courtesy http://xkcd.com

For much of the last three weeks, this comic has been my life: mooching free wireless (thank you, jrodie, whoever you are) from a neighbor while living out of boxes in my new apartment here in San Francisco. Earlier this summer I accepted a position at UC San Francisco, working in the Center for Instructional Technology as a Learning Technologies Specialist. For the 2008 - 2009 academic year, I’ll be primarily responsible for developing and delivering training on our new Collaborative Learning Environment; our campus is migrating from WebCT 4.1 to Moodle as of this Fall. Our space, and our organization, are undergoing a lot of changes this year, though, and so what my day-to-day work life entails beyond this year is not set in stone. But that’s another post, or a series thereof …

While my heart leapt at the chance to move to the city of my dreams, it sank when I realized what I’d be leaving behind. No, I’m not talking about the Ohio cornfields, or the stench of cow manure on a damp spring morning, as lovely as those things might be. However, anyone who has worked with Barbara knows how talented, kind, and generous a person she is. I could not have asked for a better or more caring supervisor, and I left her employ with a heavy heart. Anyone who has not worked with Barbara: well, now is your chance. My old position at the CILC is currently open and applications are being accepted; feel free to contact me at ryan [dot] brazell [at] gmail [dot] com with questions.

While many, many things are changing and moving and shifting in my life, my participation here on LLU is staying put. I will no longer be working with language faculty or students on a daily basis; UCSF is a graduate school solely focused on the health sciences. But solid teaching and learning practices are universal, and when it comes down to it, a Dentistry professor at a large state university and a Russian professor at a small liberal arts college are both just trying to educate the next generation. I believe they can learn a lot from each other despite (and, perhaps, because of) their different needs, wants, and perspectives. Helping folks look past disciplinary silos will be challenging, indeed, but I’m all about a good challenge.

Speaking of which, we are looking for a better name for our new Moodle implementation. We don’t want to call it Moodle, because we don’t want to put the focus on the software, but “Collaborative Learning Environment” is a mouthful. Anybody have suggestions?

Summers are great because I have more time to try out new software. With the work on the upcoming language technology boot camp manual (released next Friday! more on that soon), I learned a lot more about inDesign CS3.

But that program is a behemoth, sometimes overly complicated. So I am also a big fan of little apps that get the job done. For language learners (and Mac users), this free little app might be useful:

DialectX

It’s very simple: you speak into the microphone and then hear yourself - with a (customizable) delay. That’s it. Definitely plug in a ear buds or a headset before starting the software. Enjoy.

Link: http://www.muddybranch.com/DialectX.html

LLU now has a built-in email subscription service … if you like being automatically notified when we update the site, but don’t want to deal with RSS, you can now have updates sent directly to the email address of your choice! Visit the site, put your email address in the box, and click submit. It’s that easy!

We do still offer updates via RSS, of course, but we’re now using FeedBurner to handle the technical bits. New subscribers - click the RSS feed icon at the top of the page and add it to your default RSS application. If that doesn’t work, you may need to right-click the RSS feed icon and manually paste the address into your RSS feeder.

If you’re already subscribed to the LLU RSS feed, the address you have *should* continue to work. However, we recommend using the new RSS feed, as it’s more stable and yet snazzier than the old one.

As always, email us at languagelabunleashed@gmail.com with questions, comments, concerns, etc. Happy weekend!

Hello folks!

Last March at the joint CALICO / IALLT conference, the LLU group was giving a presentation when someone asked why our domain was a .com, and not a .org. We don’t make any money off this site, after all, and aren’t those addresses normally used by companies (hence the name)?

Great question. (Thanks for asking it, Claire!) It’s true: our goals for this site - to bring people together to discuss the teaching and learning of languages, and to ponder the use of technology in education more generally - are better represented by a .org address. We already had the domain - ’twas just a matter of finding the time to make the switchover.

I’m pleased to say the switchover is now complete. Going to old links with the .com address –should– still get you to the right place, but we do ask that you update your bookmarks anyway. As always, email us at languagelabunleashed@gmail.com if you have any concerns, questions, ideas, etc.

We’ve got much in store for LLU in the upcoming months - new authors, new workplaces, new ideas - so stay tuned. Enjoy your summer!

I was talking with a student who works in our center on Friday and he reported that he had slept about 2 hours in the past 24 or so, studying hard, and yet he was still not caught up on the work he had been assigned to do for the end of the semester. It was as if, he said, the teachers realize there are only 10 more days to go and therefore have to cram everything into the syllabus (and into the students’ sleep-deprived brains) in order to get to the finish line.

But does anyone actually learn anything when this happens? Does anyone ever stop and take a look to see if learning really occurs in those last frantic days before the term ends?

I know of one faculty member who front loads his class…all of the heavy lifting is at the beginning of the semester because he knows that the end of the semester is when people get hammered by all of their other profs. Plus it is springtime here… springtime in Ohio feels like a huge reward after winter and many weeks of almost-spring in Ohio…and it is hard to work when the weather is so fine.

But why do we tend to burden our students (and ourselves!) at the end of the term if we know deep down that they forget almost everything they cram under duress? I have that wonderful recurring nightmare about being told I need to retake my Algebra 2 final in the 10th grade because “they” need to see if I was just parroting my answers or if I really truly understood the concepts. I wake up in a cold sweat every time. I wonder if other people have those same dreams when they teach.

In language education there is a debate about “learning” vs “acquiring” a language that seems appropriate to mention here. If you “learn” something, it is in your short term memory…and not for long. But if you “acquire” it, that means what you have learned has become permanently welded into your brain, something you can rely on being there for the long haul.

How one goes about “acquiring” a language is a bit of a mystery, and it varies from person to person. Everyone has their way of moving along the language acquisition continuum. But one thing theorists are saying with certitude is that cramming a second language rarely leads to language acquisition.

So why do we do this to ourselves and to our students? Why do we, time and time again, create syllabi that are chock-a-block full of tasks that are impossible to accomplish wisely and well?

I understand the logic that says that in Spanish 101 you need to teach the first half of the book because Spanish 102 (the next course in the series) will begin at the second half. So you had better hurry up and get there… and cover it all, dagnabbit.

But if people would just stop and look up for second they would see something: the first two chapters in Spanish 102, that is the middle two chapters of the textbook, are usually REVIEW chapters. And what do they review? Why, the stuff from the last two chapters that they know most people jet-skiied right through in order to get to the end of the semester.

In my mind, the really good teachers are the ones who can follow the syllabus but also figure out when the class needs or wants to go deeper into the material and then helps them do so. S/he also is able to articulate what the intended outcomes of the class are meant to be w/o being wedded to a syllabus and then helps to get everyone there, alive and in one piece and able to reflect upon what they have acquired along the way.

But where does that courage come from? The courage to say, um, hold on here…this is not working. The courage to stop, reflect, look around, assess and redirect. These are all things that folks like McKeachie and Skorczewski have asked us to do…but we don’t Do it. Why?

Ryan and I were having our weekly staff meeting and he came up with this thought: for any change to happen, any real change… you just gotta want it. How true. And once you want it, really want it, and once you can clearly articulate why you want it, and once you can articulate what you want the outcome(s) to be… the rest all falls into place.

This time of year we all feel and act like automotons…we are going through the motions, one foot in front of the other. Once the summer comes and the blood begins to coarse through our veins again, my hope is that everyone will stop and think for just a moment about where they want their students to be, what they want them to be able to do, by the end of the next term. Resist the temptation to pull out the same ole crusty syllabus. Resist the temptation to go through the motions and the patterns of the past.

Be bold: Just gotta want it.