Heike Philp's Kolabora Weblog

May I invite the readers to join me on my new blog site to continue the journey in the world of synchronous live online language learning.

http://www.philp.de/blog

See you there.

Heike Philp
Photo credit: Ophelia Cherry

präsentierte sich das Gesicht des Teletutoren- und Telecoaching Netzwerkes das gestern auf der LearnTec 2008 stattfand und das von Gabriele Pflüger vom Teletutoren.net, Michael Krings vom Innovation Campus und Meirich Rombach von Acovis des European Telecoaching Institut organisiert und moderiert wurde. In einer 10-stündigen Marathon-Veranstaltung referierten 12 Vortragsredner zu dem Themen rund um das berufliche Umfeld des modernen Internetworkers vor einem vollen Saal mit ca. 150 Teilnehmern mit gleichzeitig paralleler Liveübertragung im virtuellen Klassenzimmer von Elluminate.

For me, the Online Educa in Berlin was such a banquet of well-oiled e-learning dishes and it truly has become my personal highlight in the year. This gourmet table was loaded with piles of international delicacies and 2012 participants from 92 countries testified to its popularity.

The main conference program on November 30th to December 1st was filled with 126 hours of program consisting of approx. 350 presentations, discussions and net-working activities. These two days were preceeded by another two days of pre-conference workshops of yet again another 117 hours of program in 10 full-day and 15 half-day workshops. If you were to stretch the Online Educa over a normal working week, you could easily fill 6 weeks of program!

As you can imagine it has been extremely difficult to choose what to listen to

A spontaneous text chat with Vance Stevens gave way to an opportunity to ask him, how he would have designed a train-the-trainer course similar to the one that is being developed in LANCELOT right now. This was the questions I asked the old master of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) and co-founder a global community of practise called Webheads.

Imagine Vance, you were contracted to facilitate the move of a language institute from real to virtual classrooms. You are also asked to design a train-the-trainer program for the language teachers. These teachers usually teach face-to-face, they average mid 30, they are not very computer literate and above all: they arent webheads.

This was the task that I put to Vance, and he came up with an unusual approach, that I would like to share.

This year's EUROCALL conference took place in beautiful Grenada. CALL stands for Computer Assisted Language Learning and is mostly about research, development and best practise in this field of language learning and technology with a very high level of academic output.

The three day conference program was made up of 190 presentations in up to 7 parallel presentation of 15 or 30min in length and a total of 350-400 participants were present. The conference was very well organised and left room for networking and social events such as a guided tour to the Alhambra, gala dinner and Flamenco show.

What especially interested me (a newbee to this conference) was the history of CALL, because at times, the depth of academic discourse left me wondering about the 'meaning making'.

Nancy White, Ted Kahn, Robin Good and Ken Thompson met live online in a Marratech room on Wednesday, the 15th of February 2006 for a panel discussion moderated by myself, Heike Philp, to share their insights on virtual teams. 'From Virtual Teams to Global Work Teams' was the topic of discussion, which was broadcast at the LearnTec 2006. 25 participants from Europe, Australia and the United States attended the meeting and another 30 participants watched the show in the Gartenhalle on a large screen in Karlruhe.

My hopes and wishes were to create a webcast of a different kind and in the end, it was unique for a number of reasons.

A major part of the proposals for funding by the European Commission is stating reasons, why the development project LANCELOT (LEONARDO DA VINCI, Language Competence Program, 9/2005-8/2007) is needed and why it is unique and timely. The needs analysis for the LANCELOT project fills 25 pages of the 90 pages long application and a) lists why there is a need for qualifying language teachers in the use in virtual classrooms, b) contrasts efforts of other European Projects and c) lists items of the European Action Plan for language learning which it purposes to meet. For a detailed project description, please look at the previous article.

a) Is there a need for qualifying language teachers in the use of virtual classrooms?

For a number of reasons, language training and virtual classroom seem a perfect match.

On June 15, 2005 the European Commission granted approval for the development project LANCELOT in the framework of LEONARDO DA VINCI, Language Competence II. A total of 23 partners in 8 European countries participate in a 2-year development project from September 2005. In a series of articles, I will explore the main points out of the main application written in German, which I helped to create.

What is LANCELOT all about and who are part of the Consortium? The following is a reprint of the summary of the official proposal.

The iCohere Virtual Teams & Collaborations Conference took place from March 29 to 31, 2005 and was a 3-day online event targeting leaders of virtual organizations and teams. Whilst providing excellent recorded presentations by top level speakers, the conference itself failed to apply its own principles of collaboration.

Let me start by introducing you to the presenters.

David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies gave the opening presentation on ‘Who buys whom in the collaborative industry’. His tightly packed presentation includes survey results and future outlook and can be listened to following this link. This was one of the three live events during the conference.

Mark Neff, CSC introduced virtual community work. If I understood it correctly, the difference to virtual teams (which are funded and tasked) is that virtual communities are voluntary and that it is a challenge to engage members to contributing and spending time and resources in virtual spaces. This is an excellent recorded presentation by a very considerate speaker. Mark also was outstanding in contributing comment after comment in the forums and during the group chat sessions, always present and always pleasant. You can enjoy his presentation following this link.

Do you wish to upgrade your language school and do not know how to go about it? What kind of technology is worth the investment? These were the questions posted on slashdot in a forum at the end of last year. The forum post received a staggering 322 commentsin a matter of 2 days and includes a host of technical gems and at the same time criticism, not to use any kind of technology at all in language learning.

The following story was posted on “Ask Slashdot” on December 17th, 2005:
Bakerybob writes "My wife and I are currently setting up a small Japanese language school, and I am in charge of all of the technical aspects, with a small but not tiny budget. What would Slashdot recommend as technologies we could use to improve the student experience (and hopefully to interest more students in the school!)? We have the easy bases (free Wifi access for students, a stunningly poorly designed homepage, and a few cheap computers lying around for them to play on between classes) covered, but I'm sure there are a lot of better ideas out there. Has anyone used Moogle? What about online lessons via webcam? Give it your best shot, revolutionary thinkers!"

What kind of technology is suitable for language learning? Why criticise the use of technology in class? What is missing in the overall picture?

Technical highlights for language learning

• Web Based Training (WBT) and Computer Based Training (CBT) is digital learning material very similar to our old language textbooks. It is designed for self-study. The production of multi media learning packages is very costly and so are the prices. There are lots of images, conversations in written and audio form, grammar and vocabulary as well as many games and exercises to train the newly learned sentences. More often or not, these learning packages are supplemented with speech recognition software. When a student repeats the same word or sentence he has just heard, a visual display of bars will show him whether he matches the sentence in its entirety. Samples can be found at Rosetta Stone, Eurotalk and Tell me more by Auralog.

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