apcampbell

Community has been on my mind a lot recently, especially concerning the little EFL/ESL niche in the great big blogosphere we’ve all helped to construct. As Marco reminds us, blogging is a social process, not a technology, so therefore the higher the quality of our conversations in these open, dispersed spaces, the stronger our sense of community will become. And with a strengthened collective identity comes a certain agency to be exercised should the need ever arrive. I suppose this is why I found Daniel Mangrum’s invitation to host this month’s Carnival of English Language Teaching attractive, for the monthly posts that rotate from author to author serve to raise awareness of our individual perspectives on what has been happening and what is of value in our community.

As for new initiatives, EFL Geek’s recently created ESL & EFL Wiki is a positive step toward building a resource from which everyone in our field can benefit. It’s going to take sustained participation from a committed core of people to develop the site if it is to be useful, so hopefully we can all step forward and contribute something.

Another new project recently unveiled is the Dekita Orchard, which serves to aggregate and display work from EFL/ESL students engaged in P2P uses of open Web tools, like weblogs, podcasts, and Flickr. Well, it’s arguable whether all the students are actually engaged in P2P uses, but they are at least expressing themselves while being exposed to potential conversation partners, which is a step in the right direction.

Aaron Nelson’s post, on Going Bedouin, was for me, the most intriguing post of the month, as it addresses directly what many of us have been exploring recently: the idea of a personal language learning community, what George Siemens might call a language learning ecology. Aaron writes:

Students will need to learn how to function autonomously, and teachers will need to learn how to allow it. We’ll have to learn that it’s not what we know now that matters, but out ability to connect to relevant sources of information to learn more - when we need it, and what we need it about. Teachers need to learn how to do this in front of their students, modeling what you should do and how you should do it.

This reminds me of AJ’s recent personal foray into learning Spanish, which gives him insights into how his students experience the process of learning English.

Teachers should do exactly what they ask of their students and provide a model for them to follow. The real challenge is overcoming the inner barriers to such learning: the minds of students, many of which have been conditioned to associate schooling with passive reception of pre-packaged knowledge. They expect the teacher to deliver the goods and to demonstrate their acquisition through testing. Teachers often maintain similar mindsets, all of which works against the kind of autonomous, self-directed learning processes necessary for success in open Web environments. How can we overcome such conditioning? Bee offers some insights.

Traditional classrooms must now open up and embrace alternate forms of student centered learning, lest educational institutions miss out on the opportunity to capture the attention a whole generation of youth. Part of such a movement involves adopting open Web technology and showing students how to use it skillfully and responsibly within a given field of study. Perhaps then we won’t see as many of the behavioral problems or lack of motivation so common in school settings today. And since we’d be engaged in more experiential learning, perhaps we wouldn’t have to spend so much time teaching minor grammar points - students would develop their own feel for it.

Well, so ends this month’s issue of the CELT. I’m looking forward to next’s month’s issue. In the meantime, check out the Daily English Show down in New Zealand, via Graham.

Update: The CELT #9 will be hosted by Aaron Nelson at Teacher in Development.  Also, a big thanks to Muse, Meg, and Basia for their submissions.