Modern learning experiences... repeatability...?

In the H817 MOOC, and everything else written about connectivist teaching, there is an evident strand of frustration among the proponents of connectivism that other teachers just don't "get it" and aren't buying into this new trend.

George Siemens claims that connectivism is a pedadogy for the internet age, as opposed to everything else which is pre-internet pedagogy crammed into an internet-shaped package.  Leaving aside the obvious criticism (that the human brain has not evolved since Tim Berners Lee first pinged his server), the real question is whether their successes (if they were indeed successes) are repeatable.

Since the start of the H817 course, I have been trying to remember the name of a guy I read about on Slashdot over a year ago... and funnily enough I never thought to check my bookmarks, and when I went looking for another bookmark today, voilà! Michael Wesch.

Wesch proposed a model of teaching based on social media and interactions.  He did it in his classroom and had great results.  He gave talks, he wrote articles, he encouraged other people to apply his techniques.  He was a teaching technology evangelist.

But eventually he stopped evangelising his techniques because the feedback he got from other teachers was that they weren't working.  There was something missing, some kind of magic that he hadn't included in his instructions.  And of course people with completely different techniques were getting results that were as good as his.

So he's stopped evangelising.

The important thing is the connection between the teacher and the student, and that's not down to the technology.  In fact, I would say that the technology has to follow as part of the teacher's passion and way of thinking.  What does that mean?  I haven't a bloody clue.  And neither does anybody, or that mystery -- "wonder" in Wesch's word -- of teacher/student rapport would be formulisable, and therefore teachable.  And if it was teachable, Wesch would have been able to teach people how to teach with technology.

When discussing language learning with other learners, I have always made a strong distinction between "what you do when you are learning" and "how you learn".

What I mean by this is that when someone does a series of grammar drills from a book, we cannot say that those drills are directly causing them to learn.  In fact, for every person who appears to learn successfully from such a book, you will find another half-dozen who fail to learn from exactly the same book.  Therefore we have to conclude that looking at the book's activities only gives us a very superficial view of the learning process.  We have to attempt to analyse the difference in approach between the successful and the unsuccessful learner.

But these approaches are very poorly understood and documented and very rarely taught.  The successful language learner's natural and intuitive learning process is not available to be repeated, so the method doesn't improve.

As soon as I started training to teach English, I quickly came to the conclusion that the same distinction affected language teaching techniques.  Everything in the how-to-teach books struck me as "what to do when you are teaching" rather than specifically "how to teach".  None of the activities really taught the language, and yet these books were written by very successful teachers.  They must have constructed sophisticated teaching styles and structures unconsciously, or their students would be failing -- it's just a shame they don't know what that is, or they could tell us.

The more and further I read into teaching, the more I find that this isn't specific to language teaching.  Don't get me wrong -- it's really not as bad in most fields as it is in language, but there is still a huge conceptual gap between "classroom activities"/"what I do" and "teaching"/"how I teach".

The connectivists are a prime example -- they give a list of fuzzy... I don't know, stuff; guidelines and that sort of thing, and a couple of fuzzy justifications for why it should work, but they simply do not give enough information to make it repeatable.  It's "what" not "how", "activity" not "teaching".

And right now the world is full of people trying to replicate the "MOOC", and as Siemens and Cormier are only too happy to tell us, they're doing it wrong.

Well, maybe that's because Siemens and Cormier haven't told us how to do it right.

And the most likely reason for that is simply that they do not know how to do it right.

Decoo's wheel turns again....

I'm always referring to it, but everyone with an interest in language should read Wilfried Decoo's lecture "On The Mortality Of Language Learning Methods".  By his reckoning, the latest "new" popular movement in teaching is long overdue.  (The fact that the communicative approach is still king is probably due to its prevalence in TEFL, and the fact that anything else takes longer to train teachers to do.)
And one candidate is starting to emerge.  There are whispers of "social media" echoing round the classroom.
Not that long ago, the watchword was "web", but what became of that?  Certainly, the web gives us more access to more materials, but what we've seen to date is either simply the existing textbook styles rewrapped as webpages with automatic marking of exercises or a rapackaging of 90s style multimedia packages.
Digitised textbooks have their advantages over the paper textbook (no fiddling with the CD player to find the right track, instant feedback on many errors) at the expense of being something you couldn't just sit down and do on the train.
The multimedia websites, on the other hand, offer very little over the old CD-ROMs, but are a lot slower to use due to constant downloading of materials in between questions.  And I can shove a CD-ROM in my laptop on the train, but I won't be able to get a connection to the internet without running up a fairly hefty 3G bill.

But the "social media" thing is starting to kick in.  LiveMocha is a clone of the overpriced toy courses by Rosetta Stone, but they had the idea to get learners correcting each other's work.  This is not an innovation in any real sense, it's just a poor man's version of paying a tutor.  Of course, Rosetta Stone decided to jump on the social bandwagon too, and started setting up a language buddy/exchange site.  Reports have it that the demographics are heavily skewed and it's difficult to find language buddies for many language combinations.
Steve Kaufmann's Lingq has taken the social approach down a different track.  The website provides a shiny interface that doesn't really do much and gets people to insert screeds and screeds of texts with audio in various languages, and the user is expected to learn by induction from massive exposure.  I don't buy the argument.  The interface doesn't do much to guide me and the quality of the material varies wildly, with some people even just uploading lists of words, contrary to the site's main philosophy.  But this is starting to get away from the notion of "social", and more into the realms of "crowdsourcing".   It's only the credits-based correction system that retains any sort of "social" status, but even that's starting to stretch definitions a bit.

Tatoeba is unashamed crowdsource.  It's a very intriguing idea: a bunch of sentences undergoing unstructured translation from one language to another, and another, and another.  In mathematical terms, they describe it as a "graph" rather than a "table", a concept which probably merits a blog post to itself.  I love it, and I find it a great exercise to translate stuff from various languages into Scottish Gaelic, as it gets me thinking about things I might not otherwise, and helps me identify holes in my abilities.  That said, it's difficult to see what you can actually do with all that data.  It has no concept of grammatical syntagms or paradigms, so you can't search for a structure and see examples of it.

But all these things -- web, social or crowdsource -- have one thing in common: they're outside the classroom.  The internet is a solo phenomenon -- why would anyone work the web in the classroom?  You might as well be at home!
Perhaps the biggest problem with computer-based learning is that it's all independent, so we can all make excuses and slack off.  Maybe we'll start writing a blog post instead of studying, and we'll pretend to ourselves we're doing something productive....

But anyway, all that notwithstanding, there are still people who dream about getting social media into the classroom as an article in today's Guardian shows.
The justification for a focus on social media is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-sequitur:

We are late to the party. Children now default to social media in nearly every aspect of their life. They use it to communicate with their friends, play games and watch TV. Our failure to provide language learning resources must partly be due to teachers and parents who either don't appreciate or don't understand the power of social media.

To paraphrase: kids use it outside the class, so we must use it inside the class.  But what of all the other things kids use outside the classroom?  When I was a child, did the teachers use BMX bikes and Action Man to teach us stuff?  No.  They used TV to an extent, but even then it generally had the goal of making up for the classroom teacher's defiencies -- most primary teachers don't know much science, for example, so we watched a weekly science programme.  So TV wasn't used because it was "what the kids use" but because it was the appropriate tool for the job.  Any attempt to crowbar teaching into social media for its own sake is likely to be as successful as any other attempt adults make to "get down with the kids", and it will just look patronising.
At the end of the article, the author gives "Five ways you can start to engage with your pupils on social media", and if the term "engage with" doesn't immediately turn you off, you'll discover that once again, the "method" is not led by pedagogy, but by technology:

1. Create a Facebook page that your class can 'like'. Start posting updates to your timeline, but not in English. Ask your pupils to translate the text using Facebook's in-line Bing translation tool and ask them to gauge its accuracy.

It looks to me like it's a matter of "it's there so we'll use it" -- correction is an occassional exercise in most classrooms, but here it's being promoted as part of the routing.  Because it's there.
(This may actually be counterproductive -- why draw students' attention to the ubiquity of free translation tools if you're trying to demonstrate to them the value of learning a language?)

2. Create a Twitter account. Start tweeting in a foreign language, keeping in mind that you have a 140 character limit, and see if your pupils can strike up a conversation with you. Impose a non-English only reply and retweet rule.

Nothing of note - nothing groundbreaking.  Write stuff.  But short.  OK.  Understood.  But what stage do you get to in school language before you're able to write over 140 characters anyway.  (See also "idiographic languages"...)

3. Create a YouTube account. Ask each of your pupils to record a video blog, or 'vlog', of their hobbies, thoughts or opinions on topical news stories, but speaking only in a foreign language. Those who want to have their video uploaded should send it to you first.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see any teaching goal that is achieved by putting these on public display on YouTube.  In fact, as a student it would horrify me to think that my errors would be on show, but then I'd probably feel browbeaten into agreeing, seeing as everyone else is doing it.
Why is this any better than setting a spoken homework task that only the teacher and/or the class sees?

4. Create a Pinterest account. Take some pictures of prompt cards, post-it notes or even objects with their description in another language and 'pin' them on your boards. You could even look for photos of the country, or infographics about languages in general, to help your pupils understand more about why they should learn it.

I can't imagine this getting much use.  What is the student's goal in using the pinboard?  Why would I go to it?  What on Earth could you put on it that would grab enough attention to make the endeavour worthwhile?

5. Create a blog or Tumblr. Dedicate it entirely to publishing content in the language you teach. Show your pupils why you love the language and inspire them to do the same. Ask them to write something, however small, and post it for the whole world to admire.

All well and good in a liberal arts atmosphere, but like the videos, where's the innovative step between this and written homework?  Besides, as a learner and a teacher, I prefer much more closely directed work.  Why?  Am I a tyrant?  Hell no.  An open task normally leads to either getting stuck in a rut using the same old "safe" language items over and over again, or frequent overreaching by trying to say something that you haven't been taught yet.
As a learner, that frustrates me.  As a teacher, it makes things harder to mark.  What feedback do you give in the latter case?  Do you write five or six lessons worth of teaching?  Do say just mark it as wrong and say you haven't done that yet?

So I don't think social media's a great answer for the teacher, really.  A fantastic resource for the independent learner, yes.  A great way of maintaining a language in the absence of other contact, yes.  But an important component of the modern classroom, no.


Edit 11/04/2012: Tatoeba's actually better than I thought.  The search engine may not be as flexible or as specific as true corpus concordancing software, but it's pretty powerful, as the docs indicate.  There's a "proximity operator" in there, so you can look for co-occurring words even if you don't have the exact phrase.  Nifty.

Community of slaves?  LiveMocha's new business model charges for free labour.

LiveMocha started out on shaky ground -- free courses with free help through the power of Web 2.0 and social networking.  The scope for monetarisation was always limited, and initially they seemed to expect to make their money through targeted advertising.  For what?  Well, the only known factor about their audience was that they wanted to learn specific languages.  Unfortunately, the sort of people who look for free online language courses aren't generally that interested in paying for commercial language books.

The second side to LM's monetarisation was their so-called "premium packages".  These premium packages basically consisted of the same material in an off-line format for MP3 players and iPhones.  Considering the low quality of the LiveMocha material, it wasn't a brilliant deal.

However, "free" is a great price, and LiveMocha's strength wasn't in the quality of the material, but in the availability of the chat facilities and corrections from native speakers, so they built up a large user base and had to monetarise it one way or another, and from that came their tie-up with Harper Collins to launch their
"Active" language course range.  When they launched it, they took down the existing free courses for English, French, German, Italian and Spanish -- easily the most requested five languages on the site.

Ok, so they have a right to stop doing stuff free, but the problem is they're still expecting their customers to do their marking for them.  I logged into LiveMocha for the first time in months and suddenly I'm getting requests to mark material that others are paying to do... but I'm to mark it for free.  I don't have access to this sort of task for the languages I'm learning, either.

I'm not impressed.  The price they charge is quite high (and you pay per month, not once per course, which I find interesting) yet they expect people to work for free, not even for any sort of credits (or at least, not yet.)

To me that's abuse of the community, and a quick way to kill any goodwill they may have accumulated up to now.