LING 797 Research Presentation

The link to my video presentation can be found here. The actual research paper is available here on Google Docs.

At least the Citeulike staff care...

So my saved articles from Citeulike inexplicably got deleted twice and I ranted about that here. I don't know how, but two Citeulike representatives (Kevin and Chris) took the time to e-mail me and figure out what was going on. They even retrieved my articles! I was quite impressed by their politeness and professionalism. It turns out that my articles were an unintentional casualty of spam removal or something.

Anyway, I will give credit where credit is due and comment the good folks at Citeulike for standing with their users and customers.

Thanks.

I hate Citeulike

For whatever reason, all of my Citeulike sites have disappeared.

That is the second time that has happened. Now I have to find all of those articles AGAIN. Fortunately I have the authors' names, but I am sick of having to find all those sites and add them to this library again if it's only going to disappear. Why can't Citeulike save my library?

This is one example of how technology is more trouble than it's worth. I would have been better off just using bookmarks.

Bah.

Mini-Project 3

This is the link to the Mini-Project 3 video.

This is the Mini-Project 3 Japanese-English script.

Here is the Mini-Project 3 purpose statement (also available on Google Docs here).

This is a video detailing my dream life. I talk my students through my perfect day from waking up to going to bed. After each event in which I describe an activity I engage in, I ask the same question to the students. The target language generally consists of yes-no and wh-questions:

What time do you wake up?
Do you have a pet? What’s its name?
What’s your favorite television show?
Do you play a musical instrument?
What kind of music do you like?

This video is presented entirely in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. No jargon or slang is used. It is designed primarily for low intermediate students who are familiar with the traditional phonetic Japanese scripts as well as some basic kanji (pictographs).

There are several possible activities that could be done in conjunction with this video:

1. Students could watch the entire video and be asked comprehension questions either after each scene or at the end. (skills practiced: speaking and listening, and/or listening and writing)

2. Students could ask each other the questions posed in the video as they are presented. I model how to answer these questions prior to asking them. Students could also ask as many questions as they can remember after watching the entire video. (skills practiced: speaking and listening)

3. More advanced students could watch the video with the sound muted. Only the subtitles will be visible. These students could then be tasked with quickly and accurately reading the subtitles before they change. (skills practiced: reading and speaking)

4. Cloze-type exercises could be given in which students must say or fill in the missing word from the subtitles. This would require the instructor to have the subtitles printed out with the appropriate gaps. (skills practiced: listening, reading and speaking)

5. More advanced students could develop a set of follow-up questions to ask each other based on my original questions. Or they could find a partner who is imitating “me” and ask their follow-up questions to "me." (skills practiced: speaking and listening)

6. Students could engage in speculative language about the feasibility of such a life or what my job could be, for example. (skills practiced: speaking and listening)

Thoughts on mobile technology

This week we learned about podcasting, vodcasting, and mobile technology. I think this has a lot of potential in the classroom, but it would require a cultural shift in how we view the purposes of these technological devices. For example, people tend to think of iPods as devices for listening to music or downloading their favorite television shows. In other words, it's used mainly for entertainment. Using this as an educational device seems a bit too much to ask for now.

I'm not sure teenagers or college students could do it or would want to do it. Asking them to transform an iPod from a video library to a smaller version of a language lab tape player seems a bit too optimistic.

Having said that, podcasting allows for maximum flexibility in that people can download and listen to podcasts on their own schedule. But I think that users would be more likely to listen to these podcasts at their regular PCs, rather than on some mobile device.

I also think podcasting/vodcasting has to compete with the digital camera. Digital cameras are easier to use and are more familiar. Their accessibility gives them credence. Podcasting is new to a lot of people, including people who are familiar with technology, such as myself. You'd have to do a lot of training of teachers in addition to training the students before you could really implement this in the classroom.

And finally, I could comfortably assert that podcasting and mobile technology seems a bit more practical than Second Life!

Palmer on Podcasting

Second Life, but no second chance

The Second Life activities we conducted in class this week were both interesting and revealing. I had never heard of SL before, so I learned a lot from the readings and my presentation on the subject. It seemed like a visionary program that could potentially yield all sorts of rewards in the classroom, but when it came to the hands-on activities, I began to question its usefulness and practicality.

To start, there were problems downloading the SL client to the computers in the language lab. And seeing that these are university computers, it would seem that those computers would be of a higher quality than those that people have at home. The inability to download the client program consumed time that could have been better spent on another task.

When we did actually get to use the program in pairs and trios, I found that it was quite easy, if one wanted, to stray off task. Part of this is because of the novelty of it all. After all, how many people have created avatars and flown around a virtual world? But because of this fascination, I feel it may overshadow the language learning activities that are supposed to take place.

I also found SL a bit cumbersome to use. The controls felt awkward, and I wasn't quite sure how to navigate. I remember one student found a door that would presumably lead to another world. (It had an "exit" sign on it and other avatars were turning into sparkles when they touched it, as if they were being vacuumed or whisked away to the other side.) This student spent several minutes trying to go through the door and talk to people for clues. Keep in mind that these are reasonably tech-savvy university students. How could a digital immigrant navigate this?

To give SL a final chance, I tried downloading the SL client on my computer at home. I wanted to explore a bit more. I was successful, but could not open the program without crashing Windows. So that's when I decided to uninstall the program and take a pass on it for now.

This is not to say SL is worthless. It's probably quite fun and interactive. But as a tool for language learning, I believe it's more trouble than it's worth based on my experiences with it thus far.

Mini-Project 2

My second mini-project can be viewed here. A link is also on the right side of this page under the "assignments" heading.

Intercultural Communication

As the world becomes increasingly globalized, an increased emphasis should be placed on intercultural communication. The consequences for failing to communicate successfully across cultures could have disastrous consequences, especially given the rise of international business. So I think it's a good thing that researchers and educators are exploring this issue in greater depth.

I think one of the best ways to change your perspective on ICC is to study abroad or actually work abroad for an extended period of time. Because if you do that, then for what is likely the first time, you will be in an area where you, your culture, and your worldview will not be in the majority. So you will be forced to at least open your mind and learn a bit about how people of other cultures think and how they see things.

But not everyone has the luxury of being able to study abroad or take an overseas job. So what's needed is patience. And you have to be a bit proactive as well. There's a lot of mistrust between different groups, so an honest opening gesture or overture could go a long way towards dismantling stereotypes and barriers.

I also think we should focus more on our comfort levels than the actual dialogues themselves because if you have a rapport or the trust, then you will know that you should not assume bad intentions when there's a communication breakdown. Patience and trust will allow both the speaker and listener to cooperate and negotiate meaning together.

However, to be sure, repair strategies, recasts, and recul are indeed essential to successful ICC. The aspect of recul is probably more important for one's own personal development because it could make your future ICC interactions a bit more successful. However, is the goal of ICC to understand each other, or is it merely to avoid offending someone? If you believe it's the former, then recul is more important. If it's the latter, then mere tact and patience would probably suffice.

Research question

Here is my research question for the end-of-term research proposal:

1. To what extent does using instant messaging as opposed to flash cards (PowerPoint) influence learning Japanese vocabulary?

On Social Bookmarking

I like to think of social bookmarking as a way to make using websearches easier. When you go to Google's website to search for something, you often have to weed through a lot of old, tangential, inappropriate, or outdated sites in order to find the things you want. Social bookmarking is good because it allows you to visit sites that have been recommended by other real people who are interested in the same things. I think this could potentially allow websearchers to save time.

However, I'm not quite on board with the importance of sites like Digg or StumbleUpon or Citeulike because if you have reasonably strong computer skills, you are probably going to be able to find what you are looking for without the assistance of social bookmarking. We learned in this class the various ways of making your search strings more powerful, such as capitalizing certain words, adding quotes, and adding "OR" or "AND" strings.

Another disadvantage to social bookmarking is that even though they should theoretically make websearches more efficient, it's still maintained by people, and people are not always perfect. In other words, some sites might be improperly tagged, thus causing people to miss what they are looking for or to have to weed through something they're not looking for. In addition to this, who's to say that the popular site that you can find on Digg is a site that you in particular are interested in. With your own bookmarks in Internet Explorer or Firefox, you are the sole arbiter of which sites you want to provide quick access to via bookmarks and which sites don't quite make the cut.

Social bookmarking didn't really exist when I was an undergraduate, so I'm admittedly not quite on board when it comes to using this, either in my regular internet use or in the classroom. But maybe my opinion will change.

Blogs and Language

Blogs seem like a creative way to integrate technology into the classroom. Blogs allow for a sense of ownership, thus blog owners will be more apt to take their blog, their writing, and their overall product seriously. It's a reflection of themselves. And when another internet user leaves a comment on your blog, it is quite validating of your "worth" as a blogger.

Another advantage of blogging is that readers can easily track one's progress over time. Unless blog entries are set to private (which would defeat the purpose of using them in a language classroom), readers can easily see all previous entries and contrast those earlier entries with later ones. Students and readers may be surprised by how much the blog owner has improved regarding his or her language ability.

Because blogs are easily customizable, blog owners may be more interested in maintaining them because they can add their favorite pictures, You Tube videos, polls, etc. When you are interested in something, your performance improves. And if learning doesn't seem like learning, that would seem to make this a tool worth pursuing in a K-12 environment, where motivation is often a problem.

One of the disadvantages of blogs that should be of particular concern to K-12 teachers is the element of privacy. Anything on the internet is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. If a child blogger posts information on his blog that can identify his address or other personal information, that introduces risks that parents and instructors may find unacceptable. And what about strangers leaving comments on the blogs? This could be circumvented by changing the blogs' settings so that only registered users or particular users can access the blogs or leave comments.

Maybe this is one reason why I'm not much of a K-12 kind of guy, even though I've taught children English before...

Gender issues

For my research paper, I would like to examine gender differences in CALL. I studied psychology as an undergraduate and I remember taking a course called Psychology of Women. Hillary Clinton's candidacy also reminded me of this course.

Anyway, I'm interested in seeing how comfortable the different genders are with using technology and with performing in front of others face to face or over the computer. Will men be more self-conscious with making mistakes over the computer, or will women be more self-conscious performing in front of a group? Or will women do better because they can feed off of the other students in front of them? Or are there no differences at all?

Research and statistics show that women are increasingly likely to go to college and more likely to complete it than men, so this kind of research seems pertinent. I'm still working on the methodology right now, but I'm leaning towards reciting a foreign language dialogue over webcam, voice chat, and face to face and comparing fluency, hesitation devices, and accuracy.

My subjects for this study would be adults. I know there's a paucity of research regarding children, but my interest is not in K-12 teaching. I taught children when I lived in Japan and I gave it my best shot. But it's just not for me. I had fun sometimes, but I just didn't like the lack of control I had regarding criticism. Sometimes parents can be too bossy or stifling.

Have a good spring break, everyone.

Help Anthony win a scholarship!

My political blog has been selected as a finalist for a $2000 scholarship awarded by College Scholarships.org. But I need your help! Please visit this site and VOTE FOR ANTHONY PALMER! Please help a fellow USC and TIFLE student out! Tell your friends!

THANK YOU!

On Blogging

Blogs have become among my favorite ways to spend my time online. The number of blogs has exploded in recent years as more and more people become connected to the internet and advances in society and technology give people new subjects about which they can write on their blogs for everyone to see.

However, one major problem with blogs is that it's hard to determine which blogs are worth reading and which ones are better left alone. I suppose a lot of this depends on what you are looking for as a reader. Are you looking for factual content? Meaningful and insightful perspectives on current events in the news? Personal stories about someone's life? Firebrand commentary?

Because blogs are not really regulated (aside from comment moderation and posting access at times), it can be hard to filter out the good sites from the bad. So that's where technology comes in yet again. Sites like Technorati and Digg allow users to see how popular certain sites are, and allow the best or most provocative sites to "go viral" and become an internet phenomenon.

Technorati scours the internet to find out how many different sites link to one individual blog, thus leading to a calculation of "authority." Sites with higher authority are then seen as a bit more popular, and therefore more credible, than sites with lower authority. My political blog has an authority of 40. That's quite validating because when I first started blogging, nobody knew who I was, nor did anybody know if what I wrote was worth reading. But my number of RSS subscribers, unique site hits, and appearances on other people's blogrolls have steadily climbed, so that means I'm doing something right!

I have more to say about that political blog, but I'll save that for a separate post.

Blogging for dollars!

My political blog has been selected as one of the three finalists for a $2000 scholarship! Apparently voting will begin on Monday (the 25th). To any TIFLE students who happen to be reading this, please go to this site and vote for me! THANK YOU!!!

Sure would be nice if I could quit my daytime job and blog for a living...

Mini-Project 1

You can access my first mini-project here. It is already available at Google Docs, but I will add a link to my blogroll.

On Gaming

During the long Presidents' Day weekend, I had a thought when I was playing some video games. Wouldn't learning be more fun if it didn't seem like learning? I guess I should preface this by saying I was playing Dragon Quest, a role-playing game, in Japanese. I don't live in Japan anymore and I don't use Japanese as much as I used to either. So these games enable me to read Japanese and even provide real consequences in the event that I misinterpret something, such as a clue from a townsperson, a clue found in a treasure chest, or even a dialogue in a cut scene.

Playing video games in Japanese has been far more educational for me than sitting in front of a textbook. Not only am I learning, I'm learning with context and meaning. This makes me a bit more interested in assessing how games enhance learning. We'll study this in LING 797 a bit later. My class presentation will be about gaming, actually. It really wasn't my first choice, but now that I think about it, I think I'll enjoy the topic.

One of the readings mentioned how younger learners liked to explore and try a new product out without reading the instruction manual first. I think I fall into this category, as is evidenced by the way I approach the Dragon Quest games. How could I make learning more like Dragon Quest without having to program an entirely new game?

I guess when I think about it more conceptually, learning is more fun for me when it's active. I don't like sitting in classes and taking notes. I like learning by doing. I'm a kinesthetic learner, and games are a kinesthetic activity. That's what makes CALL such an intriguing field of study. While the technology is still being refined, I think its potential is quite great. It could have implications for classroom management, students with ADHD, maintaining student interest, and even giving students a greater sense of ownership regarding their own learning.

Thoughts on technology

One of my classes this semester uses Blackboard to serve as a hub for class documents, such as notes, announcements, syllabi, readings, etc. When I was a master's student at USC from 2001-03, I used to think of Blackboard as being more trouble than it was worth. However, now I like the idea of having a central location to keep all my course documents together.

Fast forward to 2008. The professor of the course that uses Blackboard doesn't update the site so much and not all of the documents are available for download. What's the point of using Blackboard if you're not going to upload the notes there in a timely manner? This reminds me of the "bells and whistles" phase of technology in the classroom. Yeah, it's cool to say that your course utilizes Blackboard. But if you don't take advantage of the conveniences it offers, then it's probably not worth using at all. If you're going to try and integrate technology into the classroom, it's important to do so effectively.

In terms of research, I learned this week that there is a glut of research focusing on the over-18 crowd, but a dearth of research examining children. Adults are more accessible and have fewer barriers regarding getting them to participate, obviously. However, this made me think of my own job. I teach adults ranging from about 25 to 40. When it comes time to develop a project for LING 797, I should consider whether I want to focus on adults, which are probably easier to measure, or children, which would be more empirically useful.

Anyway, here's a random YouTube video. Congressman Clyburn is hip!

Document link test

Can you read this? It's a Word document.

Video #2. I miss Japan!

This is another video of Osaka. This time it's a video of Namba, which is downtown.

Japan rocks!

Test video post

If you don't see a video of Osaka, Japan, in the video above, that means there's a mistake.

Forget Columbia. Osaka is my hometown.

Thoughts on advances in technology

In class this week, I mentioned that sometimes classes are better left not integrating technology into them because it's either forced, awkward, or not necessary. When Dr. Lomicka asked me which classes I've had in which this was the case, it reminded me of a course I took as an undergraduate at Duke University more than 10 years ago. It was a Spanish course and the teacher, presumably a TA, tried to use powerpoint and overhead projectors perhaps in an attempt to make it easier for the students to read the notes. (Her handwriting was not particularly neat.)

But more often than what should have been the case, there were often tech problems in which the computer running Powerpoint would lock up, the bulb in the overhead projector would need to be replaced, or the actual equipment had been removed and had to be located. All of these problems would result in lost class time.

Because this course was in Spanish literature, it seemed unnecessary to me for there to be such an emphasis on using technology. If the students read their reading passages and books, they didn't need to see the teacher's notes on the board. And the time spent locating missing overhead projectors and rebooting a computer using Windows 95 was time that could have been spent discussing the class material.

Dr. Lomicka reminded me that the mid- to late-90s was the "bells and whistles" phase of CALL. Back then, there seemed to be a greater emphasis on learning how to use the new technology rather than showing how that new technology could actually help people learn. In retrospect, perhaps I should give this Spanish teacher a bit more credit for at least trying to jazz things up a bit. And maybe because technology is a bit more advanced and more reliable now, technology probably would be more likely to enhance (rather than detract from) that class.

Then again, a part of me still thinks that sometimes there's just no substitute for having the students go at it with each other unencumbered by setting up computers and and plugging in wires. But I graduated from college in 1999, so maybe I'm just an old fogey who likes the old way of using technology:



Regarding Powerpoint (PP) specifically, I think it can be quite useful in that students can print out the main notes and not have to spend so much time quickly trying to scribble down what the professor says. However, I really don't like it when professors read their PP slides word for word with minimal elaboration. To me, that makes it seem like the professor is unprepared, doesn't know the subject matter so much, or is lazy. I could easily just print out some PP slides and stay home if the lectures are going to consist mainly of reading PP slides verbatim.

On the other hand, PP can be a useful organizational tool. Most people can type faster than they can write, so this can be a big time saver. And if you use the bullet points in PP as a springboard into other discussions or points of elaboration, I think it's great. The key here is to let the technology assist the teacher, not become a substitute for the teacher.

Powerpoint Presentation

| View | Upload your own

This is my Powerpoint presentation. It's a simple presentation about nonnative speakers of English who join the Army. I work at Fort Jackson as an ESL teacher, so this has quite a bit of personal relevance to me.

Thoughts on my internet usage

(This picture was taken as an undergraduate in 1995 when the internet was just taking off. Life was a lot simpler then.)

I consider myself to be a heavy internet user. Unless I'm traveling, not a day goes by when I don't get online. And in the event that my internet service is disrupted, I become quite anxious and agitated because of how integral the internet is to my daily life.

I wake up at 6:00 each morning and use the internet while I watch Morning Joe on MSNBC from about 6:30 to 7:00, when I go to work. During this time, I check to see if anyone left any comments on The 7-10 and check out that blog's statistics regarding subscribers and hits. When I get to the office at 7:30, I use the internet again to read the headlines at CNN.com and check out some message boards I'm a member of, such as Dave's ESL Cafe.

Because I'm a teacher, I'm not allowed to use the internet during class. So I wait until the breaks to check my e-mail and other political news headlines. I'll also go to Google to search for links to include in my political blog posts.

Lunch is at noon, but because I don't brownbag my lunch, I quickly drive home, make a sandwich, and then check out some other sites that are blocked at my office. These sites include those that have embedded video and social message boards relating to Japan and video games. I'll also respond to comments others left at my political blog.

At 12:45 I quickly race back to work and teach again until 3:30, when I get back online yet again to read more news. I'm home by 4:30 and that's when I have 7 or 8 windows open at once while I watch the political news on TV and update my political blog, interrupting this only for dinner, an errand, or to walk my dog.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The people I tend to interact with online are usually the faithful readers of my blog, friends I've met in real life, and my own family members, although there seems to be an inverse relationship with people close to me and how often we interact online. I don't use chat programs like AOL or MSN Messenger very often these days, though I used to use them almost daily several years ago. I estimate that I spend at least 4 hours online each day, but it's skewed more in favor of accessing information, rather than engaging in two-way communication.

Thoughts on technology in general

Today we had a chat session in which we had to discuss the role of CALL (computer assisted language learning) and the changes it has undergone throughout history. When I was reading the articles for this assignment, it made me think about how people in the younger generation seem to take technology for granted. I remember growing up with an Apple IIc at home and an Atari 800 in the classroom. The Apple II GS was the fancy schmancy machine that everyone drooled over at the time.

Anyway, I never really thought about how heavily computers had been studied in the context of learning a language. Some of the readings seemed a bit contrived or nitpicky in terms of their nomenclature and I had trouble discerning between the authors being researchers and the authors simply being unfamiliar with the technology they were studying because many of these people likely did not grow up with technology in their lives as we know it now. So reading about theory X and hypothesis Y seemed a bit strange for me simply because I had never really thought about technology in that context before.

In other news, here are a few other links you might be interested in. For starters, I really love politics and spend several hours a day perusing various news and political sites. I maintain a political blog that I started almost a year ago. It's called The 7-10 and has really become a labor of love. My goal is to have that blog give me a bit of name recognition so that eventually I could be called upon to provide freelance political analysis and commentary before ultimately getting hired by CNN or MSNBC.

Some of my favorite political links are National Journal and MSNBC's First Read. You can access other good political links at my blog.

Test post 2

I maintain a political blog called The 7-10. You can access it here. If you can't see a picture, that means I made a mistake with entering the picture code.




This is my pet monster, but you can call him Duke. He's two years old and is responsible for many gray hairs. If you can't see him, that means I made another mistake with entering the picture code.

Initial test post

This is a test post. There is no point to this post other than to allow me to tinker with some of the colors.

Test link #1: CNN webpage

Test link #2 MSNBC webpage