Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

 

Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments Description Objectives  Target audience Interest Section Weekly content Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Moderators Communication Tools Join this session

 

Description

 

A multiliterate teacher understands the many ways that technology interacts and intertwines with academic and interpersonal life, and actively learns how to gain control over those aspects impacting teaching, social, and professional development. Multiliterate individuals are aware of the pitfalls inherent in technology while striving for empowerment through effective strategies for first discerning and then taking advantage of those aspects of changing technologies most appropriate to their situations. These strategies include managing, processing, and interpreting a constant influx of information, filtering what is useful, and then enhancing the learning environment with the most appropriate applications.This session seeks to heighten awareness of these considerations. 

 

Objectives 

 

Participants will develop an awareness of what multilteracies signifies and what it means to be connected as a functioning node in a distributed learning network, or if you prefer as a contributing member of a community of practice.  Participants will develop skills in using the online Web 2.0 tools of multiliteracies, and will hone an awareness of the implications of these tools to education, to society at large, and to their own professional development.

 

 

Target audience

 

Teachers and other educators seeking to maximize potential benefits of working within distributed learning networks to increase their opportunities for learning from peers of whatever knowledge they wish to acquire. For the purposes of this course, that knowledge focused on would be the tools and mechanisms for promoting the dissemination of knowledge through such socially driven learning networks. The strategies and heuristics modeled in using the tools would be applicable to whatever content the teachers needed to work with, be it applicable to language learning, some other content area, or project management at the administrative level.

 

Interest Section

 

CALL-IS

 

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Weekly content

 

Week 1

 

This week gathers the participants into a distributed learning network that overlaps with other existing such networks.  Several  essential frameworks underpinning multiliteracies are discussed, and these frameworks are applied to models of how this course might function (more as a seminar where knowledge is built through connecting sharing as opposed to a course where the learning paths have been prescribed).  Many tools are introduced which participants can use to foster connections with one another.  The materials and tools can be sampled and trialed as needed; there is no need to do everything suggested here.  Participants are encouraged to keep blogs or wikis to record their progress through the course and discoveries made, and ways of sharing knowledge with one another will be touched on.

 

Week 2

 

This week introduces a thorough discussion of the key concepts tagging, RSS, folksonomies, and aggregation. Example implementations using these concepts for language learning are introduced, and techniques and tools for aggregation of content on the web are explored.  Participants are expected to tag and configure their blogs and other web artifacts associated with this course in a way that their content can be aggregated by other participants here.

 

Week 3

 

This week we explore blogging in its permutations microblogging and podcasting.  Particiapants are encouraged to try their hand at these tools, develop their personal distributed learning networks, and consider how they can be expanding their personal learning record from blogging to documenting their progress in formats approaching e-portfolios.

 

Week 4

 

This week we focus more thoroughly on the tools of connectivist knowledge and discern patterns in what makes these tools facilitative of enhancing knowledge in distributed learning networks.  Some of these tools filter into a container we currently call 'digital storytelling' and we'll look at these tools in particular and think of ways of using them in developing our e-portfolios.

 

Week 5

 

And now for something complEATly different.  The concept of edupunk suggests that there are issues regarding new technologies not being addressed by institutional learning, and it also suggests an 'in your face' approach to resolving some of these issues by stepping around the established authority and just doing it.  This week we'll consider what some of these ill-addressed issues are, and we'll ask: when is it justified to simply take off on one's own tangent on the assumption that this is best for one's students? What are the up and downsides to such an approach?  In what way is this a multiliteracies issue?  Participants should enjoy addressing the question: Do you feel that you, or anyone for that matter, is, are, or should be an edupunk?

 

Week 6

 

This is a week for reflection and consolidation.  We intend to put here issues that come up during the first 5 weeks and address them in the context of critical and rhetorical multiliteracies, from Selber, S. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Southern Illinois University Press.  Of course, our participants might have other ideas.  In that case, we'll go with the flow.

 

 

See the complete syllabus outline at: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbwiki.com/Syllabus_Outline

 

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Moderators

 

 

 

Vance Stevens teaches computing at Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. After a 20-year career in English language teaching, usually as CALL specialist and coordinator, he worked in software development in California as educational technology consultant, before returning to the Middle East as ed tech coordinator for a language school in Abu Dhabi. There he founded the online community Webheads resulting in involvement in many community-based online professional development endeavors which have formed the basis of his professional development life this past decade.

 

 

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Communication Tools

 

Yahoo Group for email list: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/

Course Portal: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbwiki.com/

Wiki syllabus: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbwiki.com/Syllabus_Outline

Sandbox wiki: http://havingalookatmultiliteracies.pbwiki.com

Sandbox blog: http://havingalookatmultiliteracies.blogspot.com/

 

Other tools will be introduced during the course of the session.

 

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Join this session

 

 

To join this group:   From January 1 to 12:   Go to:  http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/ Click on the blue button:  (This is just an image). The real button is on the Yahoo Group. If you don´t have a Yahoo ID, you will be prompted to create one (it is free). Follow the instructions

 

 

 

Note: When you register for the group, you will have to be approved by the moderator. In order to reduce the possibility of "unwanted" members (such as spammers), please be sure to fill out your profile.

 

Back to Call for Participation

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 The Electronic Village Online is a project of TESOL's CALL Interest Section.

 

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Lang

 

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