Part A: Digital Essay
Part B: Critical Reflection
Tag: digital essay
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.
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.
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?)
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
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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Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 