instant message to other members of courses. The message feature could be used in a number of ways. One is to alert learners who have not fulfilled a particular task that something needs to be done. For language teaching, it can also provide an opportunity for more spontaneous communication. Another feature is a more robust quiz module. The latest quiz module includes an adaptive function to allow users to try a missed question again or move to an easier question on the same item. Quiz-makers can choose a percentage for a penalty or allow learners to earn the same credit. I have not used the adaptive portion yet, but plans are in the works. Film at eleven…
On the downside, the wonderful Journal module is being phased out. For those of you who are not familiar with journals, they allow learners to respond in writing to a particular topic. Teachers can then evaluate all the learners as well as provide feedback, all from one page. Journals have been replaced by the Assignments module. Now teachers have to click on each student’s work and provide the feedback/evaluation on individual pages (in addition to the extra time for the loading of each page). Fortunately, Journals can be reactivated in the Modules page of the Administration area. This reactivation has saved me time and clicks in the past week.
As I learn more about the new version, I’ll try to bring my comments up to date.
JALTCALL 2005
Thursday, June 9th, 2005Well another year, another JALTCALL conference, this time at Ritsumeikan University in Kusatsu, Shiga, Japan. I thought it was one of the better of the JALTCALLs, although the attendance numbers seemed to be smaller than in the past. Besides the opening and closing ceremonies, there were five types of presentations: keynotes/plenaries, papers, workshops, posters, and “show & tell.” As usual, there were a wide variety of presentations to see. The biggest problem, in my opinion, was the fact that at any one time there may have been as many as 15 presentations to choose from!
A simple breakdown of those I saw (more information coming as time permits):
Saturday
—The keynote on using video, voice, and text for for (a)synchronous communication…
—A networked project between Thai and Japanese learners of English, using a social constructivist model…
—Creating your own audio files for disseminating to learners (or anyone for that matter)…
—A workshop on putting your web page design and construction into your own hands…
—A new computer game targeted at 15-18 years olds for Japanese study…
—The latest in creating mobile CALL (think cell phones and/or PDAs)…
Sunday
—The plenary on keeping track of students’ learning in self-study mode…
—A talk on helping to make learners’ presentations more communicative…
—The latest multimedia solution from the folks at Longman’s…
—A workshop and paper on wikis…
—And, of course, mine on developing online learning communities…
