Saturday, November 19, 2005

Daf and Letiticia's Chat in EFL/ESP

I had participated in at least one of Daf's voice chats with her architecture students (ESP-Architecture) last year, so it was fun to see it from the lesson plan/teacher/moderator side.

One concern some participants raised was how long it took to get the students familiar with the technology, or if a whole separate course might not be needed to teach them the tech skills. From my perspective as a participant, the students readily used the Powerpoint and voice chat interface with little problem, and indeed, these are not difficult technologies to master-as-you-go.

Most impressive was the pre-planning: creating jigsaw task groups where students had to share knowledge with each other, planning how the voice chats would work with the global participation of Webheads, and setting up rubrics for assessment.

Also impressive was the enthusiasm with which the students took on the tasks of creating presentations, taking turns presenting the slides, and conversing with the FL teachers who participated in the voice chats. (Obviously, I can't write about this presentation without drawing on my own side of the experience.)

When discussing the challenges, Daf exclaimed: I went from madness to exhilaration!

http://daf4.free.fr/wiaoc/chatpres.html has links to the PPT, photoblog with pictures of the architecture, etc.

WiAOC Conference



I am going to try to put up notes and comments--in random order-- as I recall them. (It would be nice if the ole blog had a reorganize function.)

The Conference program is at http://users.prof2000.pt/wia/oc/schedule.asp

This is one of THE most exciting events of the cyber world--it is so much fun to see what all the Webheads are working away on. All too seldom do we have a chance to see our virtual colleagues describe in detail their activities with students, research projects, and general thoughts about the nature of knowledge in the Internet-versity.

I've also gotten some good ideas for various chapters in the upcoming 2nd ed. of CALL Environments.