Future Faculty of English and Modern Languages graduates at Hanoi Open University
This is the fourth post in a blog series based on the the TOETOE International project with the University of Oxford, the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). I have also made this post in the OEP series available as a .pdf on Slideshare.
Hanoi is fondly known at the city of the rising dragon. The best outcome you could hope for when giving any workshop is that what you are sharing is both timely and needed. Through the OCWC and the Open Universities network I made contact with the vice Dean of the Faculty of English and Modern Languages, Dr. Ho Ngo Trung, with a bit of help from Google Translate for deciphering Hanoi Open University’s web pages. Dr. Trung was able to set up two meetings and a workshop with twenty-one English faculty teachers and academics literally at the drop of a hat. My time in Vietnam was short but we managed to pack in a lot in response to new digitization guidelines issued by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education (MoE) for upgrading their current EAP resources. Fortunately, I had located a rising dragon for building open EAP resources for sharing best OEP across the Vietnamese context, using a combination of their own and Oxford’s resources.
Dr. Trung picked me up from my hotel and drove me across the city through a sea of scooters to his Faculty of English and Foreign Languages to discuss current trends in Vietnamese higher education with a particular slant on language education. It turns out we were in a higher education zone where networking between universities and with the MoE (located just around the corner from the Hanoi OU) was both easy and encouraged. Cars are obviously not the norm in Hanoi as we entered the building past the staff motorbike parking area. He informed me that the OCWC status had just been conferred by the MoE on Hanoi and Ho Chi Min Open Universities to lead in the area of OCW and OER. Open Universities in Vietnam like many around the world pride themselves on offering flexible types of education to learners of different abilities and socio-economic situations. They even offered short programmes to full-time workers referred to as in-service learners in this context.
Dr. Trung informed me that a bold National Foreign Language project would soon be launched with the MoE for developing foreign language proficiencies amongst Vietnamese youths. English would be the first target language to pilot the project. Language teachers would also have to show their linguistic competencies by taking internationally awarded language tests. The stakes for multilingualism in modern Vietnam were getting higher.
Vietnam scores 80, making it a long term orientation culture. Societies with a long-term orientation show an ability to adapt traditions to a modern context i.e. pragmatism, a strong propensity to save and invest, thriftiness, perseverance in achieving results and an overriding concern for respecting the demands of Virtue. The countries of South East Asia and the Far East are typically found at the long-term end of this dimension (Hofstede, 2010).
The final meeting of the day was a fifteen-minute drive away to the main Hanoi Open University headquarters where I met the Vice President and Dean of the Information Technology Faculty, Dr Truong Tien Tung. This meeting was carried out with the help of Dr. Trung’s excellent translation skills. Vice President Tung was eager to tell me that OER and OCW were the lifelong learning mission they had been edging toward for the past fifteen years, putting aside faculty and university savings to be able to show their commitment to the MoE once the opportunity to wear the OCW/OER mantel arose. There was no government funding in this area, only government policies and guidelines. He expressed his keenness for the Faculty of English and Modern Languages to lead the way with the development of OER for EAP/ESL and invited me to come and stay in Vietnam to work with the Hanoi OU on their digitization project. We discussed ways forward for working with each other at a distance and for translating any OER developed so that they can be used to showcase OER in Vietnam. In further TOETOE project blog posts, I will be referring to this collections building process with the teachers working at Hanoi Open University.
Reference
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Revised and Expanded 3rd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill USA.
Seoul 2004 – marker on newsprint by Girlieprig. Click on image to visit Girlieprig Productions (CC some rights reserved).
This is the third post in a blog series based on the the TOETOE International project with the University of Oxford, the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). I have also made this post in the OEP series available as a .pdf on Slideshare.
The hopes and aspirations of English language education in South Korea reach sky high. This is manifest in the multitude of skyscrapers occupied by private English language institutes or ‘hagwons’, coupled with the soaring ambition of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology’s latest roadmap for English language education assessment. Part of the national curriculum goals for English include the launch of the National English Ability Test (NEAT) where speaking proficiency will be one of the areas for evaluation. This will raise the stakes for test takers and their families who will have to find the resources to finance hagwon tuition to make up for a deficit in state school provisions for English language speaking support.
Flashback
When I arrived into Incheon in 1995 to take up my first English language teaching post, I soon realized that ELT was a successful money making industry, perhaps more than it was an educational field. My ELT experience in Korea would become my finishing school, setting me up with the questions that would furnish my future career as an open English language practitioner and researcher. This is the place where I learned to use the Internet, where digitized billboards and neon lights running up multi-stories were the simulacra that covered the urban Korean landscape. When I left Seoul in 2005 I had not yet heard of the open source software movement, which I would encounter early on in my PhD research in 2007, and I wouldn’t come across the term OER until 2009. As I was exiting Korea in 2005, high-speed Internet was available on public buses and the Open CourseWare Consortium (OCWC) would be arriving at Korea University in 2007.
Open KU – Open Educational Resources at Korea University
EAP at Korea University
Twenty-three Korean universities are currently members of the Korean OCWC. 2012 brought me back to Seoul to deliver an Open Educational Resources for English Language Teaching Workshop at Korea University with Professor Hikyoung Lee whom I had met at the joint OCWC and OER Cambridge 2012 Conference and with former teaching colleague, Christine Aitken. Similar issues were raised by the participants in this workshop about the need to be able to build specific EAP collections that had the same functionality of those in the BAWE collections in FLAX which I had demonstrated. Academic Word Lists were discussed as potentially useful resources to add to the FLAX system for analysing texts for EAP. I noted this feedback down for development plans for when I would be working with the FLAX team in New Zealand directly after my time in Korea.
iTunesU at Korea University
iTunesU Korea University channel
Korea University was getting ready to launch Creative Commons content onto iTunesU so Hikyoung was keen to introduce this news to the English language teachers and students present at the workshop and I introduced training resources from Oxford’s OpenSpires project that had been used with academics at Oxford to explain key concepts about OER and Creative Commons licensing before putting their teaching resources onto Oxford’s iTunesU channel. Within a few days of Korea University’s entry onto iTunesU on March 1st 2013 their content, some of which is licensed as Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND, had already received more than 40,000 hits.
Discussions around the re-use of educational resources seemed only fitting in light of this move onto iTunesU, so I introduced the teachers to Chris’ Reusable Card Game from the ORIOLE project, which is now fielding for survey responses from users based outside of the UK (please follow the ORIOLE project link above to complete the survey).
Investigating sharing and use of open resources
[Re-use card being read aloud by Teacher A]: “Is it necessary to have links to relevant research or even proper referencing? Do resources used need to evidence scholarship?”
Teacher B: Well, you know, we have a problem with plagiarism and part of the problem is that students have a hard time understanding what they can and can’t take out of texts.
Hikyoung: Right
Teacher B: And, what they need to paraphrase and what they don’t need to paraphrase, that’s a very big can of worms.
Alannah: I have heard from OER colleagues at Oxford that when they began recording the podcasts for OpenSpires, especially the ones recording video, that the cameraman had to turn the camera away from the screen because the lecturers hadn’t cited stuff or they hadn’t got clearance for lots of images; they hadn’t got permission to use them. So, I think as teachers we’re actually quite guilty of this, you know, just mocking up a slideshow here or a hand-out there and we’re not actually trained, we’re not trained in it, are we? We don’t know about copyright…I definitely didn’t get trained in it. I’ve learned about it through OER really.
Teacher A: But as you said earlier once it’s within the closed classroom or the online learning environment, no one’s going to take it away to anywhere else.
Alannah: Right, but that’s what the issue was because once you go to put it on iTunesU then it does become an issue so that’s something you will need to think about as well as you go onto iTunesU.
Teacher A: I’m quite reticent about this whole iTunesU thing…
Hikyoung: Why?!
Teacher A:…because I might end up behind bars [group laughter]
Hikyoung: We have people at our office who will check with you to go over what is Creative Commons and what is OK to use and reuse and what is not, so no problem.
Teacher B: They’ll bring you food every day behind the bars [laughter continues]
Hikyoung: Yeah, yeah, that’s what we’ll do, ha! [laughter continues]
Teacher B: You won’t lose your freedom, you’ll just lose your reputation. [laughter continues]
Alannah: Yeah, you can do podcasts from behind bars – that could be a real viral hit on the Web, eh? [laughter continues]
[Re-use card being read aloud by Teacher B]: OK, “if funding is available to get involved in using, making or sharing resources then perhaps that is reason enough to get involved?”
Teacher B: Yes and no though, right? Overall, yes, but I do think that, you know, you do need to have passion or desire…
Teacher A: But this is all very non-profit oriented and the concept of sharing resources is that you get a lot of satisfaction from doing it and you also know that there’s a lot of people like you out there doing it, producing something that you could also use. It seems like a sort of give and take scenario really.
Private English language expenditure
At lunch with Hikyoung and Christine we discussed where OER was most needed in the Korean ELT context and how the Korean OCWC was focused primarily on higher education. The biggest challenge lay ahead for under-privileged families who would need to support their children’s English proficiency with the new higher level English speaking requirements as set out by the Ministry of Education, Technology and Science with the new National English Ability Test. This is likely to create a burden for those families who cannot afford to pay brokers, namely private language institutes or hagwons, with preparing their children for this new test where the testing of spoken English is one of the key focus areas.
Recent OECD reports for the percentage of GDP spent on education in the Republic of Korea have been consistently higher than other OECD member countries, the bulk of which (an average of 40% annually) is made up of money paid by parents on private tuition to hagwons and tutors for their children. English is the number one academic subject in the private tuition sector, raking in 41% of the total amount spent in this area.
Korea currently has nearly 100,000 hagwons, which must receive a permit from the local education government to operate. The concentration of around 6000 hagwons in the Gangnam district of Seoul is thought to be an important factor in the high housing prices in that area, which has become a major social issue. The hagwons have more teachers than the public school system and attract the best ones with higher salaries. Admission to prestigious hagwons is challenging and depends on entrance exams. (OECD Economic Surveys: Korea 2012, p.131)
Private income expenditure on education has been an on-going concern of the South Korean government and perhaps a lesson for other countries on the effects of unparalleled privatization in the education sector. It is clear that investment in sustainable public English language education is needed to reduce private income expenditure on education in an effort to close the gap on growing levels of income inequality and poverty. Beyond the provisions of the English Broadcasting Station (EBS) channel which offers free but not open English language learning resources for young learners, there is a greater need for flexible English language teaching and learning resources that meet the needs of a diverse society.
The South Korean government recognizes the lack of faith in the public education system and is trying to introduce interventions that will remedy the situation via the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST). However, if the public education sector were to adopt open educational policies for the development of resources and practices then this would create an open promotional channel back to publically funded English language initiatives. Local expert English teachers could also benefit from sharing their expertise through the development and dissemination of well-received OER to raise their individual as well as their institutional profiles. The MEST releases annual plans for educational policy change across curriculum, resources and attitudes to education. In response to problems surrounding private tuition, such plans include: government-funded after school programmes; a reduction in study time loads to provide tailored learning; new university admissions processes for ensuring equal access opportunities and; reporting mechanisms for those hagwons that are over-charging with tuition fees (MEST, 2009, 2010 & 2011). To enact these plans, a concerted investment in open educational resources and practices could provide the necessary promotional and pedagogical tools to draw attention to successful applications of these well-founded plans from the MEST.
Creative Commons Korea
Creative Commons Korea – sharing and eating open cake video via Vimeo
“High ranking in Long-Term Orientation indicates that the country prescribes to the values of long-term commitments and respect for tradition.” (Hofstede, 2010)
This is the second post in a blog series based on the the TOETOE International project with the University of Oxford, the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). I have also made this post in the OEP series available as a .pdf on Slideshare.
Long Term Orientation
Geert Hofstede’s original IBM study on organizational cultures ranked countries according to a four-dimensional culture model. Participating countries in parts of Asia demonstrated distinct attitudes toward long-range planning, however, resulting in the identification of a fifth cultural dimension, Long Term Orientation (LTO). Interestingly, China clocks the highest count for LTO internationally. This dimension is also referred to by Hofstede as ‘Confucian Dynamism’, something which is “closely related to the teachings of Confucius and can be interpreted as …[having] a pragmatic future-oriented perspective rather than a conventional historical short-term point of view” (Hofstede, 2010).
In 2010, the Ministry of Education for the People’s Republic of China released an ‘Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development 2010-2020’. Reference is made to the rejuvenation of China through educational reforms including flexible and open lifelong learning and “the popularization and public sharing of quality education resources”, whilst observing that this outline plan “… is the first of its kind for the nation in the 21st century, and encompasses a broad range of endeavors over a long period of time. Its mission is weighty, and its requirements are demanding. It should be implemented in real earnest through close-knit arrangements and meticulous organization, so as to ensure that all the listed tasks are carried out in a down-to-earth way”. (Ministry of Education for the Peoples’ Republic of China, 2010, p.41 & p.50).
Global Local Computer Assisted Language Learning – GLoCALL
Flying into Beijing we descended through thick brown cloud. Straight into a taxi to the third ring road of the city and directly to the Global Local Computer Assisted Language Learning (GLoCALL) Conference at Beijing Foreign Studies University. A few days later it rained all day long, clearing the next two days for a canopy of blue before the atmosphere marked by one of the world’s busiest and most vibrant cities started closing in again. It felt exciting to be back in Beijing after seven years.
A kind and helpful student offered to show me the way to the Sir Shaw Run Run Building where the conference was going on. Along a tree-lined walkway and past tennis courts we talked about her part-time job teaching English at a private institute in the city and how what she enjoyed the most was helping her students understand English language content online that would connect them to the outside world. Had she heard of open educational resources for ELT? No. Would she like to come along to my talk and see the open resources from Oxford and learn how to use the open FLAX language collections? Yes.
Re-use of educational content
I was met by Dr. Shaoqun Wu, the main researcher with the FLAX project from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. She had been at the national headquarters of the Open University of China the day before, promoting the open language tools and collections in FLAX, which re-uses Oxford-managed corpora and Wikimedia content, for possible uses in their online English language programmes. Before that she had spent several weeks in her hometown province of Yunnan with Professor Ian Witten (FLAX project lead) and Dr. Margaret Franken, also from the FLAX project, developing the Happy English Learning collection in FLAX for the Shalang rural primary school. The collection re-uses content from the British Council’s China website and their YouTube channel for collections built in collaboration with the students based on digital stories they had written and voice-over recordings they had made. In a later meeting with Liang Junhong, the English project manager at the British Council in Beijing, I would ask her what she thought about the re-use of the British Council’s web resources in the FLAX project; she indicated that she thought it was an effective means of linking interactive resources in both English and Chinese for young learners in rural China.
Happy English Learning collection in FLAX
Shaoqun and I presented back to back on the following morning of the conference and I assisted with her workshop in the afternoon. With no Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube or Linkedin this made for a different conference experience from what I had become accustomed to at OER events. Chinese versions of similar social networking media which are widely used across China, for example the YouKu video platform, were not exploited at this conference and instead we were invited to upload our conference slides onto a password protected Moodle conference site. What became evident was the high regard for the efficacy of the FLAX system and the value placed on Oxford-based resources. She had lugged thirty-odd printed copies of the Book of FLAX over from NZ. Easily downloadable as an open e-book from the FLAX website, it demonstrates how the language resource collections were made and how teachers can also put together their own language collections in FLAX. This point about collections building was key at this conference and would inform our development work once back in New Zealand in November and December 2012.
The books were snapped up much to Shaoqun’s delight and relief at not having to drag them all the way back to NZ. And, the resounding message from the Chinese teachers present at the workshops was that in addition to the resource collections already built in FLAX, they wanted language collections that reflected their syllabuses, their texts, their students’ language needs and so on. But how do you take teachers whose materials development practices rely on copyrighted teaching resources through the stages of collections building to become open corpus developers? We know we can’t anticipate every need to build specific collections for everyone but we can develop simple-to-use open tools to help teachers and learners do it for themselves. Crowd-sourcing open language collections would become my renewed focus over the course of this project.
With teachers at Luoyang Normal University in Henan China wewill be building a general College English corpus-based collection in FLAX, specifically for the Chinese HE context where students will be preparing for the CET4 (College English Test 4) and CET6 (College English Test 6); two widely deployed English language tests in China for university students.
Publishers from the Foreign Language Teaching & Research Press (FTLRP), China’s equivalent to Oxford University Press (OUP) in terms of ELT resources publishing output, were in the audience. They were keen to set up meetings to discuss the re-use of Oxford creative commons podcasts and corpus-derived language samples from the FLAX resource collections for the development of ELT publications. We arranged to get together after my meeting at the British Council.
Trainer trainer resources for the Chinese ELT context
Monday morning traffic the following week, dodging pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in all manner of vehicles, made for a long taxi ride to the British Council. After a demonstration of resources from Oxford and the FLAX project, English project manager Liang Junhong, updated me on the Council’s current policies for ELT in China. There had been a noticeable shift in government educational policy whereby higher education institutes had been encouraged to become more independent, with projected growth in student completion rates almost doubling to include twenty percent of the working-age population from 2009 to 2020 (MoE China, 2010). In response to this, the British Council has moved support funding for ELT away from the HE sector to the primary and secondary sectors with English language teacher and trainer training in these two sectors being newly designated areas for ELT support. Work would still be carried out with Beijing Normal University in its capacity for ELT teacher education and training. Based on this discussion, we agreed that training video resources for how to use and build the FLAX collections using Oxford resources would be most valuable for the ELT work that the Council is currently supporting in China. It was also suggested that translating these training video resources into Chinese would be useful. Liang Li of the FLAX project at Waikato has developed a series of FLAX training videos in Chinese which can be accessed via the FLAX Youku video channel.
Saturday morning ELT resource shopping at the Foreign Language Teaching & Research Press (FTLRP) university bookstore, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Working with ELT publishers in China
My last two Chinese engagements were with ELT publishers, FTLRP in Beijing and the Dalian University of Technology Press in Dalian. The first part of my meeting with three FTRLP managers working in Higher English Education Publishing was carried out at their favorite 1950s swing rock n roll themed coffee shop near Beijing Foreign Studies University. They had all studied English language and linguistics at the university before working with the affiliated press. The connection between what they were trying to do in the ELT publishing world and their experience of the English language learning and teaching world was evident. One of their colleagues had celebrated their wedding at the coffee shop, and on our walk back to the press for the second part of our meeting old student dormitories were pointed out to me, so closely were they affiliated to their alma mater. They were impressed with what I told them about the OpenSpires project at Oxford, hoping that more Chinese universities would follow suit with the OER and OCW movements. Although they hadn’t heard of UK OER before they were familiar with other open podcast resource projects such as the Open Yale Courses and the TED Talks, pointing out that American English was the preferred type of English taught in China, as it is in Korea.
It is important to note that English language education resources from Chinese publishers are nowhere near as expensive as those from well-known ELT publishers in the west. Some of the computer scientists back in NZ showed me Chinese versions of their research that had been published as academic monographs for the Chinese market. In addition to being translated and therefore more accessible linguistically they were also available for a fraction of the cost to readers in China. In terms of business models, it’s possible to work with Chinese English language education publishers to create and distribute teaching and learning resources at a minimal cost to learners and teachers. Perhaps it is because of this overall customer satisfaction with the cost of educational resources in China that makes open educational resources and practices seem less urgent in this context.
After taking the overnight train to Dalian to meet with Ms. Ti of the Dalian University of Technology Press, similar views were shared on possible re-uses for the Oxford managed and created content I was demonstrating. Like FTLRP they could see the benefit of helping teachers who wanted to use creative commons podcasts in their teaching by offering linguistic support based on the language present in the lectures and talks. Drawing on corpus-based evidence from resources such as the FLAX collocations database and the BAWE corpus in an effort to meet the new ELT market demand for resources in teaching English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), it was agreed at both the FTLRP and at the Dalian University of Technology Press that these were viable materials development and publishing options that would ensure the re-use of high quality, flexible and authentic English language resources.
After a guided tour of Dalian’s three beautiful coastlines and some amazing seafood, I boarded a slow boat from China to Korea, eves dropping on the linguistic code switching between fellow Chinese-Korean and Korean-Chinese passengers. Several hours would be spent standing on the deck watching trucks go back n forth between depots loading container after container of goods from one of China’s busiest ports.
References
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Revised and Expanded 3rd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill USA.
Ministry of Education of the Peoples’ Republic of China. (2010). Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development 2010-2020. Beijing: In accordance with the 17th Communist Party of China National Congress. Retrieved from http://www.moe.edu.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s3501/index.html
Love Is A Stranger by the Eurythmics. Image via the Eurythmics Sheet Music Gallery
Happy Valentine’s Day!
This post is about how I came to be seduced by open educational practices (OEP).
TOETOE International blog series
After a period of radio silence, I have prepared a new series of blog posts on OEP in ELT based on my TOETOE International project with the University of Oxford, the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). They will be released weekly from today leading up to my presentation at the OER13 Conference in Nottingham in April, Stories from the Open Frontier of English Language Education Resources. These posts are a version of the case study I have prepared for this project, FLAX Weaving with Oxford Open Educational Resources, which will be published by the HEA/JISC as an OER later this year. I have also made this post in the OEP series available as a .pdf on Slideshare.
I have assembled these posts into ethnographic accounts (LeCompte & Schensul 1999:17; Clifford 1990:51-52) to stop the clock as it were and to reorder the recent past that has been observed and jotted down; to systematize, contextualize and assemble the activity of the TOETOE International project across seven different countries. They will be part narrative and part design dialectic, drawing on stories and evaluations made by international stakeholders concerning the re-use of Oxford content: Oxford-managed corpora (the British National Corpus aka BNC and the British Academic Written English corpus aka BAWE) and Oxford-created OER (podcast lectures and seminars, images, essays, ebooks) in combination with other open English-medium content. Moreover, these evaluation narratives will continue to inform the design of open source digital library software for developing flexible open English language learning and teaching collections with the FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
Thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) will be presented from networked meetings, workshops, conference presentations and interviews with OER and ELT practitioners for arriving at better understandings of the social acts and symbols connected with the international open education movement. As part of the reflexive writing process, I have re-storied the stories of participating individuals and institutions, placing them in chronological sequence and providing causal links among ideas. Themes arising from the stories contain new metaphors for linking unfamiliar phenomena from each country represented with familiar concepts for understanding OER in the international context. Topics introduced by this TOETOE International blog series include: emancipatory English, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) open English language collections building, working OER into traditional ELT publications, and long-range planning for embedding OER and OEP within sustainable English language education.
What drives someone toward open educational practice?
The reasons will be numerous but the one that stands out for me is the capacity to work across the international open education network, either in online or face-2-face mode. Working across disciplinary, technological and geographical boundaries, my current practice seems very distant from the practice I was trained in all those years ago when I did the Cambridge Dip.TEFLA (now the DELTA) in Seoul, Korea. Nonetheless, everything that I do now in my new open educational practice is very much informed by my past teaching practice in traditional classroom-based EFL/ESL and EAP.
There are vast changes happening across education globally and there is a growing need for flexible and high quality open educational resources in English along with an expanded open infrastructure to support research, teaching, training, learning and curriculum development while English is the lingua franca in education, research and publishing. Indeed, the position of English as international lingua franca is wholly dependent on its use and ownership by non-native speakers of English (Graddol, 2006). However, the reality of a rapidly expanding global higher education industry (UNESCO 2008), where open and online distance education are fast becoming major players because of affordances with educational technologies, has yet to trickle down into the workflow of English language teaching practitioners working in traditional classroom-based education.
In one of the learning technology forums I belong to someone was asking after recommended PhD programmes; someone else replied that whatever area you do your PhD in you’d better be prepared to live and breathe your chosen PhD topic area for many years to come if not your whole career. With my PhD I have begun identifying flexible pathways for open educational resources and practices to be shared across traditional classroom-based and open online English language education, but I expect that I will be continuing with this inquiry for quite some time to come.
Somewhere OvER the Rainbow – the myth about OER quality in language resources
Not surprisingly, I was assigned to the Libraries and Languages presentation slot at OpenEd 2012 where the conference theme was Beyond Content. The presenters from the other project in this session, Developing Foreign Language Courses for the Open Library Project, seemed to be fairly new to OER and raised issues around OER quality, stating that they needed to work with professional resource developers and publishers to produce what appeared to me to be fairly ordinary audio recordings for target language items to be used in their project resources.
Put simply, publishing language resources with a reputable publishing house does not always guarantee quality in the same way that publishing with an open license does not always guarantee quality. The difference being that if you buy a course book and it turns out to be a lemon then you’re stuck with it – you either leave it on the shelf or you spend hours developing supplementary resources to ‘fix’ it. However, if you subscribe to an open educational practice model for materials development you can:
Re-use an OER and if it doesn’t work for you then you’re free to:
Re-vise / re-purpose;
Re-mix with other open (and proprietary content which you have cleared for use) and;
Re-distribute through a variety of open and proprietary channels.
These are the four Rs of OER (Wiley, 2009). A far cry from the materials development method I learned on the Cambridge CELTA and DipTEFLA modules which was to Select, Adapt, Reject and Supplement (SARS) course book materials from leading ELT publishers (Graves, 2003).
In addition to raising the point about quality with the other presenters in my Open Educationa 2012 session in the Q&A, during the lunch break I discussed the on-going myth about OER quality with one of my SCORE colleagues from the UK, Chris Pegler. I have been a big fan of her Resource Reuse Card Game (embedded below in Slideshare) from the ORIOLE project (Open Resources: Influence on Learners and Educators) to look at issues surrounding educational resource re-use, including the issue of quality. It turns out that I would be re-using her card game in workshops in Korea, New Zealand and Vietnam as part of this project, and I will be including more findings from these interactions with the re-use card game in upcoming posts.
Reinforcement of the myth surrounding OER quality was not what I was expecting to encounter at an open education conference but I do come across this a lot in the work I do with teacher training at ELT events. I have noticed a discernible pattern whereby a handful of language teachers will say that their role at their institution is to develop resources (often single-handedly) for their programme(s), and where many more teachers will openly declare that they do not consider themselves to be supported or encouraged to develop materials to share across their community of practice. Common claims for not developing and sharing resources beyond classroom handouts include a deficit in technology training and a reliance on in-house materials or proprietary course books that have been selected and or developed by programme managers. These are all valid reasons considering these are all common practices.
In many ways we are trained to consume and not to create resources, and at most we permit ourselves to adapt and supplement often irrespective of intellectual property rights, making it difficult to share beyond institutional and virtual learning environment walls. But can language practitioners and the training and professional bodies that promote current ELT practice continue to shy away from an era of ubiquitous digital content and self-publishing platforms? Going through the motions with course books is a killer so how are we going to support our creative license if all that’s required of us is to consume and regurgitate ready-made ELT skills meals in the form of generic course books? Hopefully the question of bringing language teachers to the realization of their central role as materials developers will be one of the topics on the table at the Materials Development Association (MATSDA) University of Liverpool Conference which I will be attending in April directly after the IATEFL Conference Liverpool 2013.
Less yak and more hack! : rapid prototyping of resources
…it became clear to me that every technology is based upon what I call the orchestration of phenomena, natural effects working together. If you look at any new technology as a whole symphony orchestra of working phenomena, it becomes a huge wonder. I have a sense of wonder far, far greater than I had before. As human beings, we’re using these things unthinkingly every day—it’s like having magic carpets at our disposal, and we have no idea how they fly. Let me add one last thing. I’m an enthusiast about technology, but I am also suspicious of it and what it’s doing to us. It intrudes in our lives, it causes us problems such as climate change, and it’s taken away a lot of our deep connection with nature. But at the same time it’s an incredible wonder. (Interview with W. Brian Arthur, author of The Nature of Technology)
Unless you know what’s at your disposal technologically-speaking and unless you know how to bring resources together, mindful of their affordances and their limitations, then to the untrained eye technological innovation can seem like pure genius. But it’s probably more the case of working through problem solving scenarios step by step, pulling together an ever increasing swag bag of tech goodies to create solutions for the moment until the next thing comes along….and so the cycle continues. This can feel very overwhelming to the individual teacher who would like to be better at using technology and this is why Russell Stannard’s Teacher Training Videos (TTV) is such a big hit among language teachers with bringing what’s out there from the wide world of web-based language resources to teachers.
We now have the technology to flip the course book, the classroom and even higher education with the massive explosion in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) entering the traditional university world with for-profit providers such as Udacity, Coursera and FutureLearn. However, the point I would like to add to this is that resource developers such as those whose web-based language technologies are featured on TTV need feedback on what does and does not work in practice. This is where language teachers can come squarely into the technology equation and learn far more from evaluating and contributing to the development of resources than they would ever pick up at any teacher training continuing professional development session on technology. It dawned on me during my Masters in Edtech and ELT at Manchester University that I wasn’t going to learn much from talking about technology; instead I ended up going directly to the source itself by working with open source software (OSS) developers at the FLAX project.
Hackfests with OSS developers and OER book sprints (see an example of a maths book sprint here) with educators are two rapid prototyping methods for creating code and educational resources. There is no time for hesitancy or hierarchy, you simply work and learn with others to devise shared goals and to bring all that you can to the creation process; to come up with rapid prototypes to share back to the wider community to re-use, re-purpose, re-mix and re-distribute as OER. By attending two Mozilla Drumbeat festivals in Barcelona and London I got to observe and participate in early discussions for the rapid prototyping of Open Badges for educational assessment and Mozilla Popcorn for creating interactive online videos.
Mozilla Drumbeat Festivals since 2010 – Learning, Freedom and the Web via FlickrThe Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest in Barcelona 2010 via Flickr
While back in New Zealand late last year with the FLAX project team at the Greenstone digital library lab at Waikato, every week I would participate in developer meetings with the computer scientists behind the project and one other English language teacher from the Chinese Open University who is also basing her PhD research on the FLAX project. Well-versed in natural language processing and research on current web-based search behaviour, the computer scientists behind the interface designs of the FLAX collections and activities were adept at exploiting available linguistic resources for the development of simple-to-use language learning collections and OSS text analysis tools. I soon picked up what the limitations of the different technologies and resources were. The focus of these meetings was to develop rapid prototype resources for envisioning and discussing how they could work across different language learning scenarios. I was able to observe and contribute to many iterations of the resources currently under development and I will be bringing these resources to the fore of future blog posts in this series.
I also had a chance to present my work at the Tertiary Writers Network Colloquium which was hosted by the Department of Education at Waikato. This was a great opportunity to share open practices in EAP with a non UK-based audience working mainly in Australasia and in the US. I highlighted some of the OEP going on with the EAP community online using social networking technologies such as Twitter, blogs, Slideshare, YouTube and so on for reflection on the different types of networks we are and are not plugging into. EFL/ESL has been employing these technologies for longer for sharing ideas and resources in general ELT but there is more that could be done with connecting teachers to resources development projects, either through the OSS community or through working with traditional ELT publishers for creating more effective resource evaluation channels that would help teachers learn more about technology.
This would involve the development of resources to engage potential end-users, namely language teachers and students, in the research and development cycle of technology for ELT. In the field of educational technology we refer to this approach as design-based research which Terry Anderson, professor and Canada research chair in distance education, has referred to as action research on steroids (2007). Anderson’s analogy is a useful one as most language teachers are familiar with action research, which shares many of the same principles as design-based research.
Pragmatism is central to both approaches, often employing mixed methods of inquiry to arrive at tangible solutions to educational problems. Normally within action research cycles it is individual teaching practitioners who carry out classroom teaching interventions to observe, record and reflect on the impact of these interventions over time with the aim of informing and improving teaching practice (Reason & Bradbury, 2007). However, within design-based research cycles, emphasis is more commonly placed on educational practitioners working in collaboration with research and design teams (Anderson & Shuttuck, 2012).
Returning to EAP the question remains as to how much we can learn about EAP by talking about it. Quite a bit and I’m all for sharing views about what EAP is as it tries to define itself. What I would like to see beyond yak and competency frameworks like the one from BALEAP that came out in 2008, however, is more in the way of teaching and learning resources from EAP practitioners and evaluations on what works. At this point in time, we’re not yet collaborating with resources development practices across our EAP contexts in any sustainable way. It would be great if we could clone more Andy Gillettes of the Using English for Academic Purposes (UEfAP) website, successfully bringing together genre and corpus-based approaches to EAP resources development. However, it would be even better if instead of creating EAP resources that are open gratis (free to access like UEfAP) we were developing EAP resources that are open libre (free to re-use, re-vise, re-mix and re-distribute), for scaling collaborative open educational resources and practices in EAP as well as in the wider ELT community.
References
Anderson, T. & Shattuck, J. (2012) Design-Based Research: A Decade of Progress in Education Research. Educational Researcher, Vol 41(1): 16-25
Clifford, J. (1990). Notes on (field)notes. In R. Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The makings of anthropology (pp. 47–70). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fitzgerald, A. (In press). FLAX Weaving with Oxford Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources International Case Study. Commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), United Kingdom.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Graddol. D. (2006). English Next – why English as a global language may mean the end of ‘English as a Foreign Language’. The British Council: The English Company.
Graves, K, 2003. “Coursebooks.” In D. Nunan (Ed.) Practical English Language Teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill.
LeCompte, M. & Schensul, J. (1999). Analyzing and interpreting ethnographic data. California: AltaMira Press.
Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. (2007) Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage.
Wiley, D. & Gurrell, S. (2009). A decade of development…Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning. Vol 24 (1), pp.11-21.
UNESCO (2008). Education For All. Global Monitoring Report 2008. United Nations Education Scientific Cultural Organisation. Retrieved from www.efareport.unesco.org
A lot of talk around defining current and trending practices in EAP can be tuned into via open as well as proprietary channels. In this section, I will refer to new-found open practices in EAP which are embracing Web 2.0 technologies amidst a backdrop of closed practices in EAP academic publishing and within subscription-only EAP memberships. I will open up discussion around these different practices within EAP to sketch out common ground for where EAP could be heading with respects to global outreach.
Toward open practices in EAP
Recent months have evidenced a steady opening up of practices for sharing expertise and resources in EAP. The new EAP teaching blog based at Nottingham University as a discussion-based side-shoot to their new Masters programme in EAP teaching makes use of the most widely used open-source blogging software, WordPress. Thanks to our friends in Canada, EAP tweetchat sessions are run on twitter with the hashtag #EAPchat every first and third Monday of the month, bringing together EAP practitioners who wish to participate in global EAP discussions as well as suggest topics for upcoming tweetchat sessions. An archived transcript page is available at the end of each EAPchat twitter session.
Free webinars from Oxford University Press (OUP), the largest academic publishing house in the world, are also broadcasting talk on EAP to the world. Julie Moore who has collaborated on the new Oxford EAP book series has also contributed free webinars with OUP attended by EAP practitioners from around the world. A review of one of Julie’s webinars on academic grammar can be found on the OUP-sponsored ELT global blog. Wouldn’t it be great if more EAP practitioners opened up their practice in this way to suggest areas of expertise in EAP that they would like to contribute and broadcast via webinars with OUP’s considerable market outreach?
The EAP community in the UK mainly gathers around BALEAP with their Professional Issues Meetings, accreditation scheme, biennial conference and lively email discussion list. There is a noticeable push-pull between open and closed EAP practices within BALEAP which I would like to bring into the open for discussion. Openness was built into the Durham PIM on the EAP Practitioner in June of this year to make this the first BALEAP event to have a twitter hashtag thanks to forward thinking from Steve Kirk. Since this PIM he has also been curating a useful EAP practitioner resources site with Scoop.it!
There does seem to be a willingness on the part of BALEAP members to explore with new technologies so that their discussions around issues on EAP are openly available. However, the BALEAP email discussion list which I mentioned above is the only one of half a dozen similarly JISC-hosted email discussion lists that I belong to which is closed off by the BALEAP membership subscription pay-wall. The others which I subscribe to for free are all open, and discussion transcripts from their contributing members can be searched via the web through the JISC email archives. This has been a BALEAP executive committee decision to keep the email discussion list closed and I question whether this decision best reflects the current drive toward openness among BALEAP members who are interested in sharing their insights and expertise with those around the world for whom BALEAP membership is not an affordable option.
BALEAP recently added the strap-line the global forum for EAP practitioners to its website. Formerly the British Association of Lecturers in EAP (hence the continuity from the acronym to the name BALEAP), some of their event and research outputs can be found on their website but others can only be accessed via the subscription-only Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP). And, you can probably guess where I’m going here with concerns around openness or lack thereof with respects to being the global EAP practitioner forum…
Nonetheless, an invaluable EAP resource that BALEAP have put out onto the wild web is the EAP teacher competency framework. An EAP practitioner portfolio mentoring programme is currently in the pilot stages and there is talk of matching EAP teaching competencies in BALEAP with the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) at the HEA, but once again for those non-UK and freelance EAP practitioners who do not work for UK higher education institutions that subscribe to the HEA such an alignment of frameworks may not be suitable or relevant. That said, the essence of the UKPSF is useful and perhaps with the current OER International programme at the HEA we can see ownership of the UKPSF go international? HEA accreditation as a UK body will remain a reality, however, so it will be interesting to see what the HEAL working party at BALEAP who are collaborating with the HEA will come up with in response to shaping the identity of BALEAP who aspire to be known as the global forum for EAP practitioners.
Having recently formed a Web Resources Sub Committee (WRSC) with other technologically and OER oriented EAPers at BALEAP we may yet see things open up. Below is the presentation Ylva Berglund Prytz and myself (both on the WRSC at BALEAP) gave on Openness in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) at the PIM in Sheffield in November, 2011.
Elsevier are the publishers of JEAP and from experience open access in academic publishing has come about through the pressure tactics of certain academic communities of practice lobbying for green and gold standard open access publications in their representative fields. Open Access week – set the default to open is coming up again on October 22nd.
Moving to open access research publications all depends on the culture of the academic research community. It will take those EAP practitioners and researchers working in privileged and well-resourced institutions that can easily afford institutional subscriptions to memberships like BALEAP to seriously consider open access and the potential for global reach of research into EAP. It will also take those EAP practitioners who are working off their institutional radars, so to speak, and who are experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies to get their message and expertise out there for global interaction around issues in EAP practice and research. Something I picked up from Steve Kirk’s Scoop.it! account is a recent book setting an open trend in EAP publishing, Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places which is published in a free digital online format as well as a pay-for print version. This echoes what publishers are doing with big names in more open fields such as the Bloomsbury Academic publication of The Digital Scholar by Martin Weller. Exciting times and opportunities lie ahead for EAP publishing.
English for Specific Academic Purposes with data driven learning resources
It seems to be no great coincidence that Tim Johns who coined the term Data Driven Learning (DDL) in 1994 had also come up with the term English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in 1974 (Hyland, 2006). According to Chris Tribble’s preliminary results from his latest survey in-take on DDL (announced at the TaLC closing keynote address), EAP practitioners still make up a high percentage of those who took the survey, indicating greater uptake of corpus-based resources and practices in EAP than those in EFL / ESL, for example.
Open corpus-based tools and resources have the potential to equip and enable EAP practitioners to develop relevant ESAP materials. Awareness of and training in these open corpus-based resources will need to be shared across the EAP community, however, to ensure that we are crowd-sourcing our expertise and our resources in this area. If you click on the image below this will take you to a talk I gave at the Open University in the UK on addressing academic literacies with corpus-based OER. This was inspired by the Tribble DDL survey and the lead up to the TaLC10 conference. It was an added bonus to have one of the BAWE corpus developer team members in the audience that day and to receive positive feedback on how FLAX have opened up the BAWE in collaboration with TOETOE and the Learning Technologies Group Oxford.
OU video presentation on Addressing Academic Literacies with open corpus-based resources
Over the course of this academic year FLAX and TOETOE will continue to build onto work around opening up research corpora like the BAWE and the BNC managed by the Oxford Text Archive for developing resources for ESAP. We will also be engaging with various stakeholder groups through f2f workshops, online surveys and interviews for open corpus-based resources evaluation which I will be sharing insights from on this blog.
One final word on OER and where corpus-based resources might play a significant role in making higher education more accessible to the estimated 100 million learners worldwide who currently qualify to study at university level but do not have the means to do so (UNESCO, 2008). Because English is the educational lingua franca, open educationalists are going to source support resources for academic English from the approaches and materials that are currently popular and openly available to re-use under creative commons licences. This throws up interesting issues around specificity in EAP for supporting learners with discipline-specific English.
A parallel universe in EAP materials development
Cartoon image referred to by Niko Pfund, USA president of OUP in podcast on Ebooks, Reading and Scholarship in a Digital Age
It would be an understatement to say that the academic publishing world is undergoing a radical transformation with the arrival of digital and open publishing formats which are democratising publishing as we know it. Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press (USA), discusses the ways in which technology affects reading, scholarship, publishing and even thinking in a presentation he gave at Oxford recently which you can access by clicking on the cartoon image above.
I learned a lot from this podcast, including OUP’s commitment since 2003 to publishing all research monographs in both digital and print formats. I also learned of their admiration for what Wikipedians have done for opening up knowledge and publishing through human crowd-sourcing that utilises open technologies and platforms. A parallel drawn here to something that was brought up repeatedly at the EduWiki conference is how academic publishing houses like OUP are well placed to open up the disciplines in the same way as Wikipedia by bringing the voices of the academy into the public sphere through more accessible means of communication than research, and by effectively linking this research to current world events to gain wider relevance and readership.
Pfund refers to messy experimental times in academic publishing with lots of new business models currently being explored for spear-heading changes in publishing. OUP heavily subsidise and give away a lot of published resources including ELT textbooks to the developing world, but not yet under open licences (someone please correct me if I’m wrong here) for those practitioners working in under-resourced communities so that they can re-mix and re-distribute these same resources.
OUCS and OUP are literally down the road from one another, a parallel universe as it were. The former is research, learning and teaching focused with a strong commitment to public scholarship, and the later is focused on exploring new practices and business models for delivering the best in academic publishing. Arguably, there is a lot of overlap that can be tapped into here for the collaborative development of open corpus-based resources and practices for the global ELT market.
In-house EAP materials development
EAP teachers have been developing in-house EAP materials in response to the generic EAP teaching resources available on the mainstream market as a means to meeting the real needs of their students going onto all number of degree programmes. However, as I mentioned in section 2 of this blog post, many of these in-house EAP materials make use of third party copyrighted texts and therefore cannot be shared beyond the secret garden of the classroom or the institutional password-protected VLE. An enormous opportunity presents itself here to EAP practitioners and corpus linguists alike to push out resources in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) using open Data-Driven Learning (DDL) methods, texts, tools and platforms for sharing OER for ESAP. A significant cultural shift in practice will be required, however, to realise this vision for developing flexible and open ESAP resources that can be adapted for use in multiple educational contexts both off- and on-line. Once again, in subsequent blog posts, I will be presenting open educational practices and open research methods to open up discussion for ways forward with this particular global EAP vision.
References
Alexander, O., Bell, D., Cardew, S., King, J., Pallant, A., Scott, M., Thomas, D., & Ward Goodbody, M. (2008) Competency framework for teachers of English for Academic Purposes, BALEAP.
Hyland, K. (2006). English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Handbook. London: Routledge.
Johns, T. (1994). From Printout to Handout: Grammar and Vocabulary Teaching in the Context of Data-driven Learning. In Odlin, T. (ed.), Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar: 27-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I confess that I spend most of my time listening to BBC Radio 3. The parallel that I will draw here is that I was never formally educated in classical music in the same way as I have never worked toward formal qualifications in corpus linguistics during any of my studies. Because I am working broadly across the areas of language resources development and enhancing teaching and learning practices through technology it was only a matter of time, however, before I started exploring and toying with corpus-based resources. I met Dr. Shaoqun Wu of the FLAX project while at a conference in Villach, Austria in 2006 and by 2007 I had begun to delve into the world of open-source digital library collections development with the University of Waikato’s Greenstone software, developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO, for realising the much broader vision of reaching under-resourced communities around the world with these open technologies and collections.
Bridging Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC)
Let’s fast forward to the 2012 Teaching and Language Corpora Conference in Warsaw, Poland. Although I have participated in corpus linguistics conferences before, this was my first time to attend the biennial TaLC conference. TaLCers are very much researchers working in the area of corpus linguistics and DDL and this conference was themed around bridging the gap between DDL research and uses for corpus-based resources and practices in language teaching and learning.
One of the keynote addresses from James Thomas, Let’s Marry, called for greater connectedness in pursuing relationships between those working in DDL research and those working in pedagogy and language acquisition. At one point he asked the audience to make a show of hands for those who knew of big names in the ELT world, including Scrivener, Harmer and Thornbury. Only a few raised their hands. He also made the point that these same ELT names don’t make their way into citations for research on DDL. Interestingly, I was tweeting points made in the sessions I attended to relevant EAP and ELT / EFL / ESL communities online without a TaLC conference hashtag. It would’ve been great to have the other TaLCers tweeting along with me, raising questions and noting key take-away points from the conference to engage interested parties who could not make the conference in person and to catalogue a twitterfeed for TaLC that could be searched by anyone via the Internet at a later point in time. It would’ve also been great to record keynote and presentation speakers as webcasts for later viewing. When approached about these issues later, however, the conference organisers did express interest in ways of amplifying their events by building such mechanisms for openness into their next conference.
Prising open corpus linguistics research in Data Driven Learning (DDL)
Problems with accessing and successfully implementing corpus-based resources into language teaching and learning scenarios have been numerous. As I discussed in section 2 of this blog, many of the concordancing tools referred to in the research have been subscription-based proprietary resources (for example, the Wordsmith Tools), most of which have been designed for at least the intermediate-level concordance user in mind. These tools can easily overwhelm language teaching practitioners and their students with the complex processing of raw corpus data that are presented via complex interfaces with too many options for refinement. Mike Scott, the main developer of the Wordsmith Tools has also released a free version of his concordancing suite with less functionality and this would suffice for many language teaching and learning purposes. He attended my presentation on opening up research corpora with open-source text analysis tools and OER and was very open-minded as were the other TaLCers whom I met at the conference regarding new and open approaches for engaging teachers and learners with corpus-based resources.
There are many freely available annotated bibliographies compiled by corpus linguists which you can access on the web for guidance on published research into corpus linguistics. Many researchers working in this area are also putting pre-print versions of their research publications on the web for greater access and dissemination of their work, see Alex Boulton’s online presence for an example of this. Also hinted at earlier in part 2 of this blog are the closed formats many of this published research takes, however, in the form of articles, chapters and the few teaching resources available that are often restricted to and embedded within subscription-only journals or pricey academic monographs. For example, Berglund-Prytz’s ‘Text Analysis by Computer: Using Free Online Resources to Explore Academic Writing’ in 2009 is a great written resource for where to get started with OER for EAP but ironically the journal it is published in, Writing and Pedagogy, is not free. Lancaster University is home to the openly available BNCweb concordancing software which you only need register for to be able to install a free standard copy on your personal computer. A valuable companion resource on BNCweb was published by Peter Lang in 2008 but once again this is not openly accessible to interested readers who cannot afford to buy the book. The great news is that the main TaLC10 organiser, Agnieszka Lenko, has spearheaded openness with this most recent event by trying to secure an Open Access publication for the TaLC10 proceedings papers with Versita publishers in London.
DIY corpora with AntConc in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)
At TaLC10 I discovered a lot of overlap with Maggie Charles’ work on building DIY corpora with EAP postgraduate students using the AntConc freeware by Laurence Anthony. We had also included workshops on AntConc for students in our OER for EAP cascade at Durham so it was great to see another EAP practitioner working in this way who had gathered data from her on-going work in this area for presentation and discussion at the conference. Many of her students at the University of Oxford Language Centre are working toward dissertation or thesis writing which raises interesting questions around enabling EAP students to become proficient in developing self-study resources for English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). Her recent paper in the English for Specific Purposes Journal (2012) points to AntConc’s flexibility for student use due to it being freeware that can be installed on any personal computer or flash-drive key for portable use. Laurence Anthony’s website also offers a lot of great video training resources for how to use AntConc. The potential that AntConc offers for building select corpora to those students currently pursuing inter-disciplinary studies in higher education is also noted by Charles. Having said this, drawbacks with certain more obscure subject disciplines, for example Egyptology (Ibid.), that had not yet embraced digital research cultures and were still publishing research in predominantly print-based volumes or image-based .pdf files made the development of DIY corpora still beyond the reach of those few students.
Beyond books and podcasts through linking and crowd-sourcing
While presenting on the power of linked resources within the FLAX collections and pushing these outward to wider stakeholder communities through TOETOE, I came across another rapid innovation JISC-funded OER project at the Beyond Books conference at Oxford. The Spindle project, also based at the Learning Technologies Group Oxford, has been exploring linguistic uses for Oxford’s OpenSpires podcasts with work based on open-source automatic transcription tools. Automatic transcription is often accompanied with a high rate of inaccuracy. Spindle has been looking at ways for developing crowd-sourcing web interfaces that would enable English language learners to listen to the podcasts and correct the automatic transcription errors as part of a language learning crowd-sourcing task.
Automatic keyword generation was also carried out in the SPINDLE project on OpenSpires project podcasts, yielding far more accurate results. These keyword lists which can be assigned as metadata tags in digital repositories and channels like iTunesU offer further resource enhancement for making the podcasts more discoverable. Automatically generated keyword lists such as these can also be used for pedagogical purposes with the pre-teaching of vocabulary, for example. The TED500 corpus by Guy Aston which I also came across at TaLC10 is based on the TED talks (ideas worth spreading) which have also been released under creative commons licences and transcribed through crowd-sourcing.
The potential for open linguistic content to be reused, re-purposed and redistributed by third parties globally, provided that they are used in non-commercial ways and are attributed to their creators, offers new and exciting opportunities for corpus developers as well as educational practitioners interested in OER for language learning and teaching.
References
Anthony, L. (n.d.). Laurence Anthony’s Website: AntConc.
Berglund-Prytz, Y (2009). Text Analysis by Computer: Using Free Online Resources to Explore Academic Writing.Writing and Pedagogy 1(2): 279–302.
British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
Charles, M. (2012). ‘Proper vocabulary and juicy collocations’: EAP students evaluate do-it-yourself corpus-building. English for Specific Purposes, 31: 93-102.
Lexical Analysis Software & Oxford University Press (1996-2012). Wordsmith Tools.
Hoffmann, S., Evert, S., Smith, N., Lee, D. & Berglund Prytz, Y. (2008). Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb – a Practical Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Previously, I left off with reflections from the 2012 IATEFL conference and exhibition in Glasgow. Wandering through the exhibition hall crammed with vendor-driven English language resources for sale from the usual suspects (big brand publishers), the analogy of the greatest hits came to mind with respects to EFL / ESL and EAP materials development and publishing. But at this same IATEFL event there was also a lot of co-channel interference feeding in from the world of self-publishing, reflecting how open digital scholarship has become mainstream practice in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), also known as Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) in North America. The launch of the round initiative at IATEFL, bridging the gap between ELT blogging and book-making, where the emphasis is on teachers as publishers is but one example.
Crosstalk in ELT materials development and publishing
Let’s take a closer look at the crosstalk happening within the world of ELT materials development and publishing, where messages are being transmitted simultaneously from radio 1 and radio 2 type stations. Across the wider ELT world, TEFL / TESL has embraced Web 2.0 far more readily than EAP (but there are interesting signs of open online life emerging from some EAP practitioners, which I will highlight in the last section of this blog).
Within TEFL, we can observe more in the way of collaboration between open and proprietary publishing practices. English360, also present at IATEFL 2012, combines proprietary content from Cambridge University Press with teachers’ lesson plans, along with tools for creating custom-made pay-for online English language courses. Across the ELT resources landscape open resources and practices proliferate, including: free ELT magazines and journals; blogs and commentary-led discussions; micro-blogging via twitter feeds and tweetchat sessions; instructional and training videos via YouTube and iTunesU (both proprietary channels that hold a lot of OER), and; online communities with lesson plan resource banks. These and many more open educational practices (OEP) are the norm in TEFL / TESL. And, let’s not forget Russell Stannard’s Teacher Training Videos website of free resources for navigating web-based language tools and projects drawing on his service as the Web Watcher at English Teaching Professional for well over a decade now.
The broken record in ELT publishing
Broken record of “I believe in miracles” by Ian Crowther via Flickr
Yet, both the TEFL / TESL and EAP markets are still well and truly saturated with the glossy print-based textbook format, stretching to the CD-ROM and mostly password-protected online resource formats. The greatest hits get played over and over again and the needle continues to get stuck in many places.
Exactly why does the closed textbook format concern me so much? It’s an issue of granularity or size really which leads to further issues with flexibility, specificity and currency. As we all know, there are only so many target language samples and task types that you can pack into a print-based textbook. Beyond the trendy conversation-based topics, what are sometimes useful and transferable are the approaches that make up the pedagogy contained therein. Unlocking these approaches and linking to wider and more relevant and authentic language resources is key. We can see this approach to linked resources development taken by the web-based FLAX and WordandPhrase corpus-based projects. Publishers are aware of the limitations of the textbook format but they’re also trying to reach a large consumer base to boost their sales so it remains in their best interests to keep resources generic. Think of all the academic English writing books out there, many of which claim to be based on the current research for meeting your teaching and learning needs for academic English writing across the disciplines, but turn out to be more of the same topic-based how-to skills books working within the same essayist writing tradition.
Open textbooks
The open textbook movement brings a new type of textbook to the world of education. One that can be produced at a fraction of the cost and one that can be tailored, linked to external resources, changed and updated whenever the pedagogical needs arise.
The argument in favour of textbooks in ELT has always been one for providing structure to the teaching and learning sequence of a particular syllabus or course. Locked-down proprietary textbook, CD-ROM and online resource formats are not only expensive but they are inflexible. And, these force teachers into problematic practices. Despite trying to point out the perils of plagiarism to our students, as language teachers we are supplementing textbooks with texts, images and audio-visual material from wherever we can beg, borrow and steal them. Of course we do this for principled pedagogical reasons and if we don’t plan on sharing these teaching materials beyond classroom and password-protected VLE walls we’re probably OK, right?
I’ve seen many a lesson handout or in-house course pack for language teaching that includes many third party texts and images which are duly referenced. Whether the teacher/materials developer puts the small ‘c’ in the circle or not, marking this handout or course pack as copyrighted, the default license is one of copyright to the institution where that practitioner works. And, this is where the problem lies. The handout or course pack is potentially in breach of the copyright of any third party materials used therein, unless the teacher/materials developer has gained clearance from the copyright holders or unless those third party materials are openly licensed as OER for re-mixing. Good practice with materials development and licensing will ensure that valuable resources created by teachers can be legitimately shared across learning and teaching communities. You can do this through open publishing technologies and/or in collaboration with publishers.
A deficit in corpus-based resources training
Good corpus-derived textbooks from leading publishing houses do exist. Finally, the teaching of spoken grammar gets the nod with The Handbook of Spoken Grammar textbook by Delta Publishing. But, and this is a big but, do these textbooks go far enough to address the current deficit in teacher and learner training with corpus-based tools and resources? I expect the publishers would direct this question to the academic monographs, of which there are a fair few, on Data Driven Learning (DDL) and corpus linguistics. I have some on my bookshelf and there are many more in the library where I am a student/fellow, all cross-referenced to academic journal articles from research into corpus linguistics and DDL which I will be talking about more in the third section of this blog. But exactly how accessible are these resources – in terms of their cost, the academic language they are packaged in, the closed proprietary formats they are published in, and in relation to much of the subscription-only corpora and concordancing software their research is based on? It’s no wonder that training in corpus tools and resources is not part of mainstream English language teacher training. Of course, there are open exceptions that provide new models in corpus-based resources development and publishing practices and this is very much what the TOETOE project is trying to share with language education communities.
Corpus linguists are well aware that corpus-based resources and tools in language teaching and materials development haven’t taken off as a popular sport in mainstream language teaching and teacher training. This does run counter to the findings from the research, however, where the argument is that DDL has reached a level of maturity (Nesi & Gardner, 2011; Reppen, 2010; O’Keefe et.al., 2007; Biber, 2006). Similarly, many of the findings from leading researchers (too many to cite!) in language and teaching corpora have been baffled by the chasm between the research into DDL and the majority of mainstream ELT materials that appear on the market that continue to ignore the evidence about actual language usage from corpus-based research studies. Once again, this comes back to the issue of specific versus generic language materials and the issues raised around limitations with developing restricted resource formats.
Gangnam style corpus-based resources development
Gangnam Style by PSY 싸이 강남스타일 via Flickr
So what’s it going to take for corpus-based resources to take off Gangnam style in mainstream language teaching and teacher training? And, how are we going to make these resources cooler and more accessible so as to stop language teaching practitioners from giving them a bad rap? More and more corpus-based tools and resources are being built with or re-purposed with open source technologies and platforms. We are now presented with more and more web-based channels for the dissemination of educational resources, offering the potential for massification and exciting new possibilities for achieving what has always eluded the language education and language corpora research community, namely the wide-scale adoption of corpus-based resources in language education.
I’ve actually been asked to take the word ‘corpus’ out of a workshop title by a conference organiser so as to attract more participants. If you’re interested in expressing your own experiences with using corpora in language teaching and would like to make suggestions for where you think data-driven learning should be heading you can complete Chris Tribble’s on-going online survey on DDL here.
Radio, what’s new? Someone still loves you (corpus-based resources)…
PublishOER
Publishers constantly need ideas for and examples of good educational resources. No great surprises there. I would like to propose that OER and OEP are a great way to get noticed by publishers to start working with them. Sitting on the steering committee meeting with the JISC-funded PublishOER project members at Newcastle University in the UK in early September, we also had representatives from Elsevier, RightsCom, the Royal Veterinary College (check out their exciting WikiVet OER project) and JISC Collections at the table. Elsevier who have borne the brunt of a lot of the lash back in academic publishing from the Open Access movement are trying to open up to the fast changing landscape of open practices in publishing. PublishOER are creating new mechanisms, a permissions request system, for allowing teachers and academics to use copyrighted resources in OER. These OER will include links and recommendations leading back to the publishers’ copyrighted resources as a mechanism for promoting them. Publishers are also interested in using OER developed by teachers and academics that are well designed and well received by students. Re-mixable OER offer great business opportunities for publishers as well as great dissemination opportunities for DDL researchers and practitioners, enabling effective corpus-based ELT resources to reach broader audiences.
Sustainability is an important issue with any project, resource, event or community. How many times have we seen school textbook sets stay unused on shelves, or heard of government-funded project resources that go unused perhaps due to a lack of discoverability? To build new and useful resources online does not necessarily mean that teachers and learners will come in droves to find and use these resources even if they are for free. David Duebelbeiss of EFL Classroom 2.0 is currently exploring new business models for sharing and selling ELT resources. One example is the sale of lesson plans in a can which were once free and now sell for $19.95, a “once and forever payment”. Some teachers can even make it rich as is reported in this businessweek article about a kindergarten teacher who sold her popular lesson plans through the TeachersPayTeachers initiative.
Transaction costs in materials development don’t only include the cost of the tools and resources that enable materials development, they also include the cost in terms of time spent on developing resources and marketing them. Open education also points to the unnecessary cost in duplicating the same educational resources over and over again because they haven’t been designed and licensed openly for sharing and re-mixing. Putting your resources in the right places, in more than one, and working with those that understand new markets, new technologies and new business models, including open education practitioners and publishers, are all ways forward to ensure a return on investment with materials development.
Hopefully, by providing new frequencies for practitioners to tune into for how to create resources from both open and proprietary resources a new mixed economy (as the PublishOER crowd like to refer to it) will be realised.
A matter of scale in open and distance education
Let’s not forget those working in ELT around the world, many of whom are volunteers, who along with their students simply cannot afford the cost of proprietary and subscription-only educational resources, let alone the investment and infrastructure for physical classrooms and schools. Issues around technology and ELT resources and practices in developing countries did surface at IATEFL 2012 but awareness around the more pressing issues may not be finding ways to effectively filter their way through to well-resourced ELT practitioners and the institutions that employ them. ELT is still fixated on classroom-based teaching resources and practices.
The Hornby Educational Trust in collaboration with the British Council which is a registered charity have been offering scholarships to English language teachers working in under-resourced communities since 1970. I attended a session given by the Hornby scholars at IATEFL 2012 and although I was impressed by the enthusiasm and range of expertise of those who had been selected for scholarships, reporting on ELT interventions they had devised in their local contexts, I couldn’t help but wonder about the scale of the challenges we currently face in education globally. How are we going to provide education opportunities for the additional 100 million learners currently seeking access to the formal post-secondary sector (UNESCO, 2008)? In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of all children will not have the privilege of a senior high school education (Ibid). What open and distance education teaches us is that there are just not enough teachers/educators out there. Nor will the conventional industrial model of educational delivery be able to meet this demand.
As DDL researchers and resource developers who are looking for ways to make our research and practice more widely adopted in language teaching and learning globally, wouldn’t we also want to be thinking about where the real educational needs are and how we might be reaching under-resourced communities with open corpus-based educational resources for uses in EFL / ESL and EAP among other target languages? First of all, we would need to devote more attention to unpacking corpus-based resources so that they are more accessible to the non-expert user, and we would need to find more ways of making these resources more discoverable.
In interviews released as OER on YouTube by DigitaLang with leading TEFLers at IATEFL 2012, I was able to catch up on opinions around the use of technology in ELT. Nik Peachey corrected the often widely held misconception about the digital divide for uses of technology in developing countries, pointing to the adoption of mobile and distance education rather than the importation of costly print-based published materials with first-world content and concerns that are often inappropriate for developing world contexts. You can view his interview here:
Thinking beyond classroom-based practice
Scott Thornbury, writer of the A-Z of ELT blog – another influential and popular discussion site for the classic hits in ELT for those who are both new and old to the field – also praised the Hornby scholars and gave his views on technology in ELT in a further IATEFL 2012 DigitaLang interview. He talks about the ‘human factor’ as something that occurs in classroom-based language teaching. In order to nurture this human factor, he recommends that technology be kept for uses outside the classroom or at best for uses in online teacher education. Open and distance education practitioners and researchers would also agree that well-resourced face-2-face instruction yields high educational returns as in the case of the Hornby scholarships, but they would also argue that this is not a scalable business model for meeting the needs of the many who still lack access to formal post-secondary education. What is more, the human factor as evidenced in online collaborative learning is well documented in the research from open and distance education as it is from traditional technology-enhanced classroom-based teaching.
For a view into how open and distance education practitioners and researchers are trying to scale these learning and accreditation opportunities for the developing world, the following open discussion thread from Wayne Mackintosh on MOOCs for developing countries – discussion from the OERuniversity Google Groups provides an entry point:
“Access to reliable and affordable internet connectivity poses unique challenges in the developing world. That said, I believe it possible to design open courses which use a mix of conventional print-based materials for “high-bandwidth” data and mobile telephony for “low-bandwidth” peer-to-peer interactions. So for example, the OERu delivery model will be able to produce print-based study materials and it would be possible to automatically generate CD-ROM images of the rich media (videos / audio) contained in the course for offline viewing. We already have the capability to generate collections of OERu course materials authored in WikiEducator to produce print-based equivalents which could be reproduced and distributed locally. The printed document provides footnotes for all the web-links in the materials which OERu learners could investigate when visiting an Internet access point. OERu courses integrate microblogging for peer-to-peer interactions and we produce a timeline of all contributions via discussion forums, blogs etc. The bandwidth requirements for these kind of interactions are relatively low which address to some extent the cost of connectivity.”
References:
Altbach, P. G., Reisberg, L., & Rumbley, L. E. (2009). Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution. A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001832/183219e.pdf
Biber, D., (2006). University language: a corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nesi, H, Gardner, S., Thompson, P. & Wickens, P. (2007). The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), with funding from the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800)
Nesi, H. and Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the Disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter R. (2007). From Corpus to Classroom: language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reppen, R. (2010). Using Corpora in the Language Classroom . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Original, in-house and live, this station brings us what’s new in the world of OER for corpus-based language resources.
Flipped conferencing
Kicking things off in late March with Clare Carr from Durham, we co-presented an OER for EAP corpus-based teacher and learner training cascade project at the Eurocall CMC & Teacher Education Annual Workshop in Bologna, Italy. This was very much a flipped conference whereby draft presentation papers were sent to be read in advance by participants and where the focus was on discussion rather than presentation at the physical event. Russell Stannard of Teacher Training Videos (TTV) was the keynote speaker at this conference and I have been developing some training resources for the FLAX open-source corpus collections which will be ready to go live on TTV soon. New collections in FLAX have opened up the BAWE corpus and have linked this to the BNC, a Google-derived n-gram corpus as well as Wikimedia resources, namely Wikipedia and Wiktionary. These collections in FLAX show what’s cutting edge in the developer world of open corpus-based resources for language learning and teaching.
Focusing on linked resources: which academic vocabulary list?
In a later post, I will be looking at Mark Davies’ new work with Academic Vocabulary Lists based on a 110 million-word academic sub corpus in the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA) English – moving away from the Academic Word List (AWL) by Coxhead (2000) based on a 3.5 million-word corpus – and his innovative web tools and collections based on the COCA. Once again, Davies’ Word and Phrase project website at Brigham Young University contains a bundle of powerfully linked resources, including a collocational thesaurus which links to other leading research resources such as the on-going lexical database project at Princeton, WordNet.
The open approach to developing non-commercial learning and teaching corpus-based resources in FLAX also shows the commitment to OER at OUCS (including the Oxford Text Archive), where the BAWE and the BNC research corpora are both managed. Click on the image below to visit the BAWE collections in FLAX.
BAWE case study text from the Life Sciences collection in FLAX with Wikipedia resources
Open eBooks for language learning and teaching
Learning Through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication, was the theme of the EuroCALL conference and to follow things up the organisers have released a call for OER in languages for the creation of an open eBook on the same theme. The book will be “a collection of case studies providing practical suggestions for the incorporation of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Practices (OEP), and Open Communication principles to the language classroom and to the initial and continuing development of language teachers.” This open-access e-Book, aimed at practitioners in secondary and tertiary education, will be freely available for download. If you’re interested in submitting a proposal to contribute to this electronic volume, please send in a case study proposal (maximum 500 words) by 15 October 2012 to the co-editors of the publication, Ana Beaven (University of Bologna, Italy), Anna Comas-Quinn (Open University, UK) and Barbara Sawhill (Oberlin College, USA).
MOOC on Open Translation tools and practices
Another learning event which I’ve just picked up from EuroCALL is a pilot Massive Open Online Course in open translation practices being run from the British Open University from 15th October to 7 December 2012 (8 weeks), with the accompanying course website opening on Oct 10th 2012. Visit the “Get involved” tab on the following site: http://www.ot12.org/. “Open translation practices rely on crowd sourcing, and are used for translating open resources such as TED talks and Wikipedia articles, and also in global blogging and citizen media projects such as Global Voices. There are many tools to support Open Translation practices, from Google translation tools to online dictionaries like Wordreference, or translation workflow tools like Transifex.” Some of these tools and practices will be explored in the OT12 MOOC.
Bringing open corpus-based projects to the Open Education community
On the back of the Cambridge 2012 conference: Innovation and Impact – Openly Collaborating to Enhance Education held in April, I’ve been working on another eBook chapter on open corpus-based resources which will be launched very soon at the Open Education conference in Vancouver. The Cambridge 2012 event was jointly hosted in Cambridge, England by the Open Course Ware Consortium (OCWC) and SCORE. Presenting with Terri Edwards from Durham, we covered EAP student and teacher perceptions of training with open corpus-based resources from three projects: FLAX, the Lextutor and AntConc. These three projects vary in terms of openness and the type of resources they are offering. In future posts I will be looking at their work and the communities that form around their resources in more depth. The following video from the conference has captured our presentation and the ensuing discussion at this event to a non-specialist audience who are curious to know how open corpus-based resources can help with the open education vision. Embedding these tools and resources into online and distance education to support the growing number of learners worldwide who wish to access higher education, where the OER and most published research are in English, opens a whole new world of possibilities for open corpus-based resources and EAP practitioners working in this area.
A further video from a panel discussion which I contributed to – an OER kaleidoscope for languages – looks at three further open language resources projects that are currently underway and building momentum here in the UK: OpenLives, LORO, the CommunityCafe. Reference to other established OER projects for languages and the humanities including LanguageBox and the HumBox are also made in this talk.
A world declaration for OER
The World OER congress in June at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris marked ten years since the coining of the term OER in 2002 along with the formal adoption of an OER declaration (click on the image to see the declaration). I’ve included the following quotation from the OER declaration to provide a backdrop to this growing open education movement as it applies to language teaching and learning, highlighting that attribution for original work is commonplace with creative commons licensing.
Emphasizing that the term Open Educational Resources (OER) was coined at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on OpenCourseWare and designates “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work”.
Wikimedia – why not?
Wikimedia Foundation
Earlier in September, I volunteered to present at the EduWiki conference in Leicester which was hosted by the Wikimedia UK chapter. Most people are familiar with Wikipedia which is the sixth most visited website in the world. It is but one of many sister projects managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, however, along with others such as Wikiversity, Wiktionary etc.
I will also be blogging soon about widely held misconceptions for uses of Wikipedia in EAP and EFL / ESL while exploring its potentials in writing instruction with reference to some very exciting education projects using Wikipedia around the world. The types of texts that make up Wikipedia alongside many academics’ realisations that they need to be reaching wider audiences with their work through more accessible modes of writing transmission are all issues I will be commenting on in this blog in the very near future.
Presenting the work the FLAX team have done with text mining, incorporating David Milne’s Wikipedia mining tool, the potential of Wikipedia as an open corpus resource in language learning and teaching is evident. I was demonstrating how this Wikipedia corpus has been linked to other research corpora in FLAX, namely the BNC and the BAWE, for the development of corpus-based OER for EFL / ESL and EAP. And, let’s not forget that it’s all for free!
The open approach to corpus resources development
There is no reason why the open approach taken by FLAX cannot be extended to build open corpus-based collections for learning and teaching other modern languages, linking different language versions of Wikipedia to relevant research corpora and resources in the target language. In particular, functionality in the FLAX collections that enable you to compare how language is used differently across a range of corpora, which are further supported by additional resources such as Wiktionary and Roget’s Thesaurus, make for a very powerful language resource. Crowd-sourcing corpus resources through open research and education practices and through the development of open infrastructure for managing and making these resources available is not as far off in the future as we might think. The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) mission in Europe is a leading success story in the direction currently being taken with corpus-based resources (read more about the recent workshop for CLARIN-D held in Leipzig, Germany).
These past few months I’ve been tuning into a lot of different practitioner events and discussions across a range of educational communities which I feel are of relevance to English language education where uses for corpus-based resources are concerned. There’s something very distinct about the way these different communities are coming together and in the way they are sharing their ideas and outputs. In this post, I will liken their behaviour to different types of radio station broadcast, highlighting differences in communication style and the types of audience (and audience participation) they tend to attract.
I’ve also been re-setting my residential as well as my work stations. No longer at Durham University’s English Language Centre, I’m now London-based and have just set off on a whirlwind adventure for further open educational resources (OER) development and dissemination work with collaborators and stakeholders in a variety of locations around the world. TOETOE is going international and is now being hosted by Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in conjunction with the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the UK government-funded OER International programme.
I will also be spreading the word about the newly formed Open Education Special Interest Group (OESIG), the Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX) open corpus-based language resources project at the University of Waikato, and select research corpora, including the British National Corpus (BNC) and the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, both managed by OUCS, which have been prised open by FLAX and TOETOE for uses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) – also referred to as English as a Second Language (ESL) in North America – and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Stay tuned to this blog in the coming months for more insights into open corpus-based English language resources and their uses in different teaching and learning contexts.
This post is what those in the blogging business refer to as a ‘cornerstone’ post as it includes many insights into the past few months of my teaching fellowship in OER with the Support Centre in Open Educational Resources (SCORE) at the Open University in the UK. Many posts within one as it were. This post also provides a road map for taking my project work forward while identifying shorter blogging themes for posts that will follow this one. This particular post will also act as the mother-ship TOETOE post from which subsequent satellite posts will be linked. Please use the red menu hyperlinks in the section below to dip in and out of the four main sections of this blog post series. I have elected to choose this more reflective style of writing through blogging so that my growing understandings in this area are more accessible to unanticipated readers who may stumble upon this blog and hopefully make comments to help me refine my work. Two more formal case studies on my TOETOE project to date will be coming out soon via the HEA and the JISC.
I have also made this hyperlinked post (in five sections) available as a .pdf on Slideshare.
Which station(s) are you listening to?
BBC Radio has been going since 1927. With audiences in the UK, four stations in particular are firm favourites: youth oriented BBC Radio 1 featuring new and contemporary music; BBC Radio 2 with middle of the road music for the more mature audience; high culture and arts oriented BBC Radio 3, and; news and current affairs oriented BBC Radio 4. Of course there are many more stations but these four are very typical of those found around the world. What is more, I’ve selected these four very distinct stations as the basis to build a metaphor around the way four very distinct educational practitioner communities are intersecting with corpus-based language teaching resources. This metaphor will draw on thought waves from the following:
“I mean somebody with the wit and the guts to go and do and create. And, that I believe is what education is all about” – Gordon Pask, 1974
This post is dedicated to the memory of Gary Boyd who taught me about and inspired me with systems thinking and cybernetics for educational practice. He and Gordon Pask, the guy in the Youtube clip above who on another clip someone commented that he’d make a great Dr. Who character, began the Educational Technology programme at Concordia University in Montreal, the oldest EdTech programme in North America where I am now a student.
IATEFL Conference 2012, Glasgow
This week I’ve been to some very encouraging talks and presentations at this year’s IATEFL conference in Glasgow. A key theme that I’ve found running through all of the sessions I’ve attended thus far is that of experimentation; in learning design, in research, in educational leadership, and but not at all least, in teaching.
Adrian Underhill kicked things off with his opening keynote, Mess and Progress, based on systems thinking for leadership, emphasizing the need for post-heroic leadership and flat hierarchies in the many educational contexts around the world. This notion of experimental leadership at the policy, institutional and individual level was effectively carried forward in the following presentation on Tuesday, ELT in Action, by the international A.S.Hornby Educational Trust Scholars, including speakers from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, Sri Lanka, India, Venezuela, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Yemen. [Find out more about the Hornby scholars in an interview with three participating scholars at this IATEFL conference].
Laurillard’s new book, Teaching as a Design Science – Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology sold out at the conference. The book along with the tool she introduced in her talk, the Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE), which you can download for free from the LDSE project website, encourages sharing and collaboration between educators to lead, experiment and innovate with learning technologies and to build collective knowledge in this important area. In order to succeed, this collaborative effort will require openness. On Diana Laurillard’s slides she mentions OER – Open Educational Resources – in several places, but perhaps she needed to gloss OER and open practice more overtly to the 2000+ audience at the IATEFL conference because only one person who came to my session on open corpora and OER for ELT had ever heard of the term before. This is despite the popularity of Russell Stannard’s work with free Teacher Training Videos (TTV) which are OER for teacher and learner training with technology in ELT.
Flat hierarchy is the model followed by and experimented with by open education practitioners who choose to embody openness in their everyday practices for reducing barriers to and increasing access to education for all. Openness promotes “communal management by distributed stakeholders (users/producers/contributors) rather than a centralized authority (owners, experts, boards of directors, etc.)” (definition via Wikipedia on Openness). The term OER was coined ten years ago by UNESCO and this year OER stakeholders will convene virtually and in person in June 2012 to establish further international goals for the open education movement. Watch this space.
Returning to Adrian Underhill’s Mess and Progress, he ended his talk on a high note by performing his song, The Reflective Practice Blues, singing the need “…to reflect and not to neglect to try out something different everyday…” Basically, we can’t afford to continue to work in silos as it’s far too costly, both in the sense of wasting resources through the duplication of effort in creating similar copyrighted resources, and also in the sense of wasting potential opportunities for what could be if we would only open up to sharing what we do and the outputs of what we create so we can experiment with and improve upon these things. Underhill captured this ethos in his keynote with the following awareness-raising activity:
“Talk to the people sitting next to you to identify if you work somewhere where…
it’s easy to get people to listen to an experiment with new ideas and suggestions
when one person learns something new, everyone hears about it
making mistakes is part of learning, you can be open about it and it’s not career limiting
staff members of all ranks give each other plenty of quality feedback from above, below, and sideways
everyone is involved in discussing school policies before adoption
one department knows what people in another department are thinking and they help each other” (Underhill, A. Opening keynote address, IATEFL Conference 2012, Glasgow)
Is this reminiscent of your workplace and who you are in your working practice? Would you consider yourself to be an Open Educational Resource? If not yet or not completely, how can you become an experimenter in your practice to help open things up for yourself and others?
TOETOE Technology for Open English - Toying with Open E-resources (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ) 
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