About Vance |
CALL resources main page
& Site Index |
Vance's papers and
presentations
Back to the home page of this
presentation | Forward to Conclusion
The remainder of this presentation explains how students posting in blogs throughout the world used the tag 'writingmatrix' to make their postings visible to others in the project, and how similar techniques can be used to promote collaboration among students around the world and motivate them to read each other's postings, comment, formulate responses, and form partnerships conducive to learning outcomes. It is stressed that understanding the concepts is key to making the paradigm shift leading to opening minds to the transformational potentials inherent in connectivity facilitating interchange across the Web 2.0. Such notions impact reading, writing, and thinking, in CALL contexts worldwide, and enable applying these concepts to one's own language learning projects.
To apply these notions in learning, I worked through my community of practice or what we now like to call distributed learning network and found some teachers interested in learning about these concepts with me. These teachers had students from different parts of the world who learned to tag their individual blog postings and through these tags they were able to find one another while working with their teachers in tutored writing via blogs. This has since led to students from Argentina meeting others from Venezuela in regular online conferences in Yahoo Messenger, so it appears that the project has met initial successes in bringing students in different countries in contact with one another synchronously online which we hope will be manifested in more productive interaction in the students' blogs.
The technique was as follows:
This is as far as we got with the project as summer set in. The students had learned how to start blogs and how to enjoy posting in them, and we had seen that blog postings tagged writingmatrix were accumulating steadily on the Internet. I gave presentations on the project online which were recorded and were sometimes assisted live by the other teachers in the project and watched by their students. I am told that these students would be thrilled when I would show the local face-to-face and global online audiences examples of postings the tag search identified, and I would randomly pull up the blog of one of Saša's students in Slovenia, for example. We teachers too were pleasantly surprised that the system we had set in place worked so well. (though not all teachers' students' blogs were visible at first. We learned later that each blog had to be visible to Technorati - pingable - in order for Technorati to find it and include its postings in the output of each search.)
The next step will be for students to start forming friendships with one another that might result in writing partnerships. There are a couple of ways this might happen. Possibly the easiest way is just to browse the output of the Technorati tag search on writingmatrix http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix. It is also possible to open an account with Bloglines or Google Reader, just two internet sites that aggregate RSS feeds and display results in an easily organized way, put the link to the RSS feed from the Technorati writingmatrix search results into one of these, and browse the output there.
This would save a few mouse clicks and bring up the tag search right away, but better it would get the students using an aggregator, such as Bloglines. It is hoped that some might find others in the project whose blogs resonate with them and might add THOSE blog urls to their Bloglines list and then follow postings from those particular peers regularly. Students might then comment regularly in each other's blogs. Dialog might follow.
Whereas we see that tagging allows us to interact with others in a social network, and sift through and find each other's postings in an otherwise seemingly chaotic docuverse, this is not the only way we know that our writing is being read and interest shown in it. Blogs also allow comments to be made in them. Comments from unexpected sources can be very motivating. One can listen to the podcasts on the Worldbridges Network of Teachers Teaching Teachers http://teachersteachingteachers.org and follow discussions about Youth Voices http://youthvoices.net./elgg and some of the quite remarkable outcomes from student bloggers whose writing has taken on a sort of cult quality, who have found audiences neither they, nor their teachers, could have imagined. For example, Paul Allison's videos on blogging at http://www.veoh.com/series/paulallison are engaging presentations of how this kind of interchange between students happens in practice, the process of writing that goes into Paul's students' blog postings (freewriting, sentence starters, bubble cartoon devices, etc.), and how the students respond to one another and produce better writing by passing it through the crucible of feedback.from peers. As one of the students in one of Allison's videos said, you can write something and think it is totally correct, but when someone else reads it they can find some aspect that the writer didn't think of, and this kind of feedback, coming from another student somewhere, is much more meaningful to that student in some respects than a comment his teacher might have made. If Allison's videos are not evidence enough, he mentioned on a Women of Web 2.0 podcast this summer, that he's finding that "students are beginning to write for students; imagine how exciting that is!" Stanley (2006) also provides an excellent rationale for using blogs in writing and its counterpart, reading.
One of the teachers, Saša Sirk from Slovenia, wrote that though her classes had ended and she and her students were on summer holidays:
"another student of mine opened his blog and joined our project – 2 months after our classes officially ended : - ). It's really nice to remain in touch through blogging – everyone working at his own pace without any pressure... I don't know what my fall group will be like yet but I hope some of them will join us and make our Slovene section stronger. : - )."
The Writingmatrix project, still ongoing as long as there are students who wish to try it out and respond to one another's postings, worked remarkably well considering that its participants acted as pioneers and didn't know what to expect from it.
A final aim of the project will be to get the students to tag the URLs of each other's posts in http://del.icio.us. Although none of the groups has reached this stage yet, I think that once students find each other through appropriate use of Technorati and Bloglines, tagging each other's posts and exploring how others have tagged them through Del.icio.us will be a mind-opening experience. It is further reinforcing and accordingly motivating to discover that others are tagging what you produce and place on the Internet, and to follow the links that these others have tagged to see what their interests are. In my view this is the crux of collaboration in such a way that students might be motivated to make discoveries of authentic interest so that a motivation to write can be nurtured.
The following are some of the many artifacts which the Writingmatrix project left online to record its first phase:
References
Allison, Paul. (2006). New media in the classroom: Blogging. Teachers Network: Successful teaching practices in action. VeohTV. Retrieved August 20, 2007 from: http://www.veoh.com/series/paulallison
Stanley, Graham. (2006). Redefining the Blog: From composition class to flexible learning. In Hanson-Smith, Elizabeth, and Sarah Rilling (Eds.). Learning languages through technology. Alexandria, Virginia, USA: TESOL. pp. 187-200.
Back to the home page of this presentation | Forward to Conclusion
For comments, suggestions, or further information on this page, contact Vance Stevens, page webmaster.
Copyright 2007 by Vance Stevens
under
Creative Commons License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/