Voki for my CATESOL Workshop

What topics, up to 60 seconds, could your students create Vokis about?

Getting Ready for CATESOL

I'm getting ready for the CATESOL state conference in Santa Clara on 4/23-25, and hoping there will be good attendance!

There will be two labs for the Electronic Village, and many great tech presentations. I'm on two panels, and creating a one-page handout and a wiki for both.

The first one is on Distance Learning: The Future of English as a Second Language. This panel was organized by Kara Rosenberg, Principal of Palo Alto Adult School. We are covering a wide range of topics, from data on distance learning to creating a distance learning program, curriculum, and opportunities for professional development. All our materials and references are on the wiki. It's on Friday at 9 in Convention Center 204

The second one is for the Adult Level Workshop, and the loose theme is Transition. The four presenters will talk about strategic planning for adult education in California (Vittoria Abbate-Maghsoudi, Mt. Diablo Adult Education), the role of technology in transition (me), transitioning students from non-credit ESL to credit ESL at the colleges (Greatchen Bitterlin, San Diego Community College District), and the importance of professional development (Karen Dennis, Santa Ana College). Right now just my part is on the wiki. The Adult Level Workshop is on Saturday, 1:30 - 3 in Grand Ballroom A.

Other OTAN workshops are:
- Moodle (Penny Pearson, Friday at 10:45 in the Great American Ballroom)
- OTAN Resources (Branka Marceta, 9 am on Saturday in Convention Center 205)
- USA Learns (Evelyn Fella, 9:45 on Saturday)
- Connecting with Picasa (Penny and Branka, 1:30 on Saturday, Convention Center 204)

Hope to see you there, California!

Social Networking for Professional Development

I'm at the CATESOL conference, and it's been a mixture of wonderful conversations and depressing realizations; wonderful because of the opportunity to see so many colleagues that I don't get to see all the time, and depressing because adult education in California, at least the K12 adult schools, is being cut and curtailed by state budget cuts. The adult level meeting, which is usually full to overflowing, was this time full of empty chairs, and when someone asked how many were from continuing education in the community colleges, more than half the room raised their hands. That means that teachers and coordinators from the K12 adult schools aren't here this year. There was no money for travel. There was also no one from the Adult Education Office of the California Department of Education because they also are not currently allowed to travel.

One of the wonderful parts of being here in Pasadena has been sharing a hotel room with my friend Jan Jarrell from San Diego City College. She used to teach ESL with me at Centre City Adult Education Center in San Diego, and we used to walk at the bay every Thursday and strategize about how to solve the various challenges we perceived in our classes, our program, and the district, not to mention our personal lives. I've missed that since I moved to Sacramento in 2001, and had forgotten how deeply satisfying it is to talk to someone who knows you and your history, and who shares many of your values and beliefs. We don't have to start at the beginning of a conversation, we can start in the middle and still know where we are.

In a year when the opportunities for face-to-face networking are fewer than in previous years, I found myself giving a workshop on Social Networking for Professional Development to a very small audience at the end of a long day. (The slides are posted, and the links on the wiki are just the ones that aren't in the slides.) The audience was small partly because the topic doesn't appear directly related to teaching English to speakers of other languages. But the people who were there, the 3 or 4 intrepid souls who sat up front and really talked with me, were sincerely curious about social networking, and I had the opportunity to share my passion for the subject.

Today I listened to a bunch of episodes from NPR's This I Believe, so let me borrow from their format to articulate here some things I believe:
* I believe we human beings are social animals
* I believe that learning is an innate human drive like sex or the need to find food and shelter - we can't go on for too long without it
* I believe we learn through relationships as much as if not more than through solitary reading and studying
* I believe that we learn through a web of connections between reading, conversations and experiences that interact with each other in some chemical way inside our brains
* I believe that passion is one of the keys to a productive life

In my presentation I talked about Twitter to people who had never seen it, about how many things I've learned from links people have posted there. I talked about Delicious and what an excellent improvement it is to be able to save and tag bookmarks online, and to share them with others and have others share their bookmarks as well. I talked about listservs, and Facebook and LinkedIn, and I realized that I'm still excited and passionate about these things.

I talked about people I've "met" through these networks, like Stephen Downes for instance, someone I will probably never meet in real life, but whose thinking affects my thinking, and my ability to share those thoughts with others. He talks a lot about how ideas are socially generated, and I recently read a biography of Einstein that made me acutely aware of the same thing - ideas are developed socially, feeding off each other, pushing each other, disagreeing with each other. Not to negate the importance of the exceptional brilliance of some minds. I often, in this stage of my life (I'm 61), run smack into the limitations of my own intellect. But Einstein, by putting his ideas out to his field, developed relationships with the other people who were thinking about the same things he was, and through those relationships developed his ideas further. He did that through the social networks that were available to him, but now every one of us has wide social networks available to us. This, to me, is like magic.

Wikis in ESL

I attended this event on Saturday purely as a participant, which was a nice change. I had time to listen and observe more than I have in the past. And things have definitely changed. There were two or three presentations on wikis. A year ago, most ESL teachers hadn't heard of wikis, so this was a welcome evolution. One of the most interesting was by Cassie Piotrowski, who teaches academic writing at San Jose State. It was interesting because she was not a high tech person herself, and struggled with some of the technology in her presentation, but nevertheless she was fearless in implementing a variety of Web 2.0 activities for her students.

In her Culture and Current Events class, she has her students divided into teams, and then from each team page she created a student page for each student where they post their slide show, video of their presentation, and other assignments. On her home page, she has all assignments with links to resources and documents.

On her Writing Class wiki, look at the links to the student pages and their assignments, which include Bubbleshare slideshows, Vokis, and Wordle assignments, in which students enter a list of significant words and Wordle creates a graphic of them.

Here is a Wordle of my delicious bookmarks.