apcampbell

This semester I’m teaching an elective EFL course at Kyoto Sangyo
University entitled, Internet Communication, in which Japanese students
are putting their English to use by  learning to use the social
networking features of Livejournal and
Flickr to interact with people all over the world.  We are using 
Moodle as a course management tool on which weekly
assignments are posted, links are aggregated, explanations are given,
and quizzes and exercises are constructed.  We are now seven weeks
into the course.  Links to student blogs can be found at the New Tanuki, and weekly activities can be found on our Moodle site.

The basic idea for course activities is as follows.  Students
visit the course site on Moodle to find out what is happening each week
and to drill themselves on the grammar points and writing techniques covered in class. 
With Livejournal, students post
their thoughts, build a list of ‘friends’ by searching their interests
and scanning blogs, and
read and comment on their ‘friends’ postings, all of which are
aggregated to a
single page.   They also take photos with their cell
phone cameras, send them to Flickr accounts, assign tags, write
descriptions, post the photos with accompanying text to their
Livejournal blogs
directly from Flickr, and use tag searches to make contacts and
interact with other users.  Underlying these activities is a study
of sentence formation, word choice, sentence combining, and paragraph
formation.  Students have fun, make friends, and use the language
they are studying in authentic ways.

I like the way Moodle allows the teacher to construct quizzes and
exercises that can be evaluated both by the teacher and by the student,
the resulting score then becomes an average of the two.  I am
using these features to give students practice with grammatical aspects
of the course, including correcting sentences from their own
Livejournal postings.  I can also see when students log on, how
long it takes them to complete the exercises, and then read the feedback
that they post.  The discussion forum allows students to
post questions they might have about the experiences they are having
out on the ‘high seas’ of the internet.  This is my first attempt at using Moodle - thanks
to Tom’s orientation - and am eager to continue experimenting with it as a organizational base for student webpulishing and
peer-to-peer interaction. 

I just introduced the students to Flickr for the first time on Tuesday,
which has generated noticable
intrigue amongst the group.  I think the use of photos
should be encouraged in student webpublishng projects, for it gives
students a non-verbal way to express themselves, which can help to
provide support and relief to those who are struggling with
communicating soley in text.  I look forward to seeing how they
choose to work with Flikr over the remaining seven weeks of the
semester.  Will they continue to use it after the course is
finished?

Marco recently asked me about how I evaluate the work they
do.   Evaluation is based mostly upon successful completion of the
weekly activities and quizzes, as well as their active participation in
the course, both online and in-class.  I also have students do
reflective self evaluations (in their native language) at the midterm and end
of the semester.  The students are quite modest and grades they give themselves are generally
lower than what I would give them.  I work out any significant
differences in person, which has been a rare occurance.

One of the real challenges I continue to face is that most of students
refuse to do much work outside of the classroom.  Even the best
and brightest of them will do the bare minimum outside of class,
meaning that they generally devote only a few hours one day a week to
the
coursework. This situation is even more extreme now that I am teaching
in a completely new faculty at a different University, where the
students are no longer intercultural communications majors.  The
reasons for such minimal effort are partially cultural, as Japanese
students are loaded with classes, club activities, part-time jobs, and
long commutes, in addition to a cultural ethos that the university
is a place to coast along and relax after having studied so hard in
junior and senior high school to pass the entrance exams. 
‘Communicating with people all over the world’ is not happening like it
did last year, mostly due to this lack of genuine attention.

As blogging and social networking are a process,
participating once a week for fifteen weeks won’t lead to the quality
of interaction that would benefit their language learning and
spark their interest further.  I just find it interesting that despite
how interested some of them seem to be in what they are doing for the
course, they don’t take it upon themselves to continue these
activities on their own.  My students tend to have an extremely
teacher-centered dependency due to previous conditioning, so the idea
of them taking control of this process and cultivating it on their own
is quite removed from their consciousness.   I wonder if they
would respond differently if these activities were removed from an
institutional context?  Maybe Marco has the right idea by
giving students two options when signing up for a course: the ‘get
by with minimal effort’ option in which they don’t come to class at all
and pass with a minimum grade and the actual ‘work hard and learn
something’ option for students who really care about what they are
doing.

What it really boils down to is that community building for
international communication takes considerable effort, the kind of
effort that is not going to come directly from my students
themselves.  Either social networking tools need to become much
more sophisticated or we need to cultivate ongoing P2P lanugage
learning communities so that when the semester rolls around, we can
plug students right into these established, thriving social networks.  This
is one of the main goals that Rudolf, Bee, and I are working toward at Dekita.org.