Where is Dora the Explorer for Chinese?

YouTube - Culture Cubs

Maybe I shouldn't even make this comparison. Dora the Explorer is certainly Spanish-lite and not necessarily a good teaching tool. The rush to teach Chinese is hardly subsiding across the world and in the United States. However, while it seems that many parents, educators, and even the government are on board, instructional materials are lacking.

Where are the quality instructional materials for learning Chinese, especially for children? Do they cost too much to produce? Possibly. But, come on, if we can't do it cheaply in China with Chinese, where can we do it. I would love to see a company get its foot in the door in this area. I see nothing but growth in this area in the coming decades. If done right, you could just modify the script for any language that you want to teach to. Sending it to France? Change it from English to French. It would just take a couple studio hours to record the French speaker.

A friend of mine recently sent me this video that is a fun introduction to some words in Chinese (Mandarin), though it could just as easily be for Mandarin speakers learning English. I think that it's a great production. If used in conjunction with other materials and possibly a teacher (online or face-to-face), it could be extremely motivating and effective.



Imagine a program like this that grew with students. They could start with the basics and advance as their students advanced. They could go beyond vocabulary learning and branch into learning culture, critical literacy, and so forth. A program like this would cost to start, but the long tail on something like this would provide revenue for many, many years. Not to mention, the first ones into the schools will stay in the schools.

Now that I'm talking about it, I wonder if I could carry it out. Unfortunately, I lack both the production abilities for this sort of animation and the Chinese speakers. Oh, well. I hope that this gives one of you the impetus to check it out.

Dan

How to access blocked web sites

Sclipo: How to access blocked web sites

How could I not post this link?

Just the other day one of the listservs that I follow had a posting from someone cheering how she had found a previously unknown proxy site for MySpace and that it was going to be blocked now. I just love the ignorance of these people. Yeah! I found the one proxy site that students use to access these evil sites....

Well, as this video shows, there there many, many ways to do this. This is a proxy cold war and the schools are going to loose. For the same reason that the drug war will never be won and media companies will never be able to use encryption to protect their content, if people want something enough, they will find a way to get it.

Stop spending your time blocking sites and start teaching students how best to use what's out there.



Dan

Young warned over social websites

Young warned over social websites

These articles drive me crazy sometimes. A really valuable message is couched in fear of online social networks.

These same problems exist in every electronic medium. There is a persistent record. We will very likely see old Facebook videos used as evidence against Presidential candidates 10 or 20 years down the road, but we are more likely to see something pulled out of the Internet Archive well before that happens, since that is where the evidence exists on the pre-Facebook/MySpace crowd.

To say that this is a problem with online social networks is just ignorant. This is a problem with ALL form of publication (the Web is just a big publication machine).

We need to educate learners (of all ages) on how present ourselves online. We teach our children how to say please and thank you. We teach our children not to talk to strangers. We even teach our students not to run around naked outside. How about teaching children to respect others in online interactions, not to give out identifying information to strangers, and no to post potentially embarrassing materials online!

This is obviously not common knowledge and the blocking of these sites just removes the possibility of addressing these issues in schools.

Dan

Human Brain Cloud: Play

Human Brain Cloud: Play

This is very addicting. I assume this will be the case for anyone interested in language. It's also a fascinating project. All you do is enter the first thing that comes to your mind when you see a word/phrase. The connections that brings to light are very interesting.

I wonder it this data would be made available for teaching language. Just think. The greatest number of responses would likely signal words/phrases that should be taught together. This is a new form of corpora analysis.

Give it a try.

Dan

Happy Thanksgiving! - Turkey singing "I will survive" parody

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Motivational Monday: This Turkey will Survive!

Thanks to Vickie for this video.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my family and friends in the States.



Dan

Wisdom of Crowds on the Pitch: 50,000 Fans Acquire English Football Club

Wisdom of Crowds on the Pitch: 50,000 Fans Acquire English Football Club

Not that I'm a football fan (soccer for those of us in the States), but this post really spoke to me. Not as in the wisdom of crowds approach that the author took, but rather in how these fans were able to collectively raise money and buy (influence) a sports team.

The stock market has worked this way from its inception, yet has only really benefited the wealthy. Us average Joe's might be able to buy stock, but not enough to make a difference in policies, approaches, or other decisions. What if this approach took off for the acquisition of majority shares of companies. I don't realistically think that this would work with many companies. The wealth of the world is really in the hands of a few. However, imagine what could be done by just moving one or two big companies.

Mircoloans and micropayments have found a place in the global economic, what about microinvesting? Small investments could add up to lots of power for funds of this sort. Whether driven by profit motives or special interests (Green, perhaps) small investments by large numbers of people could cause significant movement in the corporate world.

I don't really see this as a viable option yet, but I think that its time will come. With raising standards of living in many countries around the world and with greater Internet connectivity, there will soon be both money and information distribution necessary for a movement like this.

Just an idea I'd like to float. It has little to do with instruction, but does focus on a changing society that will look at everything from investment to education differently.

Dan

Skypecasts as a mediator of authentic communication - ALAK 2007

Just got back from a wonderful conference. The Applied Linguistics Association of Korea (ALAK) put on a great show at Sookmyoung Women's University today.

Jungtae Kim and I participated in the CALL Fair. We put together a little presentation on the use of Skypecasting in language learning. If you have used Skype, you know that it is a great program, but have you used the Skypecast function? Most people haven't, but it has great potential for autonomous learners and even more formal classrooms. Take a look at the presentation and abstract below. Then follow the link to a quick video on setting up a Skypecast.

Of course, I have to be completely honest. Skypecasts were down today and even last night when I recorded the video. They have been down a lot lately. However, I'm sure that they will be back up and running, but even if they are not there are a few similar sites out there that can be used in a similar manner.

Here is our presentation.

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Here is our outline.


Here is a link to a video that we created on creating Skypecasts: Video

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions or suggestions

Dan

Walled Gardens are dead!

I got a little carried away in my presentation on Saturday at the KAMALL/KSET conference. At one point, I declared, "Walled Gardens are dead!" While I really do believe this, I should know better than to say it that way. Luckily, nobody called me on it during the presentation, though someone did afterwards.

The reason that I shouldn't have said it like that is that it's impossible to defend and it's not true. There will always be walled gardens. Organizations will always have some sort of closed system for the sake of security, either of the data or of the participants. It's a wild world out there and I can see the need to keep student data in a closed system because it really can be used for nasty purposes.

However, this doesn't mean that the concept isn't dying. There are surely benefits for users with technologies (or services) can play nicely together. More and more, people are providing their content to the world. Whether this be videos, pictures, or ideas, users expect to be able to share this content with the world and set restrictions themselves (not the organizations/services).

I might be an idealist, but I think that ideas should be free (as in free beer AND as in freely expressed). We have both a right to benefit from the sharing of information (instructional or other) and the responsibility to share information that we possess.

Many teachers are walking the walk. They are putting their ideas in terms of lectures, activities, lesson plans, and so forth out there for public consumption. This can only benefit other teachers (and learners) who can incorporate these ideas and products in to their instruction. In this way, the sharing of ideas has moved (or is moving) from the break rooms to the ether Net. These ideas are them being collected from the ether, organized, and re-shared with others. This is where services/technologies like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and others come in. They enable anyone to collect, organize, and re-distribute these ideas (content) in any way they see fit. We then develop connections with these re-mixers of ideas, which forms our personal (learning) networks.

There will come a point when the walled gardens simply can't compete. They will be (or already are) relegated to spaces with a minor impact on learning/working/playing and will be seen as just another place that users have to remember to go to get the occasional message or tidbit of institutional treasures (information that can't be shared).

Call me deluded, call me a dreamer, but please call me :) Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Dan

My Apologies

Hi have to apologize to those who expected to see a posting on the survey that I conducted a couple weeks ago on Teacher Overload or technology use by educators. I have been really busy with 3 presentation and a workshop this month. I do promise that I'll get it out ASAP. The last presentation and workshop will be on Saturday. I'll have a little extra time to filter through the data at that time.

Again, sorry for the delay.

Dan

Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Deliver Individualized Instructional Resources to Language Learners

Korean Association for Multi-media Assisted Language Learning (KAMALL) 2007 Conference

Below is a copy of my presentation for Saturday, November 10 at Korea University in Seoul, Korea.

Here is the presentation.

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Here is a copy of the presentation slides with my notes (.pdf file via Scribd)


Here are the files associated with this presentation.


Don't know where Korea University is? Here's a map.

View Larger Map

Please, let me know if you have any questions. Leave a comment here and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Dan

Play Web 2.0 Truth AND Dare

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Play Web 2.0 Truth AND Dare

Vicki Davis passes on some great resources and often adds unique insights to them. This is one of those postings. I'll embed the video below, but I encourage you to check out the link above to see her questions. They are a great conversation starter.



Dan

TESL-EJ June 2007 -- Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web

TESL-EJ June 2007 -- Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web

Good article on how syndication, aggregation, and mash-ups can be used in education.

Dan

socialmedia » A-Z of social media

socialmedia » A-Z of social media

Here is a growing wiki glossary of socialmedia terminology. Great for the newbie and expert. Always something new popping up here.

Dan

Commoncraft "...in plain English" videos

Commoncraft has a series of "...in plain English" videos that are great. I'll embed some of them here.

This one is about social networking. This is a fundamental concept that you should understand.



This one is about RSS, which is the most popular standard for XML syndication.



This one is on social bookmarking, which will be central to my presentation.



This one is on using Wikis.



This one is on using Google Docs.



Dan

Web 2.0 Workshop

Web 2.0 Workshop by Vicki (Cool Cat Teacher) Davis

This looks like a really great workshop on a large number of topics regarding the use of Web 2.0 technologies specifically in education. It is organized into a series of short videos that can walk you not only through the technologies, but also the rationale behind using them.

The videos are free for now, but I'd get in there fast to take a look before they disappear.

Dan