in the age of tag clouds...

...cultures are clouds too.

‘Cultures are like clouds, their confines ever changing, coming together or moving apart [. . .] and sometimes merging to produce new forms arising from those that preceded them yet diff ering from them entirely’ (Droit in UNESCO, 2007).

*picture credits

notes from UNESCO report

from the General Intro

the relationship of cultures to change. For, as noted by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, almost seven decades of the 20th century were to pass before cultures started to be understood as shifting entities. Previously, there was a tendency to view them as essentially fi xed, their content being ‘transmitted’ between generations through a
variety of channels, such as education or initiatory practices of various kinds. Today culture is increasingly understood as a process whereby societies evolve along pathways that are specifi c to them. ‘What is truly specifi c in a society is not so much people’s values, beliefs, feelings, habits, languages, knowledge, lifestyles etc. as the way in which all these characteristics change’ (Cunha, 2007).

a new approach to cultural diversity — one that takes account of its dynamic nature and the challenges of identity associated with the permanence of cultural change.

culture and identity:
The challenge inherent in cultural diversity is not posed simply at the international level (between nation-states) or at the infra-national level (within increasingly multicultural societies); it also concerns us as individuals through those multiple identities whereby we learn to be receptive to diff erence while remaining ourselves.

although it's become quite a buzz word in HE, there are true social implications for improving intercultural communicative competence:
Thus cultural diversity has important political implications: it prescribes the aim of freeing ourselves of stereotypes and prejudices in order to accept others with their differences and complexities. In this way, it becomes possible to rediscover our common humanity through our very diversity. Cultural diversity thereby becomes a resource, benefitting cultural intellectual and scientific cooperation for development and the culture of peace.

good justification for telecollaboration:
It has become clear that cultural diversity should be defined as the capacity to maintain the dynamic of change in all of us, whether individuals or groups. This dynamic is today inseparable from the search for pathways to an authentic intercultural dialogue. In this regard, it is important to analyze the causes (stereotypes, misunderstandings, identity-based tensions) that make intercultural dialogue a complex task. It is also necessary to explore the potential benefits of novel approaches, paying particular attention to new actors (women, young people) and the creation of new networks at all levels.
four key areas — languages, education, communication and cultural content, and creativity and the marketplace — with respect to the future of cultural diversity.
the fields in question are particularly relevant in the sense that cultural diversity both depends on and significantly influences their evolution.

1. Languages doubtless constitute the most immediate manifestation of cultural diversity. Today they are facing new challenges and steps must be taken both to revitalize endangered languages and promote receptiveness to others through a command of several languages — mother tongue, national language and an international language — and through the development of translation capacity.
2. In the field of education, we must seek to strike a balance between the requirements of education for all and the integration of cultural diversity in educational strategies through the diversification of educational contents and methods, and a new emphasis on the development of intercultural competencies conducive to dialogue. More generally, there is a need to promote practices involving out-of-school learning and value transmission, notably in the informal sector and through the arts, as developed by societies worldwide.
3. Concerning communication and cultural content, the focus is on the importance of overcoming certain obstacles that, by hampering the free circulation of ideas by word and image, can impair our responses to cultural diversity. Persistent stereotypes and major disparities in the capacity to produce cultural contents are a particular concern and call for greater efforts to promote media literacy andinformation skills, particularly through the information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Cultural diversity accordingly becomes a key instrument for the effective exercise of universal human rights and for the renewal of strategies aimed at strengthening social cohesion through the development of new and more participatory forms of governance.

I'm back!

Ok, today is really like the first day of my PhD. I finished (or at least I hope so!) the book, set up the exchanges and am finally sitting down to read. As I went through my emails today to do a bit of cleaning up, I found two messages colleagues had sent me about culture - the Global People project (Helen Spencer-Oatey) and the Unesco report on cultural diversity.
As usual, I'm lost as where to start so I'm starting here. The idea is that if I'm going to argue anything about telecollaboration, I have to be more familiar as to it's value from the three points of view - linguistic, cultural and literacies. It's reassuring that the Unesco report highlights the importance of language and modes of communication in describing cultural diversity. I'm going to try using Diigo to send a few quotes to this blog - let's see if it works. Then, of course, in the afternoon, a half hour of German?

Observation

Following the course in Antwerp and my discussion with Markus it became clear that the initial data for my phd would be qualitative data based on teacher observation and interviews/focus groups with students. I thought it would be a good idea to have an observation schedule to use during the sessions. I spent quite awhile the other day looking for other examples of teacher observation schedules in the language classroom to use as a basis for mine. It was very difficult to find anything relevant, though my search is not up. I found this article about observing teachers, which provided some insight.

These are some ideas I jotted down.

I found it extremely difficult to observe students for three reasons basically:
1 - though it would be nice to be the researcher on the outside, I'm actually running the course;
2 - once I'd finally got them all up and running, the time was almost over;
3 - I need an effective observation schedule.

I've got one major doubt about observing: am I supposed to observe them all or choose a few and just observe those in particular? Obviously, the former is more challenging and I can't do the latter until I've gotten to know them better. I've asked Marcello if we can have access to their Skype text chats, but, ....

So here are some ideas on what I came up with before the session based on what I thought during the session. This is what it might be worth observing:

Topic
Sts stayed on topic?
If not, off topic, sts were discussing
Personal experiences
Comparing cultures
Current events
Reinforcing stereotypes
Challenging stereotypes
Local culture content
Target cultural content
Grammar
Technical problems
Other

Level of motivation
high
fairly high
low

Initiative Taken by students to manage difficulties
A lot - never asked for help, always managed alone
Quite a lot - rarely asked the teacher
Some - sometimes asked the teacher for help
None - always asked the teacher for help

Types of online activity in addition to Skype
text chatting with other people
dictionaries/translation sites
wikipedia
college websites
other websites to share information

Use of text chat in Skype with peers
overcome initial shyness anxiety
explain words/expressions
say things sts don't want peers to hear
share urls
support one another
other

Padova-Dickinson Exchange 2009 - Session 2

My observations from the first actual Skype exchange:

• the usual - two students had technical problems, but the rest did fine
• all of them started off text chatting and then, thankfully, Nicoletta made hers call ours so they actually started talking - usual blushing, smiling, anxiety, discomfort
• most students' first comment was 'it was fun' or 'that was great' :-)
• most of the American students are very weak in Italian, and our students noted this - some said it made it impossible to speak in Italian, others said once they 'got to know each other' in English, then their peer was willing to speak in Italian, others said they just had to speak slowly - will have to question the order, i.e. in the case of weak students, maybe it's better to start in English
• use of the Web: I found observing very hard (see next post) but this was my general impression - some students kept the screen only on the questions on the wiki, others Skype audio and text so that they could text in awkward or difficult moments, only 2-3 had other windows/text chats going on at the same time, and one student was using a dictionary rather than the Web! It will be interesting to note whether this limited use of the Web was caused by the fact that the first session is overwhelming and will increase as time goes by or not.
  
• most students had already contacted one another on Facebook and were very excited about meeting there peers online in Skype - one had read all the intros and decided who she wanted to be paired with (girl-boy) and when that wasn't the case she was disappointed.
• Lara-John: John doesn't talk much so this needs to be observed in the future exchanges.
• Silvia-Monia-Nina: Silvia was very disappointed when she found out the reason she wasn't able to hook up with Nina was that Nina wasn't using her Skype name and had already started Skyping with Monia using another name - then added Silvia to the conversation but Monia seemed to dominate (she seems to be a strong student) - thought about changing the groups, but towards the end Monia seemed to 'leave space' for Silvia as well so for now, have left così, 3 strong students - will see how it goes.
  

Padova-Dickinson Exchange 2009 - Session 1

Wow, it's been nearly a month now. I've spent the past few weeks writing a chapter on TBLT and Telecollaboration 2.0 together with Fran, which will hopefully be published after all the work we've done it! Then I had to organize the Padova-Dickinson Exchange Fall 2009. This is what I'd like to note for now...

We've made several changes to the wiki based on our past experience and are hoping it will work better, and be more user-friendly this semester. We're having students use the comment function and their own personal pages for introductions in order to avoid many different people trying to edit one wiki page - which has proven to be inevitably a disaster.

Each discussion topic will have it's own page where students can continue the discussion asynchronously after the Skype chat. We still have to decide whether we, the teachers, are going to start discussions or 'let them go' through the comment function.

Fran and I made a long questionnaire that nearly all students have completed. We hope this will help inform us in our research.

I need to make up an observation schedule to use while observing the students Skyping. Need to work on that with Fran.

My observations with the students during the first lesson were these:

• Although they use technology, they don't really know how to use it and the second there's any glitch, they get frustrated and ask for help, with the exception of a few students such as Antonino.

• Fiona had a problem accessing the wiki and wrote a comment - a student replied with the technical help before I did, even though we hadn't suggested this. It was Silvia. Two others are also using this page to post comments so it looks like this use of the wiki is working - I just need to be checking it regularly!

• The students' questions are the usual, trivial, banal ones so it's going to be a challenge getting them beyond this. On the other hand, there is some material there like one student's statmente (note: not question!)"Do you know that where we live and troughout the north of Italy Mafia doesn't exist? It is not a countrywide phenomenon."I am definitely going to have to find out more about the 'Ndrangeta and other sources of organized crime, Mafia del Brenta, ecc. or have them investigate???Then there are a few cute ones worth using for increasing language awareness: During the Christmas Holidays which season are you living in? (This one for basic knowledge - does this student not know that the US is in the Northern Hemisphere??!!)Do you know Silvio Berlusconi?Have you ever done a spelling race?
  

• I'm hoping to make the 'Single Story' video into a task that will challenge them to consider their 'Single Story' of America, Italy or any other country. I think I can use this with the German-Italian exchange as well. For now I've embedded it in the wiki and made links to the comments on YouTube and on the TED website surrounding the video. It might be worth having students choose one of those two discussions as well and to contribute.

Still trying to figure out how to best organize my time :-(

sociocultural, pedagogical or interactionist?

When Andreas and Francoise presented Activity Theory at the conference in Léon, Spain, I (along with many others) felt quite lost. But, I must admit, after having read Andreas's chapter, it's beginning to make much more sense and seems like a relatively plausible framework within which I can conceptualize telecollaboration 2.0 because in the end, the nice thing about it, is that everything interacts with everything else. But before I get there...

In my experience as a student and then as an academic, there are certain words and terms I have trouble getting my head around. For example, authors speak of a sociocultural approach, or a pedagogical approach, or an interactionist approach to TBLT and NBLT (gotta love these abbreviations!). Although the words themselves seem to inherently communicate what the 'approach' deals with, for those of us trying to put it into practice, it all remains a bit abstract. So let's see if the Internet can help me out...

First you try searching for 'pedagogical approach' and NBLT - niente, then - language - all this engineering stuff, then TBLT and voilà, an article by the same person whose article I've just read, Marita Schocker-v. Ditfurth entitled What do we know about how foreign languages are learned? – A pedagogical perspective on tasks. Guarda che caso ;-)

Then I did a search for 'socio cultural approach' and to no surprise came up with Rod Ellis who compares this approach to the psycholinguistic approach (another one to take into consideration). But for now I can't get access to the journal :-(

Finally looked for 'interactionist' and found this interesting blog by Fred Shannon that explains a few things. So now I'm off to read these resources and to try and get my head around these concepts before I go pick up the kids and go to the pool!