Thank you for having taken a look at the LTD Project Wiki, as well as for your suggestion to bring it over to WikiEducator (… [author's name removed {PB}], personal correspondence …, Nov 21, 2009). While I haven’t assessed WikEducator in these terms before, you’re right; the community members, and especially people like you there, have a great deal of experience and expertise to offer. I appreciate the reminder. People using WikiEducator are a wonder to behold. …

And ending like this:

… I’m afraid that reasons for not following your suggestion, including a horrendous learning curve, outweigh currently perceivable benefits from porting one of many wikis over to WikiEducator.

On one hand, as you may know, I’m involved with several wikis in Wikispaces, the interface of which I find visually appealing, intuitive, and user-friendly enough for low-intermediate students of English as an additional language to use in the target language. Those wikis are in addition to a DokuWiki, MediaWikis, pbWikis, pmWikis, and a bit of dabbling in Zoho Wiki, too. In general, I’ve found developers at Wikispaces responsive to inquiries and suggestions.

On the other, the invitation I’d received precipitated wonder whether a massive translocation of wiki content from one engine to another would be feasible and easy, or better yet automated and reliable. A quick and dirty approach, I thought, would be to plant an RSS feed in a user page on WikiEducator, at least temporarily, to display content from selected wikis and blogs.

However, even after racking up years of experience with wikis, and having audited several introductory workshops about WikiEducator, I find MediaWikis hard to fathom, and WikiEducator – in particular – frustrating to attempt to navigate, understand, and use. For example, I opened a user page to edit it (still thinking of quickly planting an aggregate RSS feed over there), but running short on time could find no cancel option.

I thought a prominent “dismiss” link might do the job, but something else disappeared when I activated that. I searched for “dismiss,” and have found nothing so far except no “search” help on the Help:Contents page or All pages (Help namespace). Though the Practice editing page refers and links to “the user manual” (P.S.2), that link leads straight back to Help:Contents.

A circuitous and fruitless foray like that into WikiEducator suggests that its wiki engine[, search engine,] and the collaborative venues in flux or stagnating around it (e.g.: WikiEducator policies, “Work in progress … last modified October 4, 2008″) may be too complex for comfort, too cluttered for practical use with English-as-an-additional-language learner collaborators, and too convoluted to unravel and reweave in what little time I have. I feel that, for the time being, the wiki pages I continue to develop, or to [archive or] disregard … [and allow to stagnate] as the case may be, are fine where they are.

A gem that I’m carrying away reflects remarks Paloff made about 14 of 15 minutes into the interview, about the value of social presence. Segueing from assessment to online presence, when Pratt emphasizes presence (instead of social), he’s probably referring to facilitators as much as to other online inter-actors (or course-takers). If he isn’t, he ought to be.

In turn, Palloff mentions research indicating that deliberate if not explicit developments of online presence at the onset of interactions enhance learner involvement, engagement, persistence, performance, and satisfaction. She characterizes such developments as “an extremely important component of community building” (Show #3: Assessing the Online Learner – An Interview with Rena Palloff & Keith Pratt, 2008.08.31).

While Marielle recognizes strengths of networking technology that enable people with common interests to form networks, if not communities, easily and quickly; she also points out amplifications and caveats to those bent on rapid diversification of networking sites, and similar migrations from one to the next:

With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.

(mpal3, So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet), 2008.07.03)

At present, lacking (or simply ignoring) great automaticity in propagating connections from one blog or network to the next, it remains a matter of choice where to establish or maintain a toehold on connected writing. For me, the choice this morning was easier done than said, or written about. Anyway, here goes – a short story long:

I’d followed Marielle’s link from Blended Learning to her blog (Authorship 2.0), previewed her post about reciprocity, and decided on the spot to bookmark it in Diigo, highlighting the passage that I’ve quoted above, sharing it with a Diigo branch of the Learning with Computers community, and sending it to a list of friends weblogging in Kumamoto. When I finished bookmarking, commenting on, and description of the post that I’d flagged, the description had grown to such an extent that it seemed almost more suited for blog commentary.

There I was, in Edublogs, ready to leave a comment for Marielle, when it dawned on me that I didn’t recall, immediately, what in a flurry of early morning activity had lead me there. Once I pasted the overflow from the Diigo bookmark description into an Edublog comment window, with no, “Hi, I found this interesting post on your blog through…” (no thanks to hot de-caf. coffee on a sweltering morning before the air-conditioning kicks in), I noticed how impersonal what I’d originally written for a bookmark description sounded as a stand-alone comment.

That inkling led to a quick poke about the Authorship blog to see who had written the post So Many Nodes… (above). However, finding little more than mpal3 on edublogs (and Bmused on del.icio.us) there-abouts; I decided that, rather than leave my names, email address, and an impersonal comment on an unknown author’s blog (if knowing an author requires knowing her name), it would be easier to dump the description I’d clipped from Diigo into a new, full-featured blog entry here, then retrace my steps backwards through multiple browsers, tabs, and drop-down histories, in order to suss out what connections I could.

In short, I got lost, and wrote my way back. The remainder of the coffee is chilling, the air-conditioning is working now; I’m heating the world, and writing solipsistically. What else is new? I’ve rediscovered, in a very personal way, what so many nodes mean. I surmise that initial connections in or via writing, whether in the head or on the web, are necessarily loose, and that virtual connectedness is just that – virtual.

Messages flowing into my mailbox on a daily basis are hard to ignore, and fill a professional development gap that I’d hoped might, after I joined the EdubloggerWorld wiki and started monitoring the Tagging Standards page (along with all others on the latter site).

Actually, I cannot recall getting any notifications at all from the latter. That is why I’m so happy to be involved with the LwC crowd in a collective exploration of tagging practices.

I don’t expect it to remain as narrowly focused as the Writing Studio Blog that I’ve been running on Blogger for a bit over a year now. In spite of familiarity with Blogger functionality, I decided to make the leap into Edublogs and blended instruction with students in an English for communicative purposes course that I resumed teaching in April this year (2008).

After reading Sue Waters clarification of the differences between categories and tags (Edublogger, What’s The Difference…, 2008.03.02), I deliberately established three initial categories that correspond to the intended purposes of the new Edublog. Those are fostering and facilitating development of learners’ computer literacy along with their language skills, and a degree (modicum?) of autonomy in their own learning (LLD Project Blog, About).

Having grown accustomed to dedicating Wikispaces to individual courses, it wasn’t much trouble to build a course wiki for the blended course before actually deciding whether to go with another blog. However, I felt an itch to consolidate resources and tutorials less directly related to course assignments somewhere they would be equally accessible to students in all of the courses that I teach, in a venue less noticeably earmarked for teachers than the Language Teacher Development Project Wiki. Hence there now is a budding Wikispaces companion, the Language Learner Development Project Wiki.

A community, on one hand, she suggests is “an online group where one’s absence will be noted (you will be missed).” In contrast, she suggests, a network is “an online group where one’s absence does not matter (the group will survive)” (Learning Times, Virtual Community Working Group, 2005.04.06).

Reading that led to wondering whether the WinK network is beginning to approximate a community. [Somehow, this quick post got clocked in on January 1, 1970. Since I don't recall when I posted it, I'm changing the timestamp to today (March 19, 2008).]

Blogged with Flock
Tags: communities, LearningTimes, networks, online, virtual

The mind-map represented in the image below is a visualization in progress to reflect upon tools and venues supporting a growing community of webloggers called WinK, an acronym for Weblogging in Kumamoto, the brain-child of two colleagues with whom I group blog privately in Vox.

The Pageflakes nodes (among RSS aggregators in the image, below), inaccurate and incomplete as they may be, represent recent developments inspired by impeccable models in the Blogging for Educators workshop (wiki & Pageflakes).

For the continuing inspiration that the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop coordinators, facilitators, and other participants provide, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere thanks: Thank you all!

This mind-map (image only) captures many if not most of the major constituent elements of WinK at this point in time (between academic years 2007-08, and 2008-09). Please note that it is neither complete in details or interconnections, nor completely accurate in some of the details it represents.

(PB [aka ltdproject], description of WinK image posted on a Vox blog,

for discussion in the private WinK Core Group, 2008.02.20).

… Blogging has helped me view each of my students as constructors of knowledge who need frequent opportunities to be involved in the process of creating meaning. Blogs can be short, quick writes that give them the practice they need to learn from putting their thoughts down and then engaging in the dialogue about the process, both online and in the classroom….

Davis, EduBlogs Insights,
Blogs and Pedagogy, 2006.05.31

Now that I’ve spent a year with students in a blended learning environment for whom blogging was the primary course activity, I must say that those choice words from a Blogging for Educators workshop reading ring more true than ever.

One activity that I will continue to assign next year will be quick-writes at the beginning of face-to-face class meetings in order to encourage students to develop fluency in written thought production. This activity will continue to challenge them not only cognitively, but also linguistically – as they write in a language other than their vernacular, and typographically – because they may be better at text input with a thumb or two on cellphone keypads than than they are on keyboards with four fingers and two [one or both] thumbs.

In order to engage them further, in dialogues about the process of writing in English as an additional language, I am seeking to adopt and adapt or develop activities that both promote and facilitate reflective, meta-cognitive and interpersonal writing. I’ll be looking in particular for activities like that as I view cristinacost’s November 2007 SlideShare, “Practically Speaking: A ‘How To’ Approach and Practical Examples on Blogging in the EFL Classroom.”

In writing classes I’ve taught, I’ve observed how students at liberty to do so will gravitate to their friends and favorites, with whom they may even sit in class, and on whose blogs they may willingly sustain exchanges beyond one-off comments at assigned intervals. Although active feeds which conceal author’s names may encourage students to explore posts on blogs other than those of their best buddies, they will still need interest, motivation, and purpose to carry them beyond scanning attractive posts, commenting haphazardly, and then nipping back to links, feeds, and channels already familiar and favorable to them. I still wonder to what extent student peers can stimulate and satisfy each others’ intellectual curiosity through obligatory online interactions.

Parry suggests also that we use RSS feeds to channel comments as well as synopsize posts. Indeed we can, without so much difficulty that students cannot do so on their own blogs. For a relatively simple recipe for doing so on Blogger blogs, please see:

Recent Comment Feed on Your Blog
(pab’s potpourri, February 1, 2008).

In learningwithcomputers@yahoogroups.com (message 3808), “Gladys Baya” <gladysbaya@…> points out a Camtasia-produced video demostration of Russell Stannard['s] giving screenplay + audio feedback on a short essay in English by a student from China:

http://www.russellstannard.com/king/king.html

Gladys asks: “Have you ever tried something like this in your own teaching practice?” In a follow-on, she suggests that “we are bound to differ in the way we go about giving feedback… [and] can profit from reflecting about this simple approach to discuss student-generated writing on screen.

A short answer would be, “No, I haven’t tried anything like that”, for one reason because I haven’t got Camtasia, though apparently older versions are available for free (Windows only). Nevertheless, I agree that Stannard['s] video demo. of one-to-one, tutor (teacher) to tutee (student) feedback deserves a good close look. What follow are some reflections.

We may notice that the student’s names and hometown feature prominently in the two paragraph self-introduction. We also may realize that Stannard… has made a widely-accessible public display of the work, spot-lighting and highlighting mistakes in it. His markings are monochromatic (yellow).

Though his feedback begins by focusing on a mistake, it includes a modicum of praise midway on (towards the end of the first paragraph – spotlighted, but left unmarked), and then more mistakes. Stannard… concludes with more positive observations about the communicativeness of the student’s piece, and suggestions for reviewing the video repeatedly and revising the essay.

Although in the essay the student claims better writing skills than speaking skills, in the feedback, which as Gladys points out is under three minutes, I would hardly call Stannard['s] speaking speed slow. He uses lots of teacher-talk, for example: “participle”, and “perfective” (if I caught those words right after two listenings). So I wonder whether the student will get it working alone, or even with near-peers.

I’d like to hear what catches the attention of other teachers of writing as they watch Stannard['s] video feedback demo:

http://www.russellstannard.com/king/king.html

(Beaufait, Learning with Computers,

Re: Video on teaching writing with computers [feedback demo.], message [3863],

November 30, 2007 [JST])