Ken Carroll

Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL, is where language is taught through subject areas - math through English, for example.  (This is also known as immersion.) This week, I came across some CLIL initiatives in Europe, where the classrooms have two teachers in  what is called ‘team teaching’. Here, one teacher is a subject matter expert who delivers the lesson (history, biology, whatever) in the target language (or ‘L2′). The other teacher is an actual English teacher, who looks for opportunities to exploit the language from the context and draw attention to it at certain points in the lesson.

I love the sound of this - mining an authentic communicative context to source language items on the fly. There’s also something very real about it: learners experience the language in concrete terms, rather than as something  hypothetical, to be learned for some distant future need. 

Team teaching 

I can also attest to the power of team teaching through my Praxis experience - audio lessons typically include a native L2 speaker (Jenny) together with someone who reached proficiency in it (John). For us, this has opened the door to tremendous possibilities:

• Learners get more than one perspective on the topic - male/female, different cultures, etc - in a time-efficient way.
• There is division of labor and specialization: The native speaker is arbiter of usage, pronunciation, etc, while the second one understands the process of learning L2,  anticipates relevant questions, and offers experience, etc.
• The lesson becomes a conversation between two practitioners with different  expertise, working to solve one problem. The native speaker models/demonstrates the language while the other one anticipates learner problems. The to and fro between them means that it’s all very lively - it’s prepped but never scripted - and they have 7 or 8 minutes to make it stick in the learner’s mind.

Learning needs a context

But there are other similarities between Praxis and the CLIL approach. CLIL and immersion work because they provide the learner with an authentic experience. The context is real and so learners approach L2, not as an artifact to be examined out of context, but rather as a tool for communication (the real purpose of any language) and very much in context.

So, where does that leave ChinesePod? If CLIL is so good, why don’t we teach Chinese through academic or other specialist areas? Wouldn’t that kill 2 birds with one stone?  Well, the answer is that we do take a CLIL approach on ChinesePod (and all the other pods, too). Instead of an academic focus, however, the context for ChinesePod is Chinese culture. I’d even go as far as to say that, ultimately, the object of study on ChinesePod is culture, not language.

Mobile is the new immersion

And there’s more. Although immersion is undoubtedly an efficient way to learn a L2, it hasn’t generally been widely adopted in schools - it’s expensive to immerse kids in such an environment and not easy to administer. But it occurs to me, now, that mobile is the new immersion. The learner can simply pull those portable islands of context into his personal learning network and take them with in wherever he goes. This works at he leve lof the receptive skills, and especially listening, and it’s soemthing we have worked hard on. One new development phase for us will be to find ways to leverage the productive skills - ways to enable learners to practice with teachers but also with each other. I believe we’re starting to figure out ways to do that. Now all we have to do is, er, build the technology to enable that.

 Ken Carroll

Some Friday afternoon thoughts …

Although there is some original thinking in the edublogs - George Siemens, Stephen Downes - the vast majority of edublogging is derivative. That is to be expected, I guess. It helps to flesh out and disseminate ideas into the broader conversation, though it can lead to conventions that quickly form around ideas, perhaps before they should.

This is partly because activity in the space is still (necessarily) at the level of theory/debate, and less, perhaps, at the level of application. It shouldn’t be so surprising as the blogosphere is ultimately a conversational medium. And of course there is also much to discuss about how pedagogy works on the web. It’s all kind of new and emerging.

But even though the phenomenal rate of change that technology is bringing about isn’t going to slow down, there’s always some reason why social and institutional change takes so long. The same is true in business: Jenna Sweeney talks about mobile learning’s ten year gestation here. Meanwhile, Donald Clark recently posted on how deeply the old teacher/institution centric philosophy is embedded into our language.

So, I think it’s worth asking how we are dealing with all of this. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or lost in the details. Somehow it seems we are hoping to discuss or research our way out of it. I’m looking at a pdf on learning from a recent and influential learning conference, where 40 researchers gathered. 40 researchers? I’m not saying that those findings were wrong, just that if its only about research, then you probably have a bias for theory over application.

Applying it

I guess I see a need for application. This is the only way we are going to test the theory and move on. I am actually an obsessive reader of a pedagogic theory, but I guess my work is about applying ideas. My instinct, then, is to look to the market for validation: to get products into the market and see what people actually want.

Nor would I want to get embroiled in the near impossible efforts to reform education. I think we need instead, to try to look at the problem in another way. Let me offer two facts I heard from Gary Hamel this week:

1. Over 10% of all we know, we learned in the last 5 years.

2. IBM will soon release a supercomputer that performs a quadrillion operations per second.

Our school system is a lost cause (helped along through politics) and absurdly out of step with change in the real world. We will spend years arguing over it, and trying to reform these 19th century institutions, but I’m wondering what the point is. I’m not being flippant. I have a daughter entering 4th grade in September and it pains me to think of the needless but nauseating rigmarole of what she will have to go through.

If I were not tied up with other things, I think I’d be tempted to look for investment to fund a school of New Learning and drop every pretense of the ancient formulas. It’d need a year or two to raise the funding, and get it up and running - faculty, location, connectivist ‘curriculum’ and so on. Any such ’school’ that focused on the reality of digital learning and embraced the unprecedented change that is surrounding us, would have to be more relevant than what now exists. It could even make business sense - to begin it would have to be a private school - but it could simply set the bar for alternatives and that has to be a good thing. (Obviously you’d need to appeal to some progressive parents but it could be done.)

During the recent brouhaha it became clear to me that both DIY and edupunk can mean different things in different contexts. So I guess I’m making a case for DIY (in the positive sense), though by that rate, all entrepreneurship is a kind of DIY.

This just in: As I write I see that the new York Times blogged about ChinesePod today.

Ken Carroll

 We recently made a commitment internally to mobile learning at Praxis Language. I guess I’ll be talking a lot about it in the future. Here are some thoughts for today.

One type of context

In the past, schools provided the physical context for most learning - the setting (or shell) that surrounded the learner (classrooms, teachers, textbooks.) Mobile learning, by contrast, lacks a unifying physical context. It can occur uninterrupted across times, locations, and settings: from office, to car, to meeting, to airport, for example.

An effective mobile learning system must, therefore, seek to create portable ‘islands’ of context for the learner. One way to do that is by embedding context in discrete, reusable, learning objects. You can see here some examples of situated, stand-alone lessons with an audio (circa 12 mins) text, and reinforcement. The content is embedded in the target language and augmented through sound effects, and other elements to give it a sense of concreteness.

The modularity of the learning objects means they can be selected at will, according to individual preference from a very sizable online database - over 1,000 lesson in the case of ChinesePod. I think it is notable that the user can group individual learning objects into sets (of whatever lengths she chooses) on the basis of vocabulary, topics, or other things. In this sense, the learner can create the broader context (travel, business, culture, grammar, etc) for herself, based on her true reasons for study.

A second type of context 

There is a second type of context in mobile learning. This lies, not in the physical surroundings, but in the intangible ones: the relationships, and social ties that emerge through learner interaction. Unlike the learning objects, this type of context cannot be pre-planned. Instead, it follows from discussion within the community of practice. Again, the learner should be free to choose where and when to engage in discussion within the community.

Choice 

Choice is the lifeblood of a mobile learning system. The learning needs to happen wherever and whenever the learner has the time and inclination. Those islands of context, the learning objects, need to be designed for choice, but also for the environment in which they are consumed. A broad selection of short lessons is, therefore, almost certainly more manageable and appealing than, say, a pre-programmed, linear course of 65 hours. (Why would anyone do a course by mobile means, when there are more convenient ways?) Because of the desultory nature of physical movement, the mobile learner needs choice and flexibility.

The most successful learning happens when the learner is on control of her own learning projects. Mobile learning success isn’t just a matter of just choosing the lessons. It invovles the learner creating the broader context of her own learning and moulding the system around her own needs. This is the idea behind the PLS and this is what infroms our notions of mobile learning going forward.

 Ken Carroll
 

I’m thinking about mobile learning - how it will work, and why it is significant. Gary Woodill’s recent paper provides a simple, and helpful description:

True mobile learning is personalized learning that unites the learner’s context with cloud computing, using a mobile device.

Clearly, electronic devices that allow access (at least intermittently) to the information-cloud are essential to mobile learning. Fine. Right now, by using an RSS feed and an iPod you are pretty much in the mobile learning club. ‘Mobile’, to me, is not an end in itsellf. It should merely seek to integrate, or blend, the broader learning experience.

Clearly, however, all of this is going to get more sophisticated. I also agree that personalization is of real significance in mobile learning. Personalization is an unstoppable trend - the iPhone 3G is basically a personal, ubiquitous, hand-held computer. (Personalization to me, is analagous to learning on your terms.) That’s fine too. However, these are characeristics of the technology, rather than the learning and we know from previous experience that just building out the tech is not enough. There needs to be something else in the equation.

The most obvious characteristic of mobile learning is the freedom - no walls, no schedules, no time or location confines. But in order to take advantage of all the freedom the mobile learner must be empowered to meet certain learning criteria: to access, to manage, to participate in the right information, and the right conversations, at the right time. (Of course, only the individual can know what the ‘right’ means here.) Again, this is something that goes beyond the technology. In my view, it might come down to communities of pactice as a source of those things.

There is a pull here, between the personal and the social: It doesn’t matter how smart or personal your phone is, learning remains social, a ‘conversation’, in Mike Sharples words, rather than a solitary activity. Let’s not make the mistake of thinking of the device is the source of the learning. It isn’t. But it can become one (integrated) conduit of that learning as conversation.

I see other things emerging from my direct experience with producing mobile lessons. Here are a few quick observations that will be relevant, I think, going forward:

One: Learning content has to be engaging. Regardless of how sexy the iPhione is, it’s not the plumbing that counts, it’s what you do with it.

Two: The medium is the message. You can’t just pile extraneous content onto the mobile medium and expect it to work. The best learning content will be designed for the medium.

Three: Learning objects, ideally need to be manageable, searchable, sharable, and ‘device agnostic’ - again, designed for the medium.

Four: The user’s history of collaboration, and other learning interaction must be accessible over the devices

Five: Not every type of learning will work on the mobile medium.

As I say, I think Praxis Language are already operating in the realms of mobile learning through ChinesePod and the rest. Now it’s time to explore it in more depth. (I think we will be hearing more from Hank Horkoff in this regard.)
Ken Carroll