Archive for May, 2010
Under Construction
I’ve started to build the repository for the Immersion Quest Curriculum. It will be at least a week before there is any content to look at, but in fairly short order it’ll be possible to get a sense of the overall vision of the project in action.
Five Observations
I started the Immersion Quest Project at the beginning of May. It was always my intention to use this first month to primarily absorb as much as I could related to the goal of creating a comprehensive standards-based open source ESL/EFL curriculum for young learners. If you were going to apply the paradigm of the writing process, the stage I’ve been in is essentially the pre-writing step of ”brainstorming.” This is reflected in all the different threads of ideas I’ve explored that have gone in widely varying directions. I’ve deliberately sought out more questions than answers, but in June I’m going to shift to the “drafting” step and focus on building out the repository for the IQ ESL/EFL Curriculum.
Here are my top five observations (and not necessarily conclusions) gleaned from my activities this month, in no particular order:
1) Although closely related, there seems to be very little functional overlap between the worlds of ELL and ESL/EFL.
2) Presentation matters, even with free online content, and while there’s a lot of crap, there’s also quite a bit of really good stuff freely available… if you take the time to look for it, which isn’t always easy to do. Given all the amazing resources buried in poorly organized and/or defunct websites all across the internet, a well-designed custom search engine- especially one that searched the Internet Archive- would be an extremely useful tool.
3) In support of the previous point, the two most exciting open educational resources currently out there, Tar Heel Reader and the Khan Academy, are remarkably utilitarian in form and function, and all the more impressive because they are essentially unpaid labors of love by their creators.
4) There are currently no online flash card systems that fully meet the needs of young English learners. To qualify for that distinction, a system would have to a) allow for spaced-repetition-enabled multi-sided cards with flexible options for mapping relationships between knowledge and representational elements in the forms of text, images, sounds, video and speech recognition, b) be printable, shareable, embeddable, and collaboration-enabled, and c) be integrated into robust testing and game-based practice systems that work on all browsers. Quizlet, FunnelBrain and Anki all provide the “best-in-class” functionality for different pieces of what I just described.
5) There is remarkably little genuinely practical free advice for Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL), so blogs like Carol Read’s ABC of Teaching Children, Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto’s Teaching Village and Jason Renshaw’s English Raven blogs really stand out.
Just came across this today in another blog/link meander, but Salman Khan is doing- albeit with a current emphasis primarily on math and science (and Napoleon)- almost exactly what I envision doing for ESL/EFL with the Immersion Quest Project.
Just like the Tar Heel Readers with beginning readers, his video tutorials are highly functional, engaging, content-rich and free. With some 1400+ videos currently uploaded over 4 years, he clearly is a guy that gets on with getting on to the utilitarian stuff without a whole lot of fuss.
I can honestly say the following video gave me very practical insight into how online content should be put together. When he notes how essentially unscripted he is going into a problem/focus presented in a given video, it’s an observation that absolutely resonates. I’ll expand on why in a follow-up post.
Formative Assessment
It is fitting the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” has an uncertain origin. Although popularly attributed to Disraeli, primarily because Mark Twain said so, a simple Google search returns a number of web pages that do a good job of casting doubt on him being the first to coin the phrase.
Speaking of statistics, in my previous life as a business planning, forecasting and analysis manager within a multi-billion dollar company, I was frequently amazed at how many otherwise very sharp individuals would take “data” at the asserted face value without really questioning how it was calculated or arrived at. One might say it’d be “common sense” to at least try to understand the assumptions and definitions used in a given metric.
However, even “common sense” can be wrong. Take, for example, the Monty Hall Problem. As described in Marilyn vos Savant’s Ask Marilyn column in Parade Magazine:
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which he knows has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
The “common sense” response by most people is that it shouldn’t matter which of the two remaining doors you choose, the odds are going to be 50/50 either way, right?
Wrong.
The correct answer is you should switch your choice. When you do, the mathematical odds increase from the 1 in 3 of your original selection to 2 in 3. For a complete explanation of why, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem.
It might seem I am making an argument against the use of statistics, but nothing of the sort. The point of all of the above is to illustrate why I think teachers should stop and think for a while about the assumptions we make when it comes to understanding and articulating student performance in our classrooms. I hope to convince you, if you haven’t already, to spend some time validating the measurements you use on a daily basis.
For example, can you define with any sort of precision the difference between an intermediate and advanced student, or whatever equivalent in your level system? How do you measure progress over time? What does it mean when a student has difficulty spelling? Or consistently doesn’t pay attention in class? If two students get the same score on a test, even the same pattern of answers, can you safely assume they’re at the same point of achievement? For that matter, when you do an assessment, what are you actually testing? Do you know the necessary learning outcomes for your students in their contexts? And how do you get there? Do you know the learning styles of your students well enough to meaningfully personalize instruction? How much time do you spend observing and noting the performance of your students as they are engaged in the process of learning?
Summative assessment can be defined as measurements of outcome. Formative assessment, on the other hand, involves creating a framework to understand the journeys of students towards given outcomes in real-time so that meaningful “mid-course” corrections can be made. I believe that continuous formative assessment is one of the key responsibilities of teachers. I also think it’s something not as well understood as it needs to be.
In order to successfully do effective formative assessment, you have to be able to articulate actionable definitions for different kinds of observable behavior related to “how” and “why” individual learners react and perform as they do in different situations, individually or collectively.
A good deal of research has been done into how the brain learns. What that research shows is that within the overall neural structure of the brain there are three primary learning networks: recognition, strategic and affective. “Recognition” is the “what,” “strategic” is the “how,” and “affective” is the “why.” Although the three systems work together, to what degree for each varies within each individual. It’s like a fingerprint, no two are the same. (A very good discussion of how the brain learns can be found here.)
And therein lies the rub of teaching as a profession, both the beauty and the challenge of the field. It’s never truly the same for different learners, even if on the surface it appears to be, because if you drill down far enough you quickly discover that every learner is in fact unique.
Another brilliant TED talk from Sir Ken Robinson about education:
The City of CleverKey
Jason Renshaw has started to post ESL/EFL content from his excellent English Raven subscription-based website onto his blog. These had previously been member-only resources, but now he’s making them available for free.
The most recent offering is the City of Cleverkey, which is an activity that allows students to “build their own city” and use it for a variety of tasks and purposes. I first used CleverKey in 2005, and for a couple of years was one of my favorite activities to do with my elementary-aged students.
I’m very happy to see it as a free resource. Kudos to him for doing this.
Zooburst
While I continue to brush up on my JavaScript skills, here’s a fantastic new site I came across while blog surfing for creating augmented reality 3D pop-up books called Zooburst. Check it out:
Very, very cool stuff.
Voice Recognition for ESL/EFL
Last night, I read a post on EFL Classroom 2.0 about Quizlet’s new voice recognition games for flashcards. I checked them out, and they’re pretty good at what they are designed to do. If you want a demonstration, take a look at the video overview Dave (of EFL Classroom 2.0) put together about them, or sign-up for Quizlet and check them out yourself. What I want to talk about, however, is the underlying technology.
The Quizlet games are based on the WAMI Javascript voice recognition API from MIT. This API is freely available for anyone to add speech capabilities to any webpage with a little bit of coding. You can check out some example applications and see for yourself. I don’t claim to be anything more than a neophyte programmer, but I was able to follow the code and the logic of the JSGF grammar for the voice recognition functionality without that much difficulty.
I signed up for a developer’s key (free) and plan to sit down tomorrow to see if I can’t put together a simple voice recognition “Simon Says” game for my next blog post as a demonstration.
The potential applications of a free and easy to program voice recognition system are endless, and of incredible potential value for ESL/EFL. One application in particular immediately jumps to mind for fluency development practice, but I’ll keep it under wraps until I have something to show. I will note that Quizlet also has a free API for developer use. Since they claim to have a database of 30 million flashcards available to mine, it would be a treasure trove of content to use in a wide variety of speaking-related activities.
Both the 114 page draft of the National Education Technology Plan and the what came to 44 printed pages of public comments about it made for interesting reading. There are a number of points I’d like to make in response, but beyond noting I agree with almost all the recommendations contained in the report, I’m going to limit myself to an issue that didn’t really get discussed, and that is global comparatives. I can’t help but feel that the NETP essentially tap-dances around one very obvious conclusion when it comes comparing K-12 education in America to other countries: whatever the mode, whatever the style, results will still come down to the efforts of the students.
Although one of the primary justifications for this clarion call of “revolutionary” and “urgent” change to education in America is global competitiveness as measured by ranking in the world in terms of academic achievement, there’s very little comparative analysis of what higher-performing countries are doing to drive their results. I think it’s a useful question to ask what America can learn from how other countries organize their educational spaces, and I find it more than a little odd that there seems to be very little outward-looking curiosity about it to be found in American educational circles. I’m sure the authors of the NETP are aware of what is happening in education around the world, but the fact that there’s so little commentary on the issue to be found in the report is telling about the presumed mentality of the intended audience. The fact not one of the public comments from that audience mentions other countries except to echo the need to be number one seems to bear the assumption out.
There is a brief observation on page 69 that “American students spend significantly less time in the classroom than do students in many other countries…” which would seem to lead to the conclusion that American students need to spend more time in school. However, the report goes into some detail (Executive Summary, page X) to debunk the usefulness of “seat-time” as a meaningful performance metric, so there has to be more to what these countries do, right?
Nope.
Although I can’t speak to what Norway or other Western countries are doing, I do have a fair amount of experience in East Asian countries that consistently out-perform the United States at all levels of K-12 on academic achievement measurements. I can safely assert that the children in these countries aren’t inherently any smarter, nor the pedagogy any more innovative, nor the schools better funded or resourced. (Although almost every school in Japan and South Korea is broadband-enabled.) In South Korea, to drill down, elementary school class sizes are 36, classes are “teacher-centered” and continue to rely heavily on textbook-based rote learning. There is some accomodation for learning differences, but it’s limited. Educational outcomes- including getting into high school and university- are ultimately almost entirely determined by scores on uniform standardized tests. I also feel safe in stating the reason why South Korean and Japanese schoolchildren across the economic spectrum in the average outperform their American counterparts is almost entirely predicated on the difference in the hours invested into their studies: the children in these countries simply spend a lot more of their time studying.
This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of problems with the East Asian approach to education, there are, nor am I advocating for the United States to adopt an East Asian educational model. The conclusion that “effort” is the differentiator is fairly straightforward, but stepping through the cultural dynamics to arrive at “why” is a complex issue that may not easily translate across national boundaries. (Nor am I entirely sure I completely understand all the involved factors well enough to not get myself in trouble when speaking to the “why.”)
I do know, however, that these countries are just as keenly aware of global competitiveness as anyone else, and they are looking very closely at learning theory and practices from around the world to inform what they do. Significant numbers of Koreans, Japanese and Chinese are studying education in the United States, Canada and Europe. And they’re bringing home what they’ve learned. Improved educational approaches combined with the already existing “sweat equity” of the students is going to make it very difficult for the United States to close the achievement gap, even with “revolutionary” new approaches, if students can’t be motivated to work hard at their educations. And although the probability of it happening is an open question given the vested interests and institutional inertia of American education, if the recommendations of the NETP are implemented, they will go a long way to providing meaningful opportunity for students. It’s unfortunately another open question whether or not the students and teachers currently not being well-served by the system will make the effort in the critical-mass numbers needed to break the culture of failure too prevalent in too many American schools.
Changing the IQ Curriculum Repository
I’ve decided to change the platform for curriculum.immersionquest.net from semantic-mediawiki (SMW) to the upcoming drupal 7.0 CMS. There are a variety of reasons, but primarily because much of the functionality I want out of SMW requires command line access to the server, and I’m currently on a shared host that doesn’t allow it.
A combination of Drupal 7.0 and OpenCalais provides much of the semantic search functionality I want integrated. Calais is “a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application. ” It has plugins for both wordpress and drupal, which makes it very convenient cross-platform, and I’ve already updated the metadata of this blog with it.
So, revisiting the vision document:
1) Curriculum Repository –> immersionquest.org/curriculum.immersionquest.net –> Drupal 7.0
2) Blog –> blog.immersionquest.net –> self-hosted WordPress
3) Standalone Content/Tools –> immersionquest.net –> TBD
4) School –> school.immersionquest.net –> Currently doing comparative analysis of Moodle 2.0 and ATutor 2.0