electro-textual

We’ve been studying the local shops and businesses.

The other day, students used (digital) cameras to photograph some of the shops. We brainstormed a huge list of all the shops in the area. Then people wrote short descriptive pieces about some of the shops. They could work in ms publisher, powerpoint or on paper.

As a group, we created texts on the big screen in powerpoint, and then added audio to the powerpoint slides. Most of the learners were not game to put their voice on record, so i recorded some of the screens.

Today i used all the software .. and students worked on paper.

i found that XnView, my favourite image application, can print a page full of selected images direct from the (image) browser.

i used WorksheetGenius and AtoZteacherStuff to create some worksheets for learners who prefer word games to writing. (Anagrams, wordsearch, jumbled sentences..)

i used ms word to make flashcards
(using the menu: “Table > Convert text to table”)
.. and also to draft some suggested writing activities.

We played games with the flashcards and the images .. people give clues about the word / shop they have, and others have to guess. Then to match word and image across the table.

After the break i put all the worksheets up front, and said people could choose what to do. It worked so much better than before when i would dole out sheets one by one.

Some teachers say that worksheets are just “Busy Work”, ie keeping students busy but teaching them very little. i often agree, but then find that students are sometimes more comfortable with what they perceive as “proper classroom learning” (ie worksheets), than they are with other activities (eg small-group collaborative problem-solving, or creative work).

So i aim for balance .. and sometimes find it  ;-]

photo credit: Sarah Jane

photo credit: ted.sali

One of the films made during Georgia’s Pacific Black Box project .. has been selected for screening in the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival. Good work ;-]

Georgie (formerly with PRACE VCAL) went to Bougainville and the Carteret Islands earlier in the year to teach people how to use digital storytelling so they could bring the world into their lives .. You can see some of their films over on the blogspot.

( PS: holdthepress: the film won an award! from community prophets. Brilliant. )

Here’s one about the local water situation. Makes Melbourne water seem not so troublesome.

(PPS: i went to see the film and was impressed. A whole range of really good films, including another one about the Carteret Islands produced by the Make Poverty History people.)

Today was a roaring success, as we held a Live Session between two classes, one at Merrilands Community Centre and the other in Broadway in the heart of Reservoir. Both groups comprised English as a second language (ESL) learners.

Tina and Jan and i came up with a way to use Skype to develop people’s language skills. Lately the students have been practising their descriptive skills, so we decided that each student would describe themselves over the skype phone, and the other group would guess who was speaking.

Each group had a set of photographs – of the people in the other class.

“I have dark hair, dark skin, and in the photograph i’m wearing a white headscarf.”

“Are you number 7, Maria?”

“Yes!” Applause all round.

There was plenty of laughter .. and not too much confusion; even though there were a few moments of garbled voice sounds, and not everyone remembered to hold the microphone close to their body.

Real listening .. because students were engaged in a real game, with real invisible colleagues. Fun plus success!
photo credit: feelmystic

Well .. Lisa continued her brave and valiant exploration of screencasting in the MYOB classroom, as part of the Can You Hear Us? project. And it’s still not as straightforward as we’d like it to be.

We discovered a few more things about this program known as Jing. We already knew that the application would not run without a login. Now we know it’s a challenge to log yourself off the system .. for example when you’re on a public computer.

Lisa’s had a go at recording the in-class on-screen demonstration with Jing. She’s come back to the recording after class, and found she can’t save the file onto her local usb drive, but she can upload to screencast. But the program is logged in under my name, from weeks before ..so she can’t access the file.

Eyes Roll !!!

i thought i’d write up a few “Caveats” for beginners to this seemingly straightforward application. So you can find some new notes on the Can You Hear Us? site.

image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: Sam at flickr

i’d be interested to get comments from anyone in ACE: is e-learning still out on the fringes, a strange and wacky add-on only for geeks? Or has it begun to come in from the cold? Is e-learning becoming part of the mainstream in ACE?

For this live conference session (details below) Josie Rose started us off by leading some group brainstorming: what does ‘mainstreaming’ mean to you? On the whole, it was about normalising, acceptance, integration.

Josie then spoke of the wonderful “e-mentor” program that she has pioneered, and which ACFE has funded for ’08; a program which emerged from the Access ACE research of ’07. People in the session remarked that it was a brilliant model for other states to follow.

Lynne Gibb showed us an amazing range of applications for their in-house wiki system, over at Coonara Community House. Blended learning in the classroom, student e-portfolios, collaboration between teachers, main website for e-business .. and more!

Denece Sippo – one of the great minds behind the terrific 23 Things Community Engagement project in East Gippsland last year – told us about many programs happening in the local libraries around Victoria, including the local history project known as WikiNorthia. She also focussed on one project down East Gippsland way, known as “Talking Visuals“, for people with complex communication needs; (they use a blog for sharing information, plus live classroom sessions which are recorded and shared.)

Myra Cake from WA gave us a beginner’s perspective, describing the rollercoaster ride of an organisation taking its first steps into the whole e-learning adventure. moving from fear and trepidation, into excitement and fun.

Stuart Jones talked about how Milang Old School House (MOSH) has moved from strength to strength, engaging adult learners in the local community through innovative uses of technology. They started off in 2006 with a combination of different open source web development tools (moodle and joomla) .. and now they’ve built in other things like google calendars and regular skype meetings.

i told people about one of our (PRACE) new “e-business” strategies, moving the website from the old-style Dreamweaver/FTP model across to content management using Wordpress. (Not yet launched, but a sneak preview here.)

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‘Mainstreaming e-learning in ACE: is it an impossible dream?’, presented by Mary Hannan, Josie Rose, Lynne Gibb, Denece Sippo, Stuart Jones, Michael Chalk and Myra Cake.

This Adult Community Education session with practitioners from across Australia was held 3.30pm Wed 12Nov. You’ll find a link to the recording via http://snipr.com/e-ace (registration req’d i think

It was part of “inspiring innovations” – a huge online conference on the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, 11-12 Nov.

(From the publicity blurb: Inspiring Innovations: national e-learning highlights online mini-conference ..showcase strategies and innovative examples for embedding e-learning ..across Australia ..include a program of 14 synchronous (live, real-time) web conferencing sessions ..
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image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: Andrew* .. and also photo credit: greyhound dad

Chris couldn’t do the whole research project, but i still wanted her to be involved; so we talked about how to use audio technologies with her very beginner, low literacy ESL learners.

Filling in forms is a crucial survival skill, but the language is reasonably advanced. Chris’ students find it hard to remember written text or even recognise words on the page.. so we decided to prepare an audio CD allowing the text to be both on the page and on the CD player. She would have them do the activity in class, and then repeat it at home later.

So Chris sat down with the portable mp3 gadget (iRiver T30), and recorded three separate texts. Today i had a go at editing the texts into three tracks for a CD. We decided there needs to be a small “Track #” announcement for each track, eg “Filling in Forms, Track One”.

Then we got more ambitious and thought it would be nice to have some music backing the track .. and to signal the beginning of each new track. So i hunted for a while, and found Jamendo .. a really great music site, where you can download full albums that are licensed under creative commons. We settled on some pieces by Maya Filipic.

ome quick editing in Audacity, and three tracks are ready to go.

Later on, Chris told me that her students really enjoyed the activities and found the whole process very useful. Great!

Afterthought:

A whole CD, for just nine minutes of spoken voice.

Would be great if some of the students have bluetooth phones .. so we can beam the audio through the air for their takeaway convenience (and saving us the 80c cost of a CD). But let’s face it, these people wouldn’t find it easy to play audio tracks from a phone. Even playing a CD on a stereo could be challenging.

photo credit: dorotea… (Thanks!)

The fabulous choc-o-Nancy White was speaking about all manner of things today, including:

• how to facilitate in a massive online course, and the implications of trust in large networks;
• the range of identity and boundary from the personal, through communities to networks;
• new and emerging roles and practices;
• the value of “appreciative change”, which is related to the appreciative inquiry championed by Marie Jasinski and Maret Staron in ’07 research. Recognise people’s strengths as a starting point for the learning process.

Ideas came up around the responsibility of adult learners in a course such as this. In small groups teaching adult literacy, for example, we might gradually teach people how to become more responsible for their own learning, through explicit instruction, groupwork activities and reflective discussion.

But here, in a massive course involving educators, there was a suggestion earlier that participants would already have the skills of self-directed learning. Is this true, and would it change the demands on our facilitators? Of course it would .. in this environment you model other ways to cross-connect, eg forums, comments on blogs, using the chat in live sessions etc ..

Here are Nancy’s slides:

Christy Tucker posted her summary of the earlier session;
and so did Diego Leal.

Thanks to all these people for sharing their knowledge ;-]