Multiliteracies for social networking and collaborative learning environments

Abstract

A multiliterate teacher constantly strives to understand 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 identifying, accessing, aggregating, processing, and analyzing a constant influx of information, filtering what is useful, and then enhancing the learning environment with the most appropriate applications. The multiliteracies session achieves these objectives through heuristics for learning and ‘knowing knowledge’ inherent in the paradigm of massive or miniscule open online courses (MOOCs) with documentation of learning demonstrated through development of Me-Portfolios.

Target Audience

This session is appropriate for 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. The session focuses on use of tools and mechanisms for promoting the dissemination of knowledge through such socially driven learning networks. The strategies and heuristics modeled in using the tools are applicable to whatever content the teachers needed to work with, be it language learning, some other content area, or project management at the administrative level. Participants can benefit from the session no matter what their skill level as long as they have an open mind and willingness to experiment in the company of virtual others.

Interest Section Sponsors

TESOL CALL IS

Syllabus 

Weekly Outline

This session encourages language educators to make paradigm shifts in rethinking their learning environments and enhance their skills in improving and even transforming how they engage and connect with learners. This course draws inspiration from a spectrum of educators and thinkers in the field. For example, David Warlick characterizes teachers as students with especially well developed learning skills, leading to the notion of teacher as master learner.  Stephen Downes has said that to learn is to practice and reflect, and that to teach is to model and demonstrate.  Downes along with George Siemens and Dave Cormier (and others) have been active proponents of the MOOC model of learning, which in turn encapsulates Siemens’s notions of connectivist learning.

This session develops each week one of the five stages of Cormier’s steps in coping with MOOCs: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus. The moderators, experienced master-learners, will model and demonstrate to peer-participants means that they have developed using emergent technologies to enhance their own learning and professional development environments following these steps.  Moderators and participants alike will reflect on each other's practice while learning from one another through blogging and aggregation of tagged artifacts.  

Cristina Costa was once asked (by Etienne Wenger) how she knew she had become a member of a community of practice.  She replied, ‘when she saw that her practice had changed’.  The objective of this session is for participants and moderators to help each other make shifts in thinking needed to apply the latest technology skills learned from one another to impact each participant's practice of engaging others in learning.

The weekly topics are Cormier’s 5 steps of coping with MOOCs, interleaved roughly from topics in Mark Pegrum's book From Blogs to Bombs: http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/isbn/9781921401343.htm,  The book is available in ebook format at nominal cost and is optional reading for participants. For each week of the session a synchronous discussion will be scheduled.

Week 1 - ORIENT  (Jan 9 - 15, 2012)

What is/are multiliteracies? Many literacies: A pedagogical lens
During this introductory week, participants will register at and familiarize themselves with the course websites (wiki, Posterous blog, and Yahoo!Group) and will begin to get to know one another through self-introductions and sharing of prior knowledge.  They will read, watch, and comment on seminal materials and consider Pegrum’s framework of a variety of lenses through which to view the phenomenon of multiliteracies.  Participants will be encouraged and assisted this first week in tracking their learning during the course on a wiki or blog (either an ongoing one or ones we share in the Posterous blog). This will be the first step in production of an eportfolio by the end of the session.

Week 2 - DECLARE  (Jan 16 - 22, 2012)

Many clouds: A technological lens
Participants will use tagging, RSS, folksonomies, and aggregation to gather, organize, and share relevant information among themselves, as well as with other EVO sessions.   They will read and comment on Pegrum’s chapter,  “Many Clouds: A Technological Lens”.  There will be practical exercises to help participants better understand how tagging works through experimentation.

Week 3 - NETWORK: Many Selves - A Social Lens    (Jan 23 - Jan 29, 2012)

Participants will consider possible applications of microblogging, podcasting, and ePortfolios in language teaching and will work together to compile an annotated blogroll of interesting educational blogs.  They will create a framework for an ePortfolio.

Week 4 - CLUSTER: Many Stories - A Political Lens    (Jan 30- Feb 05, 2012)

Participants will continue to develop their ePortfolios through the addition of digital storytelling and  a smorgasbord of other tools, including podcasts and other tools for sharing audio and text. 

Week 5  - FOCUS  through all the lenses: technological, pedagogical, social, sociopolitical, & ecological  (Feb 06 -12, 2012)

Participants will continue to build their ePortfolio while identifying the most useful tools for their own situation, and together we will consider some predictions for the future of the Internet. Active participants present their ePortfolios online, either through an asynchronous presentation, or at one of our regularly scheduled webcast events

Join this session

Sign up for the session starts on Jan 2nd, 2012 .

The action starts on Jan 9, 2012.

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).

Moderators

Vance Stevens coordinates Webheads in Actionand teaches ESOL writing in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He has over 30 years experience as lecturer in English language, CALL specialist and coordinator, courseware and elearning curriculum designer, and lecturer in computing.

Kalyan Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor (Senior) at Bankim Sardar College, University of Calcutta, India. His research interests include New Literacies studies, Web-based learning design, Mobile-based learning and interaction design, and Workplace Communication. He is currently Vice-president of IndiaCALL (an IATEFL Associate), EC member of AsiaCALL and IALLT Council Member. He has got BA Honours in English from the University of Calcutta, an MA in English language and Literature, an MA TESOL & ICT from the University of Leeds(UK), and a PhD.

Communication Media Used
 

The session has regularly scheduled live online events listed at http://learning2gether.pbworks.com. It also utilizes events taking place in Change MOOC http://change.mooc.ca/

Complete syllabus and course description at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ 

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

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, an international education association