TESOL and the Unconference

Conventional conferences are models in poor knowledge transfer

The 2008 conference of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in New York City should have sounded the death knell of the conventional educational conference. Sadly, it didn't, and there promises to be more debacles to come as the membership dues bill in my mailbox seems to indicate.

Such bloated, sponsor-driven conferences—packed as this one was, again, into the undersized New York Hilton and cramped, labyrinthine meeting rooms of the Sheraton across 54th Street—provide gasping testimony to what models of ineffective instructional design and inefficient knowledge transfer such meetings have become.


Evidence of bad design

Logistics. Venues that do more to restrict free movement of people than a lifetime of bacon double cheeseburgers restricts arterial blood flow—too many non-essential elements clotting together.

Lack of subjectivity in planning. Meeting room assignments seemingly made at random (that is, by hotel staff) without regard for reasonable expectations of the popularity of one session over another.

Hype. Session abstracts, written as a part of proposals and printed in conference programs, invariably overstate the goals of the session, representing an unrealistically ambitious agenda for the allotted time and all but guaranteeing disappointment.

Ignoble motivation. Presenters may be motivated by careerism more than having something to say. Such sessions are little more than, for example, a notch on a grad student's c.v. before she hits the job market. Perhaps serving the interests of enlightenment even less are the teachers presenting to justify reimbursed travel—the pseudo-scholarly junket. (In all fairness, considering the relative low pay of language teachers and those working for academic publishers, this is perhaps the most understandable motivation.)

Poor instructional design. The irony, nay, tragedy, of teachers perpetuating bad instructional design seems lost on no one but the presenters themselves.

What might make conference attendance all worthwhile, however, are a few unscripted conversations with peers or counterparts who may have sat through the same disappointing sessions, combined with a little time to reflect on fresh possibilities courtesy of being removed from the quotidian demands of one’s job, not to mention eating well on an expense account.


Power to the people

Imagine a conference free of bloated administration (and its like-sized fee), free of pretension, hype, and poorly designed and delivered bullet-point recitations that rarely risk enlightenment or stimulate thought or interaction. Imagine the TESOL unConference. This "people over process" approach, not wedded to a pre-determined agenda, can be seen in action at any number of technical conferences.

RedMonk’s Free Conference at JavaOne CommunityDay
BarCamp
BrainJams
Wikipedia entry

A description of the unconference from Digital Web Magazine:

Unconferences are gaining popularity in the high-tech community as self-organizing forums for idea sharing, networking, learning, speaking, demonstrating, and generally interacting with other geeks. The unconference format is based on the premise that in any professional gathering, the people in the audience—not just those selected to speak on stage—have interesting thoughts, insights, and expertise to share. Everyone who attends an unconference, such as those put together by organizations like BarCamp or BrainJams, is required to participate in some way: to present, to speak on a panel, to show off a project, or just to ask a lot of questions. As an event, the character of the unconference falls somewhere between that of a bazaar and that of an intellectual salon. It is, to borrow a phrase, a free “marketplace of ideas.” There are no themes or tracks to guide you, as in a typical conference; the whole event is centered on what might be called the discussion group. The ad hoc nature and the low cost of this forum (they’re usually free, compared to the hundreds of dollars needed to attend some industry gatherings) make the unconference accessible to many.

Separating Content from Form

One critical mistake teachers and trainers make involves the failure to separate content from form. This fundamental error in approach to complex topics frustrates learners and impedes understanding. Teachers and trainers are at times so narrowly caught up in their subject area that they lose sight of perspectives outside the field and are unwilling or too intellectually lazy to take the time to step back and address the challenges of someone for whom this subject is completely new or perplexing.

Avoiding cognitive overload

In an analogy that writing teachers will appreciate, process writing separates the focus on form from the focus on content. Content—what students say, their ideas, examples, and organization—is, initially, more important than form—how it's said, the particular structure and words they use to express them. Thus first drafts of papers should receive few or no comments on form (e.g., word choice, grammar, punctuation, spelling), because this would distract the student from concentrating on content. Furthermore, why correct form in a draft when that form will change to express reworked content anyway? It would be like touching up aesthetic blemishes in a primer coat of paint. It's a strategy of divide and conquer, of consciously avoiding cognitive overload, which is when your brain cries "uncle!" after trying to do too many things at once, and doing none very well.

Take another common example from classes across the college campus: making web pages. Teachers in many disciplines, from management to education, have students create web pages. Outside of a course in web development or design, why assign such a project? Besides keeping students up into the small hours IMing their frustration with the ambiguity and lack of structure, what's the benefit of such a task? True, it's challenging and requires problem solving and teamwork. Unfortunately, such assignments typically follow nothing but the most cursory introduction to the nature of document design on web pages, information structure of web sites, and how different this is from page design and the organization of printed matter. Then there is the enormous technical challenge. Was the tool designated to carry out the mechanics of this creation, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, similarly introduced and demonstrated? Not likely.

Editing a page in Dreamweaver

Editing a post in Blogger

Manipulating form does not imply content knowledge

The web is a complex medium, and development tools like Dreamweaver are technical and deep. As with another content tool common in college, PowerPoint, the ability to mechanically manipulate appearance and objects (the how) does not confer or imply knowledge about the information product (the what). Students come to appreciate this quickly. Why don't the teachers assigning these projects? (See related post on the failure to teach presentation design and delivery skills.)

This oversight, in addition to its risk of squandering student time and energy and achieving no expressed learning objective (or at least one billed on the syllabus), fails to exploit a teaching opportunity to provide a proper grounding in some basic concepts.

Rational web design counts as prerequisites many such concepts:

Design

• basic instructional design (pedagogically sound approach to presenting multimedia content to teach or inform):

  user interface (navigation, accessibility)

  interactivity (prompts, feedback)
  

  linear vs. random access (paths to information)
  

• basic information design (layout):

• organization (hierarchy)
  
• ordering and embedding informative elements
• graphic design (color, iconography, typography)

Technical

• page elements (text, graphics, links)
• layout tools (tables, alignment, images, CSS)
• file types (GIF, JPG, PNG, PDF, HTML, CSS, JS, etc.)
• file characteristics (e.g., color palette and transparency of graphics)
• integration of dynamic elements (RSS, SSI)
  
• file naming conventions (illegal characters, use of extensions)
• file management conventions (e.g., relative vs. absolute paths)
• file transfer (FTP)
• file hosting options (sponsored vs. fee-based)
• accommodating a variety of user capabilities (different connection speeds, operating systems, browsers, plug-ins, displays)

These and other relevant issues are rarely given their due outside of courses devoted to web development. And no wonder. This is time-consuming stuff, and many people have a great deal of difficulty with it.


Web 2.0: Content breaks free of form

One of the tangible benefits of what has become known as "Web 2.0" is the ability of non-technical users to easily create content on the web, most notably through wikis and blogs, like this one, but also photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, collaborative/online writing tools like Google Docs or Buzzword, social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook, and—to a lesser extent because of a different business model (fee-based not ad-driven)—ePortfolios. Web 2.0 is the term collectively, sometimes loosely, applied to a range of capabilities non-technical users can acess through a web browser alone. These "web apps" take the place of, in many cases, complicated and expensive software installed on the user's computer ("local apps," such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Dreamweaver). For the seminal blog post expounding Web 2.0, see Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software."

One important implication of Web 2.0 capabilities, then, is how it facilitates the separation of content from form. The vast proliferation of blogs, wikis, and MySpace pages testifies to the impact on content development of removing issues of form from the process of publishing content. Anyone comfortable with word processing and web browsing, such as shopping online, can readily publish content with a professional look. In Web 1.0, we did it old school: publishers had to possess as much technical wherewithal as content knowledge—they were inseparable.

Using the prêt-à-por·ter, template-based approach to web publishing offered by Web 2.0 frees one to concentrate on the message, the content, rather than the arcane technical minutae constraining earlier custom approaches, which clearly explains the explosion in non-technical forums: web publishing has thus been democratized. What, then, explains the persistence of some teachers to compel students to use the means of an earlier development model in creating content on the web for class? I suspect it's twofold:

1. The teacher gets more mileage out of her own technical knowledge;
   
2. She passes on the pain of her own learning experience (the "why should today's kids have it easy" syndrome).
   

A more troubling possibility, which I won't dare include in this list of probable explanations, relates to the need some teachers have to make the student's challenge imposing, fed by the fiction that pain=gain is an effective learning strategy.

As teachers, if we recognize that our students have a limited amount of time to engage our subject—competing, as we are, with other classes and the seduction of countless time sinks like Facebook, YouTube, Xboxes, and the like—then we might take more care in constructing their assignments and keeping them focused on what's important.

The Blended Learning Bandwagon

How elements of distance education are counter-productive
to some language learning environments.

Find an issue in educational technology these days more hyped than "blended learning." A challenging assignment.

Blended learning, with its delicious allusion to those over-priced energy smoothies at the gym and its more utilitarian yet hip sounding hybrid learning, with its allusion to being green, represent the use of some elements of distance education (DE) technology in a traditional class, that is, one that meets together in the same physical space. The most common element of DE to incorporate is computer mediated communication (CMC), taking the form of either a synchronous chat (like IM) or an asynchronous discussion board, where students post messages around a topic (threaded discussions) and responses to the posts of others.

The CMC options in the virtual space of Blackboard courseware.


Student authoring of more elaborately formatted input, including embedded multimedia, may more effectively employ a class wiki or blog (see previous post, The Thinking Person's Wiki). Discussion boards, wikis, or blogs represent the virtual classroom space vs. the physical space of face-to-face interaction.


A pedagogical not technical challenge

Creating this stew of virtual and physical elements for a class, blending ingredients that cook at different rates, makes the task of teaching far more complicated, although potentially more interesting and effective. We are only beginning to address the plethora of skills needed to design and conduct such blended learning courses. What either intimidates or excites teachers initially, and the skills many focus on, however, involve the mechanics of using courseware rather than sound pedagogy and instructional design. The irony of this oversight seems to occur to too few educators.

Language courses present additional challenges to justifying the blended proposition. Teachers have to evaluate what is sacrificed, because, ultimately, in a zero-sum game, hybrid learning is about trade-offs—what's sacrificed for what's gained. The true measure is not merely what's added but the net gain. Class time and time available to students to study outside of class are finite and more-or-less fixed at a ratio determined by credit hours. The challenge, therefore, is to find the most effective use of this given time.


Why they're here and not there

Holed up in their dorm rooms alone, back lit by a blinking cursor, is not something SL students need to travel to another country to experience.

A second language class is a different animal from most other courses on campus. It seems sometimes that no one on campus realizes this (including, sadly, a few of those SL teachers). In a second language learning environment, especially where students live in the target language country temporarily (i.e., not immigrants), the key ingredient to acquiring communicative competency (the principle objective of living amidst the TL) is authentic communicative interaction. The post-behaviorist SL teacher creates an environment where students need to interact with each other to accomplish authentic tasks, ones that in some way intersect with their interests or needs with a deliberate though not necessarily overt focus on form.1 These teachers give students, in other words, what they can't get back home. Holed up in their dorm rooms alone, back lit by a blinking cursor, is not something SL students need to travel to another country (at great expense, by the way) to experience.

They'd be far better served, linguistically and culturally, spending their time outside of class on a ball field, in a mall, at a party, in a bar or a church, anywhere, as long as the environment demands authentic interactions to put into practice what they're studying in class. Thus, spending significant amounts of time performing DE tasks, as with working with drill-and-kill tutorial CALL software (see previous post), fails to make the best use of an SL student's limited time in the TL environment. SL students would be best served maximizing their real not virtual interactions.

Teaching writing presents a genuine opportunity for blended learning or DE as an effective device and not merely an opportunity for a teacher to dabble in technology because it's there. The needs of process writing can be addressed textually with comments on exchanged drafts, such as with Microsoft Word's Comments and Track Changes features, also supported in limited fashion in more collaborative environments, such as Google Docs, Adobe's Buzzword, or wikis (all free and less buggy than MS locally installed applications).

Entering comments in the collaborative Google Docs space.


Teacher feedback on student writing can very effectively be accomplished through virtual rather than physical interaction—something that started long before computer-based DE (think correspondence course). There's little debate about this among language teachers. Still, is this what SL learners should be spending their time on, given what is generally a brief stay in the TL country to study? Probably not, unless these students are also preparing to enter an academic degree program in the country or score well on writing tests for other purposes.

And so we return to a consideration of net gain in adopting one learning approach over another. What do students gain from spending more time in interactions in a virtual space vs. interactions in a physical space? It's been demonstrated by educators studying input in online chats, for example, that shy students who contribute little in a physical class—whether for reasons stemming from culture, personality, or lower language proficiency—may compensate for this deficiency in an online environment with significant input. In fact, such students may shine online, seemingly finding an appropriate outlet for their otherwise pent-up ability or desire to contribute. Such scenarios are widely seen as benefits to online interaction. Nonetheless, such benefits may accrue to only a small number of students in a class, where others may shine in physical rather than virtual environments.

In sum, the justifications for a low-fat blended learning concoction in a SL environment:

1. To bring quiet students out of their shells,
2. To facilitate process writing.

But perhaps the greatest justification for blended learning, if not a pure DE course:

3. To create a learning environment when a physical meeting is not possible for logistical reasons.

There are many reasons why it may be impossible or impractical for a class to meet physically, as this may occasionally be the case in a traditional course due to inclement weather, teacher or student illness, travel commitments, etc. The caution against the use of virtual space interactions at the expense of face-to-face interactions does not discount the use of blended learning or DE as a remedy for logistical issues. 

But we need to be careful about seeing our SL class as a laboratory to experiment with blended learning, even if everyone else seems to be doing it. As an instructional designer friend, John M., suggested to me recently over a pint, teachers should, at the very least, have to learn something themselves via DE before they employ these tools in their own classes, either in whole or in part. 



1. See Chapelle, C. (2001). Computer applications in second language acquisition: Foundations for teaching, testing and research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Why Presentation Skills Aren't Taught

Presentation Series—Part I

In the Information Age, everyone is involved in information design.

I have asked thousands of Boston University students over the last decade three questions:

1. Have you ever been required to give a presentation?
2. Were you told what form it would take?
3. Did you get any explicit instruction in presentation design or delivery?

Overwhelmingly, responses from these students are

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. No.

These American undergraduate and graduate students as well as international (ESL) students studying in the U.S. express some frustration with being given a heady task (1), having the tool to accomplish this task prescribed (2), yet given no meaningful instruction (3). At most, they receive some kind of evaluation rubric in advance.

Something fundamental to our lives today is missing from this common scenario: any mention of much less attention to the considerable skills required to design information for presentation and deliver it—which are, by the way, very different skill sets. Why is it that in the world of commerce salespeople receive extensive training in message formulation and pitch, while in education, the need goes unmet if not unacknowledged?

I think there are three primary reasons for this omission:

1. Time. There isn't time in the course schedule to devote to presentation design.
2. Assumptions. Older teachers who never received such training are inclined to think that young students are technology savants.
3. Training. Few teachers in any discipline have formal exposure to principles of instructional design.

Time. Student presentations consume a lot of class time—instruction time that students pay for. The technical and logistical overhead of presentations inevitably result in even more time devoted to student presentations than scheduled, which results in reduced instruction time. Furthermore, in large classes, students must present in groups to reduce the number of presentations, which requires more time, though generally outside of class, for coordination, planning, and preparation.

With this scheduling commitment for presentation delivery alone, few teachers may feel they have the luxury of burdening the schedule further, except in the most cursory or superficial manner, with instruction in presentation design and delivery.

Assumptions. Teachers who did not have computers as a part of their educational experience, as students, tend to see students who grew up with computers as "comfortable" with technology. This comfort, however, does not necessarily impart competency or conceptual understanding. That is, the mechanics of building slides in slideware is a simple skill and one independent of understanding the logic or effectiveness of a particular design. Any sampling of slideshow presentations created by college faculty or students would demonstrate this idea, what with the abundance of gimmicks (animations, transitions, sound effects, clip art) and arbitrary bullet point fragmentation of data masquerading as analysis, all at the expense of thoughtful design and presentation of data in a manner that suits the data first. Such tools in the hands of the uninitiated, not surprisingly, guarantee the triumph of form over content. In an analogy to languages, we might observe that a person with facility in several languages may not necessarily have anything intelligent to say in any one.

Training. Why is it that in the Information Age so few people have any exposure to formal information design? Teachers, or anyone involved in providing instruction, design their information package. Again, to draw on an analogy, academics in higher education who spend their lives teaching often have scant explicit training in the art of teaching—an absence painfully felt by countless uninspired undergraduates. In higher education, one's demonstrated subject knowledge, measured by academic degrees and publications, forms the basis of one's qualifications to teach—at least in the eyes of hiring committees. The closest thing to a teaching apprenticeship, serving as a graduate assistant or teaching fellow in a doctoral program, is more OJT than structured training.



All of this suggests that sometimes skills critical to performance are assumed rather than verified because recognizing a need, addressing it, and following up with higher expectations takes time and resources. Presentations would be a much more effective learning task and a more efficient model for information delivery with some attention paid to information design, suggestions for which I'll address next.


Related links:

Intelligent Use of PowerPoint
Tips for Using PowerPoint for Academic Presentations

PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely (Edward Tufte, Wired Magazine)

Edward Tufte interviewed on NPR (Weekend Edition Sunday, 8/20/06)

Constructivist Educational Theory

Using Presentation Software to Enhance Language Learning (Internet TESL Journal)

The Peril and Promise of Online Video

Language teachers have been using film and video in class as long as these media have been available. Lately, YouTube, videojug, Google Video, blip.tv and other Web 2.0 inspired, user-created content sites have appeared in the repertoire of language teachers with access to computers and the Internet in class.

Let's assume that most trained language teachers see the pedagogical merit, or potential, in such content, including variety, currency, and appeal to students as a familiar resource. At least four practical concerns quickly emerge when using online video:


Access
In planning on the use of online video in class (streamed at time of use, not previously saved as a local file), we make certain assumptions that we would not likely have made just a few years ago:

1. Continuous broadband (high-speed) Internet access (as opposed to occasional dial-up modem access).
2. Ubiquitous Internet access available at all learning locations via wired or wireless (WiFi) connections.
3. Computer hardware capable of playing compressed video (fast processor, sufficient RAM).
4. Appropriate media player software installed and configured to play Web video (e.g., Flash, QuickTime).

Quality
In order to host a tremendous number of videos, video sharing sites must further compress video files uploaded by users, sometimes appreciably degrading quality. Someone has said that the blurry quality of these videos makes them appear as if they are being viewed through Vaseline rubbed in your eyes. So image quality is an issue.

For language learners, this may blur the lip/sound correspondence that aids in comprehension.

The image on the left below is from the original, uncompressed video file (.dv). The image on the right is from YouTube, which shows only a little image degradation. This might be because I uploaded a large, high-quality version of the video to begin with (.mp4).

Original videos of lower quality might not fare so well, as with the popular Parkour video below.

Permanence
When you link to online content, you always run the risk of losing access to that content without warning if the owner moves or removes it. The ephemeral nature of popular user-generated video increases this risk. Contributors can remove their videos at any time.
To avoid this risk, you can capture some streaming media to locally saved files, access to which you control, but this raises ethical if not legal issues. Applications like iRecordMusic (Mac) or Super MP3 Professional Recorder, Freecorder, or WM Recorder (PC) allow you to capture streaming audio and TubeSock (PC and Mac) captures streaming video. The free online tool KeepVid allows you to easily capture any streaming video in any browser.

Audio or video podcast versions of content, where available, are readily downloadable files that play locally from your computer and skirt the permanence and copyright issues.


Context
At many sites offering video content, a selected video is displayed in a busy and, to some, a confusing context of other content, links, and ads. Especially on sites of user-generated content, such as YouTube or videojug.com, some of this context may be offensive, inappropriate, or, at the least, distracting.

On many video sites the "Embed" information solves this problem by allowing you to display only the video of interest to you in your own context. By pasting that embed code into your own web page, blog, or wiki, you essentially strip this content from its originating context, allowing your students to focus on the video, as in the example below.


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