The Big Crunch

The Crunch is on! Only 3 weeks left to get 2 papers written. Dear gods! It is not going well. 

I have severe doubts about paper #1, and as for #2....I feel sick just thinking about it.

Not a good time to catch a cold.

To anyone and everyone...DO NOT do a Masters Degree in anything. Just don't. 

Good luck to us all!

Down the Rabbit Hole! Rona's Adventures in Chatbotland

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Sound familiar? It's from a story about a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole! While there, she meets many wonderful and strange creatures. Some of them are rather more difficult to understand than others. 

Today I visited this site: www.jabberwacky.com and I also met some weird and wacked out characters! This is a site where you can 'chat' with a 'bot' that is supposed to make natural, human-sounding conversation with you. It has been suggested that you might use it with language students. Students can chat, get naturalistic, meaningful responses, and practice conversation skills.

It was a bit like talking with a hookah smoking caterpillar...well, maybe exactly like talking to a hookah smoking caterpillar, since its first words were also "Who are you?"

First, I chatted with 'Joan'. She is a very professional looking avatar with a lovely British accent which only makes her pointed sarcasm that much more savage...and hilarious!

We were chatting about whether or not I liked humans (what else would you discuss with a bot?) It ended with THIS!!!!    

OUCH!!  Joan...that hurts! After ROFLing for a while, I continued the chat, but after she was mean, she got strange...

I'm a rabbit? I'm not sure why she's calling me a rabbit.  But there IS that Wonderland connection....maybe I'm the White Rabbit!!  It IS getting rather late!  OK....let's continue....

Now I was just confused....and I really did have to go..."Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

I'd had enough of Joan. She was mean and snarky and was getting downright belligerent! 

Bot's got attitude!

Before I left though, I decided to have a quick chat with George. He also accused me of choosing my words randomly, and of being a computer. I wasn't sure where he was getting this from...so I told him he was as mean as Joan! Well, you can see where this ended up!!

Oh my goodness!! These bots are just nasty!!  "Meaner than Voldemort"???  Well, "Avada Kedavra!" to you too, George! They've clearly been learning a lot of bad habits from humans. Which is the point. These Chat-bots are designed to interact with humans and "learn" speech patterns from your input. If you feel like subscribing, you can buy your own 'bot' and train it to talk anyway you like. I really wonder who has been training Joan and George!

Would I use this program with students? It can certainly be entertaining. Some of the responses are funny, and if I had an advanced class, it might be fun for them to interact with the computer and have a 'realistic' conversation, with its twists and turns. I did have a few segments of 'normal' and 'non-insulting' speech.  I worry about doing this with my beginner classes though. There is just enough non-sequitur to be confusing. If we believe, according to SLA theory, that students need comprehensible input, and need sensible feedback to correct themselves and monitor their own speech, I'm not sure this program is ready for prime-time yet. Many of the 'conversations' were really disjointed, with the bots' responses being very disconnected from the flow of discourse. In another convo where we were discussing my assignment, the bot told me that it "thought I would move to Puerto Rico". When I asked "Why do you think that?" the response "Because it's broken" (although amusing) did not follow normal conversational expectations. I asked "What is broken?" and the answer was "My heart". How did we get from my assignment, to Puerto Rico, to the bot's broken heart?

How do I feel about Jabberwacky as a teaching tool? I'll let Alice answer that:

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!"

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

All quotes from: 

Carroll, L. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland &Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. Bantam Classic Edition, 1981. New York, 1981.

relaxation without the birds

I need to take better care of me.
I'm getting all kinds of strange ailments and I know it's all from stress.
The asthma is the worst. There are lots of other problems, but I don't want to bore you.
It all comes down to the hours and hours I am spending every day at the computer.
Not enough exercise...too much stress...too much looking at a screen, too much of this... too little of that.
So I decided to take a night off and do some stretching and relaxation techniques.
"Chirp.....tweeet.....tdrrdrrdrdup tdrrdrrdrdup tdrrdrrdrdrup....chirpetychirp...tweeeeetily tweeeeeet tweet.."
Why does all of my relaxation music have tweeting birds in it?
"Mountain stream (with tweeting birds)", "Zen garden (with tweeting birds)", "Ocean waves (with tweeting birds)", "Amazon waterfall (with tweeting birds)"   and so on.
Do most people find chirping birds relaxing? Apparently so. I don't. I find them distracting.
I'm drifting off on my peaceful desert island, listening to the waves and breathing deeply,
(well... as deeply as I can with a raging case of asthma),
listening to the slow, low, mellow, soothing tones and suddenly,
"CHIRP! SCREECH! SQUAWK!" butts in and ruins it!
It's weird. I like birds. But I don't want them interfering with my waves.

Anyway... off to find some inner peace.
Got to heal the body and mind.
No birds allowed.
That goes double for you, Twitter!


*all non-birdy relaxation music suggestions welcome in the comments*

Go Fly a Kite! or Multimodality: The 5th Hybrid Skill

A little background: We are reading about writing and how wordprocessing facilitates the writing process in a language learning classroom (Jarvis, 1997). OK.... sounds obvious.

Then I found an article which says that MS Word is dead! Obsolete! It no longer meets the needs of online writers! You can read it here: http://slate.me/IrzVT6

I posted about this seeming 'clash' of ideas in my class forum, and my instructor's response got me thinking about a possible 5th hybrid communication skill (Slaouti, 2012). 

I am fascinated by this idea, as I think it gets at something I noticed a year ago, but didn't know what to call it....now I do. I think there IS a 5th communication skill, and I will call it "multimodal" skills, as opposed to our traditional reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. 

I have a nephew who one year ago was 8 years old. His class was doing a project where the teacher showed the kids how to make kites, which they did in class, and then they took the kites out into the schoolyard to fly them. My mother who is a volunteer at the school was there to help, and she filmed short video clips of the whole activity on her digital camera (not a video cam...just a point and shoot still cam with video capability...hence the short clips). There were little scenes of the kids gluing frames, cutting paper, tying string, painting the paper, running outside, trying to fly the kites. It certainly had no structure other than a sequence in time.

Later, on the weekend, my nephew was busily working on the computer, and I was amazed to see that he had taken those short video clips and was editing them together to make a movie that he wanted to show his class! I don't even know what program he was using, but it had to have been simple enough for an eight -year-old to figure out for himself. He certainly was not receiving any prompting or guidance from the 3 amazed and clueless adults in the house! But it gets better... While he was editing the video clips together, he was also typing and adding subtitles, explaining what happened, and adjusting fonts and colours. He asked us for several spellings when he wasn't sure. He also searched, found, and downloaded a piece of music to run in the background, and was able to control the volume, and sync it to the video.  He was really excited that he would have something that "he made himself" to put on the SmartBoard for the class to see! What was amazing to me was that this was all happening simultaneously. It wasn't as though he first made the video, and then "added things onto it". There was no pre-planning, editing, revising....the different parts simply sprang up naturally as he progressed through the process. Video, text, sound, music, speaking, listening, reading, searching: all coming together simultaneously to create one project which he could share. "Multimodality" in action!! At the time, not only was I blown away by the computer skills of this child (Where did he get that from, in this family of Luddites?), but I also felt something happening in my brain regarding education, and the way we think about teaching communication, and teaching children and perhaps language learners in modern schools. 

If we had done such a kite building activity when I was in grade three, I'm pretty sure that the follow up activity would have been to write, or "compose" a narrative of what happened, and perhaps illustrate it with drawings. You would have seen a bulletin board filled with paragraphs on lined paper, with drawings of kids with kites lining the halls! That 'writing composition' would have been the sum total of our 'communication' about the events.

Now, 35 years later, the child has moved so far past the point of 'composing a paragraph on paper', that I started to wonder if teaching writing, phonics, spelling, composition, organization is all passé? In a world where a child can pick up a computer and create a 10 minute video with all of its bells and whistles to communicate his ideas to the masses, what relevance does mere writing have to him? Ten years from now, when he is ready to enter university, will he have any desire, or need to do lengthy writing when he has such multimodal skills at his disposal? I can see why kids are bored with reading and writing in school. It must seem completely archaic to them when they are able to instantaneously find, acquire, and put to immediate use a wide variety of materials encompassing all forms of communication. Writing??? Composing???? Why would anyone want to do that? The world is so much bigger, and faster than that!

I don't work with children, so I may be way off base. I work with adult language learners, in a pre-EAP program, and often wonder about similar issues. Are we truly preparing students with life skills? Our focus in a university setting is heavily and squarely on writing skills. They will need to be able to write in university. Writing is our bottom line. If they can't write, they can't go on. And yet, where are the "multimodal" skills? Presumably, in the real world, the students will need to be able to do so much more than write. And ten years from now, when my nephew hits university, will there be any point in writing at all?  Won't he by then be able to "compose" his assignments, even his thesis in a multimodal format? That's my prediction. 

I think we need an adjustment in our thinking: FAST!! The traditional 4 skills we cling to in language teaching must be shuffled around to make way for a 5th skill: multimodal communication skills. We ignore this at the cost of our students' full communicative abilities and needs, heading into the future.

I haven't done any reading in this area yet, so have nothing to back me up, but I'm just intrigued by the concept. Read anything on this? Comments welcome!

References:


Jarvis, H. 1997. Word-processing and writing skills: practical applications to language teaching text books, British Journal of Educational Technology, 28(3), pp.165-175.

Scocca, T. 2012. Death to Word, Slate Magazine. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/microsoft_word_is_cumbersome_inefficient_and_obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html [Accessed April 13, 2012].

Slaouti, D. 2012. Re: MS Word is Obsolete! [forum post]. Message to Rona McIntyre. Sent April 14, 2012, 09:35 BST.

Wordle or Tagul: You Decide

Comparing two word cloud tools:

Wordle:is easier to use, but you cannot customize shapes and colours to the same extent as Tagul. You can click on the little copy here, and it will enlarge for easier viewing.

Tagul: is more difficult, but you can choose the shapes and colours. It also has a cool 'rollover' feature. But it doesn't appear that you can click to enlarge, so some words are lost in this small size which I chose for embedding.

Here's another. From "Word It Out"  (Thanks Eileen). It comes from one of my personal study notes from Evernote. It is a response to one of my instructor's tasks. I like how it says "felt comfortable" in big letters.

Word cloud made with WordItOut

That's all. It's late. I'm tired. Going to bed. Will get students to do this later.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I used to teach TESOL (teacher training, for those not in the know). One of the things that I used to tell the novice teachers was that in writing lessons, they should allow 3 times longer for writing than they think it will take. So: they think it will take 20 minutes...allow an hour. They think it will take an hour, allow 3.  It was something that I had learned through observation in my years of teaching. Students take much longer than you think, until you gain the experience to judge more accurately.
Today I took my students into the computer lab. I thought it would take 10 minutes. It took 35.
Apparently, I am still learning how to judge computer time.
So far, my writing lesson time scheme seems to apply. That students are slower than I expect is only one issue. The bigger issue, which simply amazes me every time I take students into the lab, is how non-existent their computer skills are. These are adult students from a wealthy, educated country. Should I be shocked? I am!
Today's task was to Google their favourite place, find an image of that place, and print one copy that they could bring back to the classroom. How hard could it be? 10 minutes, tops!!
I just finished reading an article from 1997 (yes....15 years ago, and before I had ever used a computer myself, much less owned one!) which warns about "the time it takes to develop basic keyboard skills and the fact that students' word processing ability is likely to vary within any class" and "for short language courses the time factor is particularly problematic: students may spend so much time learning basic word processing that they never get round to actually writing" (Jarvis, 1997). It seems I am dealing with exactly these problems, here in 2012! Incredible!
Two of the students could not remember their passwords to sign in. That required the tech admin guys to go into the main system to allow the students to change their passwords, wasting 15 minutes before they even got started. Most students found their images on Google relatively quickly, but then had no idea what to do next. We have no teaching computer in the lab, so I had no choice but to go around to each and every student and show them how to find Word, open Word, copy and paste, change the orientation to landscape, resize the picture, change the margins, and how to print. Some of the women did not know how to use a mouse, or what it means to 'left click' and 'right click'. Some of them could not navigate between Google and Word. One man could not type anything unless he was using an onscreen Arabic keyboard (refused to try anything in English), one could not understand how to copy and paste, but kept trying to crop the photo to "cut" it out of the background (bizarre??).  *sigh*...
At the end of 30 minutes, I was exhausted. My students proudly took their pics back to the classroom as I stood there shaking my head and thinking "Thanks gods I wasn't doing an actual WRITING activity!!" All they had to do was get one simple photo printed, and I felt like I had just run a marathon!
As I read the above mentioned article this evening, I knew that the author was talking to me. My course is extremely short. I only have them for 2 hours a day for six weeks. Jarvis is exactly right; if I am to have my students working with word processing, they will spend so much time learning the basics (how to use a mouse!!!) that they may never get around to actual writing! Is it worth it? I don't have an answer. It's exhausting and frustrating to be a computer teacher when I am supposed to be helping them with language skills. I am simply amazed that this level of ....what's the word? non-skill? unskill? non-proficiency? exists in 2012, and in students who think they are going to gain admittance to a Canadian university within the next year! When will I stop being amazed by this?
I am not deterred, however. As I mentioned in a previous post, the goal is normalization, and the only answer is to 'Keep calm and carry on'. I will continue to bring students into the lab for a variety of tasks, but I must remember to make allowance for 3 times longer that I expected....just as I taught my TESOL students years ago!

Reference: 

 Jarvis, H (1997), Word processing and writing skills: practical applications to language teaching textbooks. British Journal of Educational Technology 28(3), 165-175

One Degree of Abdication- Gomen nasai!

I'm a total failure....a total loser....a total liar.  I have abdicated my responsibilities. I feel guilty and ashamed. I don't even know how to fix it.
A few weeks back I hooked up with the IATEFL Glasgow people and said I would be an IATEFL Blogger. It involved watching some of the online sessions and blogging about them. They put my blog on their site so that people could read my reports on the online sessions. I was really looking forward to it! Exciting! An OFFICIAL Blogger!
As luck would have it, I got really sick that week, and spent every possible minute lying in bed in a cold-medicine induced semi-coma, trying not to die, but kind of wishing I would. I didn't do any of the blogging I had promised. I didn't do any of the video-watching I had promised. It was awful.
Two weeks later...here I am, MOSTLY recovered, and I see that lots of people from various, interesting places did in fact check out my blog...hoping to read awesome reports from IATEFL, and probably wondering "What the heck am I doing on THIS loser blog??"
Gomen nasai. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I let you all down. I'm sorry I promised to offer something of value, and then didn't. I'm sorry I neglected my duties...and my blog.
I can only hope that next year I can try again. If they'll let me!
Now, where are those echinacea pills??

Getting through the days...and nights...