Author: Nadine Bailey

I’m currently living in Dubai, UAE, which is the latest in a long line of places I’ve been living in the last few years including China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, and South Africa. I’m married with two adult children. Having lived around the world I’ve acquired quite a few languages and my big passion is bi/multi-lingualism and - culturalism, which I try to incorporate into my work, learning and essays wherever possible! I finished my MIS degree in December 2014 and my M Ed (Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation) in October 2016. My murky past is in commerce and industry as a Chartered Accountant, doing a lot of random studying and learning and I’m currently working in an American School but have been a librarian PYP, MYP and IB in other international schools.

Livin’ and learnin’

Now that I’ve started breathing again I can start to think about the iBooks experience and what I’ve learnt from it.

I found out today that there are no iBooks in Singapore where I’m living and where I wrote / produced / cobbled together my first iBook. Nope, none. Something I didn’t really actually realise. I mean I’d tried to buy Dave Caleb’s excellent photography iBook and couldn’t do it here, but I didn’t twig that I couldn’t buy ANY iBook here… and you know what’s really weird? I can’t find out why anywhere. Is is because “singapore” or is it because “apple”? I notice my home country has a similar problem. Who decides? Who’s the boss.  And who would care anyway, especially for a free home-made stitched together effort? I need to know these things.  I’m sure my curiosity and sense of fairness will get me into trouble some time.

 

Screen Shot 2015-06-02 at 5.04.15 pm

What would I advice people coming after me? Play with it in your spare time, NOT when you have an assignment deadline. Make something simple, low barrier, low stakes and iron out all the learning and mistakes before you use it for a major assignment. Or maybe better still – get a class of 11 year olds to do it for you!

If you do use it for an assignment – be ready at least 48 hours before the due date. It takes 24 hours more or less from the time you hit the “submit” button to when it’s live, and then you get a nasty little surprise that things that may have worked in iBooks author and on your previews, suddenly don’t work so well in the published book. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the widgets for feeding in video, twitter etc. are handled by Bookry.com and I probably overloaded it with too many requests one after the other – the weird thing is both the display AND the functionality was fine in author … and then when I pressed “play” in iBooks 3 of the videos just reverted to the last loaded video… oops.  So I corrected that and then reloaded it, and it will take another 24 hours before it’s working…

Oh, and another thing with Bookry – well it seems you can publish directly there, BUT if you try and download the app on your mac it doesn’t like it one bit …

Screen Shot 2015-06-01 at 7.22.24 pm

 

I’m 100% sure this is not an insurmountable problem and with enough time and patience I could get it to work. But both time and patience were in rather short supply yesterday afternoon / evening.

 

Screen Shot 2015-06-02 at 5.50.07 pm

 

 

It also helps to ask around a lot. One of my friends when she heard I was going to use iBooks author said “oh no, I hear that’s really difficult. Our tech guy at school suggests that our kids use Book Creator for iPad instead. Unfortunately I was about 80% finished by the time she said that … although the 80:20 rule definitely applied at that point – I thought I was at 80%

And if you export it to pdf, note that the pdf can be a maximum of 10MB for this wordpress platform … mine was 20MB after the correct videos were updated, so can’t fly here … maybe I can publish it to the web (thinking aloud) …

I’d also like to say it is wonderful having a cohort of selfless fellow students around you who make encouraging noises about the things that do work publicly and kindly point out this kind of snafu to you privately. lol you know who you are!

Another lesson – never do this type of thing over a long-holiday weekend. You may think it’s a good idea, but then you can’t access all the tech guru’s in your life because, well, they’re having a life with their families and #notfair to disturb them.

1 ibooks author intro from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

Of course the whole irony of this learning stuff is that we don’t do it unless we “have” to do it, and when we “have” to do it, it’s kind of high stakes if you get it wrong, so then you’d rather play safe and go with something you’re sure will work. I can see how this FOMM (fear of making mistakes) and FOF (fear of failure) can inhibit personal, academic, learning and technical progress.

What else did I want to do if I had endless time – or what I’d like to do some time? Well, really to get the whole “get started” thing going on how to implement a program.  I’d also love to write a Inklestudios book based on the stories of our students and their families and the many and varied choices and options on language, and put that into it … I’d also LOVE to have a designer and producer and team of creative people around me who can make a much better job on the design side – I mean I know something great when I see it, but just can’t seem to make it myself!  Has everyone see the Guardian’s latest interactive book on the digital language divide. Gosh they are so wonderful.  Maybe I can get a research job with them…  I’d like to interview some parents and put it on a video and add that… there is so much.

My new quote and drive on this whole language thing comes from this clickbait collection:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist

Mad rush to the finish line

Well it’s done! Well it’s kind of done. The digital essay part is done and I’ve got all the little interactive bits and pieces and I hope they work in real life and not just in preview.

Thanks to Sharon who has also been experimenting with iBooks author and was the crucial hour or so ahead of me to warn me of the pitfalls (only published within 24 hours of submission – YIKES) and the work-arounds – export to pdf.

Of course I was overly ambitious – this is not just a digital essay but I want it to be so much more. I want to expand it as a guide to the implementation of a digital language learning ecology at a school. So I do have blank chapters and LOTS of ideas. Of course this can be added to over time.

INF530 Digital Essay

This is the pdf which will have to do for now, because the iBooks file is WAY to big for what thinkspace will allow me …

Some reflections on the essay process:

I should have just written the essay first. But I was jumping between experimenting with the new tool for me that is iBooks author and writing. Maybe the affordances of iBooks informed my writing, maybe it just fuzzed it.

I’ve been meaning to play with iBooks for a long time and I keep on quitting – I can see why now. It’s not the most intuitive of tools and can be darn frustrating. It’s not drag and drop and thank heavens for bookry.com (and google / youtube for all the “how to”). The thing I most resent right now is the inability to drag and drop html code into an interactive box. Yes it can be done but it involved downloading programming apps and way too much effort and concentration for what I’m capable of doing right now.

Other things that I missed that I would have liked – there is interaction, but it’s limited (or I’m useless) – like in my resources section I would have loved to add a form where people could submit their own resources, hashtags, blogs, information etc. but that doesn’t seem to be easy.

Also the quiz feature is a little primitive – I wanted to add my “do your own language audit” but then more snazzy – where you answer the questions and then get rated out of 10 whether you’re going to be able to maintain your L1 at home. Nope. Wasn’t going to happen – or at least not easily.

Then other frustrations that are totally related to time and not knowing all my tools as well as I should – I use Pages a LOT at work as my “go to” graphics design thing. I’ve become pretty comfortable with it now, which means I’ve gone and remade a lot of graphics I’d made in the past for other presentations and essays that I thought would be of interest here. But there is only an “export to pdf” function. So if I want a PNG or a JPG I have to either make a screen shot or export to pdf, open the pdf into preview and then save it as a png. TIME SUCK!  Like I say, I’m probably using the wrong tool and need to get a bit more sophisticated in my design tool, but if you have a hammer ….

It also really makes me appreciate SpringShare’s Libguides so much more! That’s really intuitive and easy to use, but wouldn’t really work for this as it’s non-linear.

Not sure what I’m going to do for my submission now – all I can say is YAY for Visek (Buddhas’ birthday) day, since that meant I didn’t have to go to work AND my husband took my “busy needs attention” kid away for a few days.

Here’s a pretty picture to end it off – my new ideas on what constitutes a “good language learner” in the digital language learning ecology.

Good language learning in DLLE

 

Transformation and Autonomy with a twist: from information to learning – Critical Reflection INF530

It’s been quite a ride this INF530, and as they say “it ain’t over until it’s over”, I have yet to complete my digital essay and enter that huge time warp black hole of combining words with media and images in such a way that it enhances rather than distracts, compels rather than confuses.

 

INF530 key wordsLooking back on the topic headings I decided to make a wordle, to see things with a little visual perspective. What jumped out was “information” and “learning” and I had to think back to previous courses where the nuances of data, information, knowledge, wisdom were picked over in meticulous detail (Barrett, Cappleman, Shoib, & Walsham, 2004; Hecker, 2012; Pantzar, 2000; UNESCO, 2005) or the role of the teacher or school or librarian is discussed, particularly in the light of information literacy (Eisenberg, 2008; Mihailidis, 2012; O’Connell, 2008; Sheng & Sun, 2007; Wallis, 2003). Yes these are all part of the picture, but the words that I’d like to contribute and focus on are not there, because they are implicit and essential rather than explicit. Integral to information and learning are transformation and autonomy.

 

Firstly transformation, it’s synonyms (conversion, metamorphosis, renewal, revolution, shift, alteration) and its’ derivatives:

  • the doing – to transform,
  • the process – transformation,
  • the subject and the state – transformed, and
  • the agent – transformer.

And the twist, because in education we are simultaneously the agent and the subject, the initiator, the process and the end state. We cannot “do” without “being”. And that is the value of plunging into a distance-learning course that takes one beyond the mundane and everyday into personally being transformed and feeling the simultaneous discomfort and thrill of not always being in control of the process or the outcome. Sometimes the truth is found in the antonym – stagnation and sameness. The resistance to change that saps energy rather than re-energises as transformation does.

 

Conole (2013, p. 61) stated “We have to accept that it is impossible to keep up with all the changes, so we need to develop coping strategies which enable individuals to create their own personal digital environment of supporting tools and networks to facilitate access to and use of relevant information for their needs.” That is part of the solution, the other is finding one’s place in digital and physical learning ecologies (O’Connell, 2014; Vasiliou, Ioannou, & Zaphiris, 2014; Wang, Guo, Yang, Chen, & Zhang, 2015). Yes ecologies, because we are, and our students and children will be “shape shifting portfolio people” (Gee & Hayes, 2011) whether we want to acknowledge and embrace the fact or not.

 

Which brings me to the second of “my” take-away words. Autonomy. It is autonomy with a difference – autonomy within communities and networks of our own and others’ making. As Downes (2012, bk. Connectivism and Connective Knowledge) puts it “knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, … learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks”.

 

However without the aforementioned transformation we can’t have the autonomy. It is an autonomy hard won, through dint of our own efforts, the pushing and pulling and attraction of our teachers, mentors, peers and heroes. Autonomy feeds off motivation and self-regulatory control (Kormos & Csizér, 2014). The latter including commitment, meta-cognitive, satiation, emotion and environmental control (Tseng, Dörnyei, & Schmitt, 2006). Ironically we need others to attain autonomy. Autonomy is not independence but interdependence, not being on your own, but being part of a larger community of learners all together on individual journeys. It’s the forums, blogs, comments, feedback and Facebook posts. The emojis, irrelevant and irreverent tweets; words of encouragement and critique, ideas and suggestions that propel us forward and backward and around in circles – but ever expanding circles and cycles of improvement and transformation.

 

Thank-you to my peers, my course co-ordinator Judy, those who went before us and those who will come after us may we transform and be transformed, gain autonomy and enable others do so too in this journey of life-long learning.

What you are speaks so loud I can not hear what you say - Original Quote by Emerson
What you are speaks so loud I can not hear what you say – Original Quote by Emerson

References

Barrett, M., Cappleman, S., Shoib, G., & Walsham, G. (2004). Learning in knowledge communities. European Management Journal, 22(1), 1–11. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2003.11.019

Conole, G. (2013). Open, social and participatory media. In Designing for learning in an open world (pp. 47–63). New York ; Heidelberg: Springer.

Downes, S. (2012). My eBooks [Web Log]. Retrieved April 19, 2015, from http://www.downes.ca/me/mybooks.htm

Eisenberg, M. B. (2008). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 28(2), 39–47. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&AN=51198131&site=ehost-live

Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age (1st ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hecker, A. (2012). Knowledge beyond the individual? Making sense of a notion of collective knowledge in organization theory. Organization Studies, 33(3), 423–445. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611433995

Kormos, J., & Csizér, K. (2014). The interaction of motivation, self-regulatory strategies, and autonomous learning behavior in different learner groups. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 275–299. http://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.129

Mihailidis, P. (2012). Media literacy and learning commons in the digital age: Toward a knowledge model for successful integration into the 21st century school library. The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, 2. Retrieved from http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2012/04/media-literacy-and-learning-commons-in-the-digital-age-toward-a-knowledge-model-for-successful-integration-into-the-21st-century-school-library/

O’Connell, J. (2008). School library 2.0 : new skills, new knowledge, new futures. In P. Godwin & J. Parker (Eds.), Information literacy meets Library 2.0 (pp. 51–62). London: Facet.

O’Connell, J. (2014, July 19). Information ecology at the heart of knowledge [Web Log]. Retrieved March 28, 2015, from http://judyoconnell.com/2014/07/19/information-ecology-at-the-heart-of-knowledge/

Pantzar, E. (2000). Knowledge and wisdom in the information society. Foresight, 2(2), 230–236.

Sheng, X., & Sun, L. (2007). Developing knowledge innovation culture of libraries. Library Management, 28(1/2), 36–52. http://doi.org/10.1108/01435120710723536

Tseng, W.-T., Dörnyei, Z., & Schmitt, N. (2006). A new approach to assessing strategic learning: The case of self-regulation in vocabulary acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 78–102. http://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ami046

UNESCO. (2005). Towards knowledge societies. Retrieved fromhttp://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001418/141843e.pdf

Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2014). Understanding collaborative learning activities in an information ecology: A distributed cognition account. Computers in Human Behavior, 41(0), 544–553. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.09.057

Wallis, J. (2003). Information-saturated yet ignorant: information mediation as social empowerment in the knowledge economy. Library Review, 52(8), 369–372. http://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310493770

Wang, X., Guo, Y., Yang, M., Chen, Y., & Zhang, W. (2015). Information ecology research: past, present, and future. Information Technology and Management, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-015-0219-3

Academic honesty should never be ambiguous

Ok, I know I have a somewhat ambivalent stance on what constitutes plagiarism and the value of collaborative and cooperative learning but one thing I’m clear on is academic honesty.  If you used something that someone else made just say that you did that. And depending on your age and level a simple copy and paste of the link is sufficient.I recently went around our G5’s exhibition project and was thoroughly impressed at their work. I did sneakily ask a few for their sources and most could point to at least a page of attribution as to where they’d got their numbers and facts.  Well done (here is a great video of it by the way).


G5 Exhibition Video 2015 from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

Fast forward to early this morning. I’m putting the washing in the machine and the kids are getting ready for school and finally my daughter lets me see the video she’s been working on for the last 4 days – one holidays and festivals in the middle ages. It’s a great video with her narrating the festivals of the year with lovely pictures and music from the middle ages in the background.  And then at the end “Thank you for watching” and black screen.

I told her I thought it was great, but that she didn’t have to thank anyone at the end, and instead a list of attribution for the images and music would be good. “Our teacher said we didn’t have to do it” was her reply. I told her that she knew that I expected it of her, and she then showed me that she had in fact made a list of the URLs but hadn’t put it into EasyBib to get into MLA format. I asked why not, and she came with some story about how citations / attribution hadn’t been in the original assignment nor in the rubric and the teacher didn’t want to add it on afterwards. I was a little annoyed at this. I said she could at least put it at the end of her video, but she didn’t think that would be “fair” on the others who didn’t. Fair? How about the fairness of the people to whom the images belonged? OK they’re all long dead now, and perhaps most of the images are in common domain, but still, it’s the principal.

I was annoyed at myself being annoyed at her, when actually I should be annoyed at the school. How can they go from being citation semi-stars in primary school to not having it expected at middle school. This is not the first instance, it is one of many, many, many in both my children’s grades across all subjects – academic honesty really does need to be institutionalised and inside every single assignment across the board! I’m at least glad my ranting has had an effect on my kids and they’re at now keeping lists to show me – but if it’s only for me for how long will my influence last?

Activity and Paralysis

Reading, reading, reading. I know I should start trying to write, but I’m in a kind of simultaneous paralysis and activity. Each new reading I do, I discover a whole field of knowledge and information that I know way too little about. Today I discovered the LEA (language experience approach) to teaching reading and writing. And the relevant (for me) “cousin” D-LEA (i.e. with digital). I’m sure every single teacher in the world is totally familiar with this and today was the first time I’d encountered it – academically at least. I’m pretty sure it’s what they do at school and that my kids experienced it, I just didn’t know the name. Duh. So this has kicked off a new round of activity – frantically learning more about it and how it relates to my topic; and paralysis – not being able to start writing my assignment yet.

Slow progress is still progress

I guess that will have to be my mantra for now. I spent from  Friday to Sunday at the UWCSEA Multilingual Conference (#mlconf2015 if you want to follow the tweets – although not many people tweeting besides yours truly and a few others). Besides the fact that I was giving two sharing sessions, as you know it’s both a topic close to my heart and close to my digital essay theme!

After working all day yesterday it’s back to reality today, and since Mindmeister kindly reminded me that one of my old Mindmaps created with some colleagues was “trending” I thought I’d try and map my readings and knowledge up to now in Mindmeister. It’s not the perfect tool, but it sure beats pen and paper and having to scratch things out and NEVER having a piece of paper big enough. I also don’t really have a space of my own that’s uninterrupted and not shared by multiple family members or bits of digital debris, (plus it’s so darn hot here, so the fan is on full blast scattering paper everywhere) so using lots of little post it notes like the TED talk below wasn’t really an option.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast.html

Anyway, as of now, this is the status from 3 of the readings I’ve summarised. I have about 47 to go, but I’m already seeing the same themes repeated (yay, fill up that reference list – woah did I just say that?)

https://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/543060246/language-learning-in-a-digital-information-ecology?width=600&height=400&z=auto

And I missed yesterday’s deadline for blog post 4 … not to mention several other things I was supposed to attend to in my personal and professional life…. slipping up.

Does academic equity even exist?

I’ve just finished reading through Yvette Slaughter’s PhD thesis: The study of Asian languages in two Australian states: considerations for language-in-education policy and planning and what an eye-opener it was. And not for the reasons I thought it would be.

I’m really interested in language-learning ecology/(ies) and since hers mentioned this, I decided to take the plunge and wade through the 372 pages. And what I found was rather interesting. Aside from all the detailed analysis, the most interesting chapter was on  “Is Asian Language Study Equitable” – she has written a paper on it, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be easily accessible (i). (Just tried to find her on twitter to see where I can get a copy…)…. read more

 

Hygiene factors that annoy …

After my last post got a pop up that my theme is retiring in 57 days and would I like to choose a new theme. No I wouldn’t but I’d better. And I’d better do it now as I don’t like to revisit that type of decision/action twice. Choosing themes for me is like choosing clothes and I like the Obama / Zuckerberg approach, sort it out once and then just mindlessly go on with it forever so your brain space is available for more interesting things. I have the same approach to most aspects of my life, including online grocery shopping (I’ve told one online retailer here if they didn’t sort out the fact that I couldn’t buy my meat / fish with one click and make it intuitive I’m gone as a customer – they didn’t see it, so I’ve moved on). I so wish that Palm Pilot’s 3 click minimisation could be more widely adopted.  We cycle through the same menu for a year at a time, when school starts in August it’s up for negotiation again (Monday white fish, Tuesday chicken, Wednesday Salmon, Thursday mince in some form, Friday beef or lamb, Saturday/Sunday BBQ) with variation on salads and vegetables and carbs that are also relatively fixed. I hate cooking and grocery shopping. I hate discussions. I love school uniforms. My brain is too small to have to think about all that boring detail.

That’s why I love Evernote and Zotero. Set it up, sort it out once and you’re freed up to spend your time reading and writing and having interesting conversations about reading and writing.

Anyone else with that approach?

Deep research Diving

I’m going to either become very quiet or very noisy in the next few weeks as I dive into my next research topic for my last (yikes, how fast did that go) assignment for INF530.

This is my research proposal:

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1. Proposal Topic
Language learning and the new digital information ecology
2. Proposed digital tools and/or spaces to be used
iBooks
This is a tool I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while, and I think it can be used to encompass all the multi-media affordances required for this essay. Eventually I’d like to expand on it and turn it into a resource for our students, educators and families.
3. Rationale
Previous research has indicated that successful language acquisition is the result of the combination of optimising factors relating to the child (student), family, school and community. These can be considered to operate in inter-relationships in a knowledge ecology.
The affordances of digital technology in education combined with global connectedness allow unprecendented opportunities to leverage the connected learning principles of
  • production centered
  • openly networked
  • shared purpose
within language learning, however the current structures of education may ignore or limit these opportunities due to institutional (or familial) fear, ignorance or perceived loss of control.
This essay will look at the work of Seely, Hatie, Bawden, Ng, Siemans, Downes, Ford, Perrault etal. to examine learning design and the information environment and discuss how the learning systems and constituents allow for zones of intervention within the language learning ecology to leverage learning – sychronous and asynchronous, local and global and allow students and their families a greater locus of control over language learning.
A particular focus will be mother tongue learning, an area often neglected by schools, who state they unable to justify supporting a large number of minority languages formally. I will argue this may be the result a failure of imagination and the application of digital technology and collaborative learning rather than a lack of resources.
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Read more: …..