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Homework: Week 2, Pedagogical implications

January 30, 2008 at 8:28 am · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged: , ,

What are the pedagogical implications of social media for ELT?

I think that social media is brilliant for languages, it has some useful elements for other educational uses, but language learning is about communication and that certainly happens a lot with social media.

Are you promoting open participatory skills in ELT? How?

Well, I’m doing my best. I have set up a moodle platform for a part-time CELTA course, they’re using that enthusiastically, networking and collaborating well online as well as offline. The Sessums article is interesting and the New Media Literacies site looks worth keeping tabs on.  I’ll have to use that list as something to aim for in my teaching.

Can these social media help you? How?

Yes, they’re fun, hip, and in the meantime there is a tool for every need (or if not there will be one next week). At my institution there is no staffroom or regular time to meet other teachers, the teachers tend to get very isolated so this could help them to connect and share ideas. It might also be appropriate for some of the normal courses once the teachers find out how easy it is to use.

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My answers: Week 1

January 21, 2008 at 1:24 am · Filed under smielt tasks and tagged: , ,

What have you noticed about the various platforms that you have opened accounts on? What do they have in common? How do they differ?
That question is too big for this time of night!

Are these environments different from LMS (like Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle and others)? How?
Yes these tools are very different to most LMSs. Moodle does go in this direction but I hear that the others are less open to communication and collaboration.

    What does “social media” mean for you? Which social media have you used already and what are your feelings about it?
    I use delicious a lot, but mostly for myself, I enjoy flickr but rarely post my own stuff., I rarely blog. Some of this stuff will certainly be useful to me, the mashup with Google Earth for instance. Some things are hard to predict. I can’t imagine becoming a twitterter but I bet kids like it. A lot of these things draw you in while you’re there (e.g. the 43 trio) but I have no inner need to return, I feel rather that I’ve wasted my time a bit.

    I enjoy helping to create something useful and meaningful, like Wikipedia pages. On the other hand, now that Wikipedia has started taking itself too seriously, the fun is draining out of it. This might be a danger for other applications., too

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