electro-textual

Inspiring adventures from Dale Pobega of Duke St community centre in Sunshine Victoria, who has recently started using blogger to engage and educate his English as a second language (ESL) students.

Great to see Dale using the tremendous resource “Online Banking“. This resource came out of Olympic Adult Education about 6 years ago, and remains one of the best online resources for adult numeracy.

There’s a few broken elements on the site (eg the bulletin board no longer exists, and the sim bank doesn’t work).. but much of it works as intended. You can also still order the accompanying booklets from Olympic Adult Education (i think, via this page).

While you’re following Dale’s ESL blog, look out for the way he uses Voxopop with his students.. very encouraging use of a good technology.

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Question for readers: what’s the best numeracy resource you’ve found online?

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Links:

• Dale’s ESL Blog
• The online banking learning resource from ..
• Olympic Adult Education
• Dale in the ACE e-learning Ning social networking place (login req’d).
• my delicious links for numeracy.

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photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: Kevin Steele.

At the recent ACE e-showcase, Michael Gwyther from YUM productions gave a great account of how they have used web2 technologies in one of their multimedia courses. Here’s the list of tools they’ve used:

1. Blog
2. Social Bookmarks (delicious)
3. RSS Feeds
4. Podomatic
5. Slideshare
6. Flickr
7. Video
8. RSS Feed reader! (Bloglines)

The key for Michael is RSS feeds. As multiple students post their course reflections and assignments to their blog, he is able to read the updates from a single place .. his RSS feed reader.

For a feed reader, i like google reader, but michael prefers bloglines. (There are so many options.)

Whatever works for you and your learners is the best choice!

i liked michael’s comment that when most people hear the word “feed” they think oats and hay.

Here are some of the web addresses michael handed out:

• Class blog: c2mm.blogspot.com
• Gwyther social bookmarks delicious.com/mgwyther
• Class podcast: elearn.podomatic.com

Plus (mildly related):

• here’s my own “shared items” from google reader,
• and my “social” bookmarks on delicious (which isn’t really very social).

PS: What exactly is RSS? => i have some notes over on my wikispace.
This video from Common Craft is also one of the best explanations around:

PS i’m sorry i refuse to say web 2.0. It’s a waste of time. We’re not getting web 2.1, so for me it’s just web2. Okay?

photo credit: Colleen AF Venable

Browsing the Radio national podcasts, i found this interview and panel discussion:

“Author and media analyst Margaret Simons takes a stab at defining the different types of blogs that currently exist.” (The interview follows an article in Creative Economy, where you’ll find relevant other links.)

1) Pamphleteering - often political blogs are like this, with many authors.
2) Digest blog, which aggregates and comments on a range of other stuff, eg from other blogs or from mainstream media.
3) Advocacy, eg telstra – where the company gets their workers to post the company line in an informal blogging style.
4) Popular mechanics, or how-to. Sue Waters on edublogs would be a good example of this.
5) Exhibition – by craftspeople and artists, writers, poets etc.
6) Gatekeeper .. watching the media as it reports the news (eg possum comitatus beats up the Australian on its newspoll reporting).
7) Diary – possibly the majority (family snapshots and life) .. in decline because of social networking sites (myspace, facebook etc).
Advertisement .. created by companies, thinly veiled, pretend blogs.
9) News blog, eg crikey.

(Direct link to mp3 here: Media Report .. interview with Margaret Simons .. but i still can’t get the player to work .. )

i love the way the abc has their audio accompanied by a transcript – how useful for higher level literacy learners!! (as well as people like me who have trouble with active listening.)

The interview was followed by a panel discussion on the perceived lack of civility online, with Andrew Bartlett (Australian Democrats), George Megalogenis (political writer) and Laurel Papworth (blogger).

George says one of his posts drew in bullies from both sides of politics (the “usual suspects”), hogging the space and leading to less diversity in comments. He went out on a limb and said, “Enough” .. which led to many more comments than ever before. People who came on to discuss the type of blog they wanted to read were much more the kind of readers he wanted to engage with.

Andrew says that he already gets plenty of people shouting slogans at each other in the Senate, and wants more diversity and nuance in comments to his blog. Real “battle to get a civil discussion place”.

How can we silence the trolls? Fascinating discussion .. have a listen.

Laurel aka Silkcharm also blogged the event, and noted a couple of blog genres missing from the taxonomy: event blogs and education or course blogs

She also makes some strong points on the differences between blogs and social networking sites. Without embedding some special kind of commenting system (eg Disqus), a blogger cannot build individual profiles on the people in their audience.

PS: Thanks Laurel for your rapid comment. Much appreciated!

photo credit: dkalo

Over at PRACE, we’ve been upgrading our website to wordpress, so that a range of people may author and edit content on the site. Yes it’s taken me quite some time to finally get the thing ready to show other co-ordinators, but it’s a lot of fun to work with the new system.

It’s meant i’ve had to upgrade the wordpress on this site, to find out more about how it all works. (Upgrading is an adventure in itself.)

.. and now, the editing (wysiwyg) toolbars don’t really work, the photodropper plugin doesn’t work .. but version 2.5 is much better than 2.03. (Oh, and now it’s time to upgrade again .. across 3 separate sites.)

What are the literacies involved here? A mix of grappling with the technology, and also with the language involved:

• Knowing how to author a document for the web environment;
• Being able to write for multiple audiences ..
• Knowing how to navigate not just an ordinary website, but a content-authoring system;
• Being open to ‘flexible layout’ .. realising that images won’t sit exactly where you want them ..
• Knowing what it means to “optimise” an image, and how to manage that technically;
• Managing relationships between authors and audience;
• Knowing about copyright, and permission to use images ..
• and much more

Oh look! The photodropper plugin does work! Terrific.
Think i’ve managed to fix all those problems between the first draft and publishing ;-]
photo credit: Gungde

At last, the guys from Common Craft have done a video how-to on the topic of blogging. Their visual approach is stunning, engaging and really clever – worth emulating. Thanks and well done.

This is a blog post about blogging. (oh-oh … eyes roll)

No, actually the point i want to make is about using visuals. This slideshow presentation uses cartoons to make a series of points .. and it’s very effective. Think you can’t draw? Well, how sophisticated are the visuals here, really?

Similar points to the ones Sue Waters makes over here.

See i don’t do any of the things recommended, which is why i’m writing for myself. Ha ha. At least i enjoy writing.

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Adult learners are starting to get into Self-Publishing (aka blogging).

and Barbara Dieu, a Brazilian educator, has set up an Exchange for ESL students around the world. With two colleagues, she has found a way to gather and re-publish the writings of students who have blog journals in their ESL classes.

(This re-publishing is known as ‘aggregation’.)

The site is called Dakita (i don’t know why), and the collection of student writings you’ll find in The Orchard (or The Exchange). Worth a look, especially if you’re thinking of using blogs in class.

.. michael