Untranslatable Words

Created in just 24 hours by Steph Smith, Eunoia offers hundreds of untranslatable words in a useful and accessible online dictionary. Eunoia is itself an untranslatable word meaning a “well-mind” or “beautiful thinking.”

Eunoia: The Internet’s Dictionary of Untranslatable Words

The Long Now posted a link to Eunoia, which is a dictionary of untranslatable words. It’s a cool website, that I plan to use with my class. At the beginning of each term, and sometimes throughout, I teach specifically about ‘language as a technology’. This approach is important for language learning, I feel, because it gives students awareness that their first language will shape many of their misunderstandings and miscommunications about leaning English.

I’m thinking of two activities that I can build around Eunoia:

• Descriptive writing – find a word and try to describe the meaning of that word in English, give examples, even write a paragraph about that word.
• Submit a new word – The website has a function where anyone can submit an untranslatable word to add to the dictionary. Students can create a new word or choose an untranslatable (not already in the dictionary) word from a language that they know, and submit it.

We’re practicing Skimming and Scanning as a skill this term. There’s probably a S&S activity in here as well, I will think about.

Connections are Habits

Connections are habits: habitual repetitions, which transform all other interactions.

From Updating to Remain the Same

It’s the start of the term, so I’m mentioning “habits” constantly to my new students with the hope of getting them thinking about habits, bringing them to their foreground, making them explicit.

Recently I think that maybe habits are especially important for skills that are slow change – language, health, movement – yet can reach high levels of fluency and automaticity.

More on Habits: https://www.quietrev.com/change-your-habits-change-your-life/

 

 

Dreams of Education

I don’t quite know how to explain what I am about to say, but sometimes when I am falling asleep, it is my hands that begin to dream first, before my brain does.

Butt-dialing’ has emerged in recent years as a beautiful means of describing unintentional cellphone calls. The implication is that the butt has no intentions, and can carry out no actions, but by a technological glitch has done something by accident…

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2018/09/notes-on-hands.html

This is such an interesting blog post, because it breaks down into parts a whole (the human body) in intentional contexts that almost always consider that whole as a whole and nothing less.

I often find myself imagining the relationship of cells and organs to a body as an analogy for people and communities to a society. Obviously, this analogy is limited because of this idea of intention, but it’s also interesting to think that the presence/lack of intention in each of these examples is flipped: Generally, with the cells/body example it is the larger entity that had intention; and with the people/society example, it is the smaller one.

But, is this so obvious?

This post challenges my generalizations, and in doing so challenges the habitually anthropomorphic ways that I see the world.

Anyway, I also see a connection here to education. Breaking down an overarching learning goal, subject, or theme, and letting the individual skills engulf the body in change, slowly, skill by skill.

Recently, I try to get my student to not think of themselves as “learning English” but to add to their perspective that they are developing strands and skills like speaking for fluency, listening for main ideas, listening for chunks of words, writing for structure, writing for accuracy, and reading for pleasure, just to name a few.

Then, if they do this, they can start to feel the dream enter through that smaller skill, slowly engulfing the larger entity of learning English.

Maybe for them it’s as difficult as me considering that a part of my body, like the hands, have intention of their own. Or, that butts can dial. This is the dream, though. This is how it spreads.

 

More: about scale here and here

Networked Professional Development and Language Learning

Here are the slides for my presentation on Networked Professional Development and Language Learning.

There’s a list of resources and useful links at the end.

Notes for using Debate in the ESL Classroom

I attended an Alberta TESL Conference session on using debate in the classroom.

View or download my notes here: Using Debate in the ESL Classroom

Taking Notice of Strangers

Much of Part One deals with Crowdsourcing in Jacobs’ context of city planning. Here’s the basic idea: more and diverse citizens watching the sidewalk makes the city safer. And, making the city safer in this way is healthy for the city, because it reaches into existing mechanisms, and pre-existing identities and lifestyles.

This woman was one of thousands upon thousands of people in New York who casually take care of the streets. They notice strangers. (p38)

She goes into detail about this type of crowdsourcing (I should note that she doesn’t actually use this term) over the next few chapters, shedding light on the importance of a mass of people’s non-exclusive, potential purposes in a complex system.

Framing this in terms of education – Educators, better yet, Facilitators casually create feedback. Citizens are facilitators (a category of educators, and not mutually exclusive with learners), and safety is feedback. This concept works especially well in language learning, where the medium for feedback is also the target content.

The Educational process starts with facilitators noticing.

A Language Learning MOOC – Thoughts & Vision

MOOCs and Language Learning seems to be a natural fit for each other. I previously wrote about the suitability between Language Learning and MOOCs, and have expanded some ideas on the topic. (I’ve also created a website that tries to communicate the LMOOC vision)

One of the reasons why Language Learning and MOOCs fit so well together is that MOOCs can create interaction. For language learners in non-target language speaking countries, this can increase the amount of target language feedback that they receive. This is a major part of the barrier in trying to learn language in an EFL setting.

However, one of the challenges of increasing this feedback, is helping learners develop strategies for increasing this feedback, and guiding them in how to use this feedback effectively. A LMOOC isn’t based in Educational Technology (like many MOOCs are, making them more like conferences), but rather uses educational technology as a means for connecting.

Thus, the two main goals of the exterior LMOOC structure would be Increased Feedback and The Promotion of Autonomous Distance Educational Skills (Learner Autonomy).

Other, content and language driven goals, would be addressed in the finer details of the interior workings of the LMOOC.

One of the other important features of an LMOOC would be the openness of such a structure not only at the learner end, but also open at the facilitator end of the structure. I believe that MOOCs (and how they are currently practiced) would benefit greatly from a general adoption of more facilitators – a whole slew of knowledgeable people in any given MOOC that construe user activity into more robust connections and networks. Building on new teacher roles, these facilitators would take the buds of learning and help them to flower.

So, my LMOOC design incorporates the need for many facilitators by making that end of the MOOC open to anyone who would like to facilitate (by creating a kind of sub-unit within the LMOOC overall structure). This achieves two important results: learners have the ability to become facilitators; and the LMOOC becomes a tool for educators who to learn and practice distance language learning instructional design.

Anyway, please check out the link to the webpage if you are interested (here it is again), and leave any feedback. I’ve been dwelling on this idea for a while, so I think I need to let it sit – I still don’t have a means to put this into practice yet, but I would love to hear about and follow any organization that tries this type of LMOOC structure out. With the means to put it in motion, it’s would be a fantastic thing for language learners and educators. Thanks!

Open Language Support – AUGSC presentation notes

These are some supplementary note on a presentation for later this week. The topic is Open Language Learning, and it is based on several papers I have written over the course of my MA and on a blog post from 2011. The slides and some useful references are posted at the bottom.

The basic idea is an open language learning system that is simple, minimal cost to learners and can be adapted for support to existing courses. Here, the idea of Open pertains strongly to access in that language students who live in countries where the target language is not spoken can have access to effective ways of improving their second language skills. One of the purposes of the program is to help students learn autonomous learning strategies, that not uniformly cultivated in cultures across the globe. In my own context of Japan, it is common to find students that are not comfortable with being challenged to learn autonomously.

In my presentation I won’t spend very much time in describing how the system works, so I want to spend most of my post here to expand on this. From the learners perspective, they would decide to sign up or join the course and initially take three 1 week, high instruction based units. The first unit explains the course to learners, many of whom may have never used distance learning methods before, and walks them through (in target language) setting up various educational media (blogs, twitters, facebooks, etc) that they will use throughout the course. The idea isn’t for everyone to sign up for everything, but to give learners some information so that they can make an informed choice on which media might suit their own interaction style.

The second and third intro units guide students through things like searching in target language (from now on, English), CMC interaction basics, and some basics and encouragement for taking control of their own initiative. Other topics, such as assessment (or lack of), web etiquette, privacy, and continuity (or lack of) maybe tackled, as well. These initial units also get students motivated and accomplished in simple tasks in an environment that may be new to many of them. For those where learning online is old news, the units can be completed easily or even skipped.

Next, and continually after this, learners will choose a 2 week “topic” to participate in. The topicss themselves can be designed by anyone. Ideally, facilitators or language teachers from anywhere will take the time to set up the small suggested requirements for the topic (which are listed on the slide). Over time, learners should set up their own topics based on their own interests and add them to the available list for other learners to participate in. Examples of topics, or strings of topics, could be various cities around the world (each city lasting for a different 2 week period), types of recipes or restaurants, current world events, anything. People study language as a means to connect to information just as much as they study it for it’s own sake.

The purpose of the suggested requirements is to provide some sound and researched instructional techniques into the program as a whole, and to give people a place to start from. Structure, here, is a starting point, and where it goes from the start depends on what the learners do and what the facilitators suggest. Each person who creates a topic them becomes facilitator of that topic. Their role, while ultimately is up to them, is to support the learners in language and autonomous learning: if they are in a position to do so they should provide English language feedback directly and indirectly, and if they are in a position to give autonomous learning advice or help, they should do so. As well, facilitators should actively connect learners to each other, to past participants in a topic, to others in different topics, to other facilitators and to content. Interaction is not restricted by topic and time; people in any topic, now or past, or even just out there, can benefit from language interaction and practice.

So, in this sense, it doesn’t really sound like much. It’s an agreement between people (learners and facilitators…often the line between the two blurred) to search out language use, interact using target language, and to build content through this interaction. It gives learners a starting structure, a non-essential structure that doesn’t limit interaction between topics, but promotes it.  The structure can be dialed down or up, and altered to suit their own style. It also gives educators and institutions a way to support second language students comprehensively, before problems arise, using the power of peers and distributed content. The main goals of the program are increased language feedback and increased learner autonomy, and this can be adapted to almost any type of language learning situation.

Useful References

Chaos, Complexity and Language Learning

(Re)Conceptualizing Design Approaches for Mobile Language Learning

Rethinking Learner Support in Distance Education (chapters by Phillips, Mizoue, Mills, Kenworthy, Aylward)

Negotiating Cultures in Cyberspace

A Model for Effectively Supporting e-Learning

Reflection as a Means of Understanding: Ways in which Confucian heritage students learn and understand organisational behavior

Open Language Support – Glen Cochrane

Open Language Support Glen Cochrane Sept 15 AUGSC