This video by Stephen Downes is still worth watching although it comes from a conference that was two years ago!
Right at the end Downes says something that strikes me as very important. He says:
This is not a message about how you should create a learning environment for your studets …. but this is a message about how you should learn.
I can’t stop thinking about the things I could do for my students, the opportunities I could create for them to learn. That seems the perspective from which I view teaching and myself as a teacher. It takes a shift in our views, a shift in our pedagogies or philosophies I guess.
Earlier on I was watching presentations at Educamp09 at http://bit.ly/R2tay when somebody said something along the line:
I can see my students use all these Web 2.0 tools but they don’t seem to use them for learning.
It struck a chord with me. However, the more I think about it the more I think this is a symtom of a situation which is not about Web 2.0 or e-learning but about our own philosophy so typical of an educational environment. We believe we have to make students learn what is good for them. But are we really sure this is what they need? What if they watch jokes and music spots on YouTube because this is exactly what they need? They may not want to become what we (or the society) want them to be. A shift in our viewpoint is needed. I’m not quite there yet. Perhaps rethinking what we want to help our students learn could be the first step and Stephen Downes is qite helpful here as well. Check his article Things you really need to learn.
“Learner corpora” is a concept that has a definite meaning (i.e. a corpus of language produced by foreign language learners), so I was pretty surprised when I discovered that Sharon Hartle and Sian Morgan’s IATEFL video focuses only on using general corpora in the classroom. I felt mislead by the title.
The presenters do suggest how teachers can make use of concordancing resources with their B2-C1 students, which is definitely positive. It’s a pity though that the authors’ selection of concordancers was based on personal preference and their choices were not fully explained and justified.
Mark Perensky said some very interesting things in an interview at the IATEFL conference in Cardiff. He raised for example the issue of the relationship between modern technology and teachers and said:
Before you can take advantage of modern technology, you have to change pegagogy.
I couldn’t agree more. We are flooded with new tools that aim to enhance our teaching practices. And too many CALL workshops focus on what needs to be clicked on to make a tool functional. But untill it’s not clear to us what pedagogical assumptions lie behind the new tool and what change it would bring to our teaching practices, we should not use it. However, once we are comfortable with the change in the pedagogy and the new tool, we can do wonders.
Also, Perensky suggests that schools should invest in modern technology wisely: some of the tools (e.g. interactive board) are very expensive and the scool would be better of investing that money into something that would be more useful to their students (e.g. 3D printers, iphones, etc.).
Finally, I support another idea of Perensky:
Governments should invest into pedagogy … and technology will actually take care of itself.
A corpus-based approach to interlanguage analysis has been used for over a decade now and its impacts on foreign language teaching materials and teaching practices has been quite substantial. The approach, however, has rarely been used for studying ESP learners’ interlanguage. This paper therefore aims to address the potentials that a small ESP learner corpus can present to ESP teachers, and determine whether the resources available can at present support such an analysis. Based on a small corpus of ESP student essays, central modal auxiliaries were studied with a focus on overuse errors. The analysis revealed that providing a reliable explanation for students’ overuse errors is rather difficult given the existing corpus resources and that these are still too few in the fields of ESP. Nevertheless, the results can provide sufficient grounds for ESP teachers to adjust their teaching materials to their learners’ needs.
I’ve recently learnt about Netvibes from a friend of mine, Saša. I just love it. I immediately made a Netvibes page, Tourism news from around the world, containing RSSs of tourism journals, travel magazines, travel sections of newspapers and tourism industry news. I hope my students will find it useful. My second Netvibes, Language Matters, is dedicated to linguistics. Linguistic journals seem to be slightly more slow at introducing RSS readers but with a little patience I’ll be able to add more RSSs soon. Welcome to visit it!
I’ve come across an interesting journal: 
