A month has already passed since we started to explore and use Twitter and I’m so glad that I’m reflecting on it only now. This time spent on Twitter helped me to get the essence of this technological tool and to use

it to my own benefit.

     So, as we know Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing? Each posting is limited to 140 characters, which gives a chance for the users to keep their ideas and thoughts short and sweet.

Twitter is a room of conversations, where a user can easily understand when to jump in, what to write and how to comment. For some people the public timeline is quite interesting and practical, because they can collect hundreds of friends and followers, they can keep connected with a select group of colleagues and acquaintances through a shared space and what not. 

      Tweets comprise some private information about a person’s likes, dislikes, frustrations and sometimes some of this information is trivial, some boring, and some perhaps better kept private. However, the information written in twits is an excellent way to get someone to know better. Although tweets in general are very little, they facilitate a new way of seeing and understanding people.

     As a tool for students or professional colleagues to compare thoughts about a topic, Twitter is a critical technological tool that force its users to be brief and to the point—an important skill in thinking clearly and communicating effectively. Moreover, Twitter can provide a simple way for attendees at a conference to share thoughts about particular sessions and activities with others at the event and those unable to attend.

Reflection on Connie Yowell's (2009) Talk

Keywords: Digital media, young learners, paradigm shift, technology

Connie Yowell’s talk was very critical to me in understanding and appreciating the role of digital media in education. Several important questions, such as how young people are changing as a result of digital media, how their learning is changed and what are the implications of those changes, were touched upon in this talk.

Connie Yowell’s talk enlightened my understanding in a way that today only technology can address the young learners’ needs and that several paradigm shifts in traditional education should take place.  The paradigm shifts mentioned by Yowell (2009) that need to be addressed were as follows:

       ·        Reducing the gap between formal and informal learning context

·        Shifting from consumption to participation

·        Creating a community and taking participation actively

Based on the findings of different researches done, in the 21^st century 96% of young people play games, which is true across race and gender. The problem is that all the nice things that they are doing via technology are happening only outside the classroom, in informal learning context, thus creating a gap between the two learning environments. From Connie Yowell’s talk I inferred that when kids are playing games they don’t need a teacher or a textbook to learn how to play “Pokemon” or “Hyper Spider”. They form groups, sharing the same interests and form communities without anybody’s instruction. So, they simply learn by doing and giving feedback to each other through comments. According to Yowell writing comments is a feedback loop, which is modeling the young learners how to be reflective, as well as how to continue to improve the quality of their products.  

In a word, the learners become not only consumers, but also doers and producers and they shift from being private to public, because they are no more individuals, they are communities, who teach each other, learn from each other, as well as give feedback to each other’s works.  

My personal opinion concerning suggestions for the research agenda in the field of technology and TEFL are the following:

•  Use of VLC for watching movies and videos
•  Use of web applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.
•  Use of Blogging and iTunes for listening to different podcasts on various topics

Google Apps

Google Apps has become the technological center of nearly all of our operations. Sharing notes, lesson plans, meeting minutes, and updates has become an indispensible part in teachers’ life. The whole world has become a unified team due to technological developments.

Year ago if I were asked a question what Google Apps is, I would say, it’s the same Gmail. Only after a thorough exploration of this web technology I learned that Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. It doesn’t require users to buy or install software. The only thing the users need to do is to simply log in to the service to access their files and the tools to manipulate them. Google Apps comprises various offerings, such as communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages).

So, among these various Apps some of them can serve as an effective tool in an EFL classroom settings.

Google Docs is the first application that I’d like to discuss, because of its flexibility and practicality.   Documents allow the user to create writings anywhere there is an internet access.  Users no longer need to save to a server, carry a flash drive, or worry about working on either a Mac or Windows machine.  With Documents, users can also share their work with others to read, edit, or contribute to the content.  For students, this tool is especially helpful as it allows them not only to work from home, school, or other internet location but also gives learners a chance to share and collaborate with other students.

Gmail is the next important App that is critical for both teachers and students to keep in touch with each other constantly. Gmail encounters lots of advantages, such as speed. It is surprising to see the very fast mail delivery and mail reception in Gmail. Even there is no need to refresh the web page to see the new mails. Besides, Gmail has the ability to label the mails that you get from your friends, professors or other staff. Moreover, powerful search within the mail message is among the advantages of Gmail, because one can find the desired mail easily by doing a simple search.

Blogger is another useful application in education, which allows the learners to write about anything and everything. It’s a free space where one can express their ideas and thoughts freely, without any limits and restrictions. Blogging helps to enhance the students’ self-esteem greatly, because after writing and publishing a post people can leave comments thanking you for a great post.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year and the term cloud computing comes from the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. It means different things to different IT professionals and to different institutions. This new type of industry joins the ranks of terms including: grid computing, utility computing, virtualization, clustering, etc. Cloud computing is now associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. Cloud computing is often used to loosely describe a broad range of activities, ranging from outsourcing a specific activity to a single external provider to delivering a set of services from the cloud in such a way that users are not even sure where their data is being housed or where it is being processed. Cloud services offer higher education and research institutions the power to choose: the opportunity to rethink which services are needed to support education and research and what will be the best way to deliver those services. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

So, cloud computing is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. Cloud manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of more than one frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the practice of measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting on Internet data for the purposes of understanding how a web site is used by its audience and how to optimize its usage. So, web analytics is the study of visitor, navigation, and traffic patterns to determine the success of a given web site. It doesn’t only focus on the amount of traffic, but it focuses on in-depth comparison of available visitor data, referral data, and site navigation patterns as well as being able to tell us the amount of traffic we receive over any specified period of time.

As our ultimate goal is to use any kind of technology for educational purposes, especially language learning, I think that web analytics can be used as a practical tool in analyzing and improving students’ learning process. Moreover, the teacher/instructor can use this technological tool for learners’ ongoing evaluation and their progress. The teacher can easily see how many times the learners spend in this or that site and how much they explore it. Besides, it gives a chance to notice those students who are at risk of failing their courses, thus further steps can be undertaken in advance.

So, today the role of web analytics continue to grow and it has become a critical tool not only for measuring and optimizing web usage, but also for improving and assessing students’ learning process.    

Distance Learning

Years ago the terms open learning and distance education was merely a dream, but today it is the fastest growing fragment in education and training. Distance learning opens access to education and training, freeing learners from the constraints of time and place, and offering flexible learning opportunities to individuals and groups of learners. It is the process of transferring knowledge to learners/students who are separated from the instructor/teacher by time or physical distance and are making use of technology components, such as the Internet, video, CD's, tapes, and other forms of technology to accomplish learning.

The emergence of the Internet and related networks such as the World Wide Web has had and will increasingly have fundamental effect on the transformation of education and training in all sectors. ODL (Open Distance Learning) provides education to those who cannot study in the traditional manner, as it gives freedom to choose what, when, where, and how to learn. Hence, distance learning is very flexible. At the same time, distant learning requires more of the learner. As a learner, you are responsible for ensuring that you schedule the necessary time away from other activities in order to complete your coursework and assignments. Whatever schedule you set, you must follow through with it, or else your learning will not be effective. Distance learning has reversed the dynamics of learning; instead of the student going to school, the school now comes to the student.

VLE vs. PLE

For the first time when I saw the terms VLE and PLE, it didn’t make any sense to me and I didn’t have any idea concerning these two terms. Only after watching several videos and reading different articles related to this topic I started to differentiate between these strange terms.   
VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) is “a web-based online environment that integrates tools for content delivery, communication, assessment, and student management”.  It’s special software that provides an integrated package of resources and facilities to support the web-based delivery of courses; including mail, real-time chat rooms, online discussion forums, individual webpages, image databases, resource banks. Moreover, it allows teachers to create a homogenous context for all learners, providing with the same experience of the system: same content, organized in the same fashion, with the same tools.
PLE (Personal Learning Environment) is more of a concept than a particular toolset - it doesn't require the use of any particular tool and is defined by general concepts like: distributed, personal, open, learner autonomy. These conceptual attributes influence the types of tools individuals select to engage in learning. A typical example of PLE is the incorporation of blogs, where students comment on what they are learning, and their posts may reflect information taken from the webs, such as YouTube or in RSS feeds from news agencies. 
Though VLE is a great repository of rich resources and tools, where everybody can produce and share information online, my opinion is that VLE or PLE will never take the place of direct teaching and learning. It can facilitate, make more productive, ease and enhance many aspects of both teacher and student’s life, in case it is used in the right place, at the right time and with the right students.   

Open Education Resources

The term Open Educational Resources is a relatively new phenomenon, which first came to use in 2002 at a conference hosted by UNESCO. At that forum OER was defined as: “Open Educational Resources are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.”

The key term in this resource is the word “open”, which has two important aspects, such as free availability over the Internet and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource. Several factors in OER are of great importance: there should be no technical barriers, no price barriers and as few legal permission barriers as possible for the users.

Open/distance learning offers a lot of possibilities where students can complete their course work from just about anywhere with a computer and internet connection, which allows students to work when and where it is more convenient for them. Moreover, since students can often work from home to complete their class assignments, both time and money are saved. Another advantage of OER is the prices for online courses, which are generally cheaper than their on-campus counterparts and you won’t have to worry about traveling, moving or getting meal plans on campus. In case of OER learning while working becomes possible, as distance learning can usually be completed on your own schedule and it is much easier to complete distance learning courses while working than more traditional educational programs.

All the above mentioned opportunities sound great, but once running, a distance education enterprise must provide with technical support, specific technology, as well as appropriate resources and professional tutors.

Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL)

Five years ago I could hardly imagine that a mobile phone can assist any learning process. Today I can’t spend even a single day without my cell phone. In the 21^st century mobile learning is undergoing rapid evolution and mobile language learning is coming to support the educational process, especially language learning.

Though the integration of this new type of approach in language learning and teaching has been very slow, today mobile phones are the most frequently used devices in our educational life. The use of this tiny special device in language learning became possible only due to its unlimited possibilities and various programs that turned the mobile phones into smart devices to assist language learning process. The only question that arises here is how the mobile phones can support learning in the second language classroom. The answer according to Hayo Reinders is “in a number of ways”, because mobile phones come with growing functions that most students are so proficient in using them. There exist a great number of useful activities, designed for students of various ages having different language proficiency levels that can actively be used in their classroom settings. Moreover, they do not require any special knowledge or additional software or hardware.

There are several pedagogical reasons to consider using mobile phones in the second language classroom.

Firstly, phones are social tools that aid authentic and relevant communication and cooperation among learners. Second language learners can use mobile technology to access appropriate vocabulary and expressions on the given topics, they can look up movie reviews while at the theater, or they discuss

weekend plans with an English speaking friend, they can download and listen to different audio and video files, as well as podcasts.

So, one can assume that the possibilities of mobile phones are endless, the only thing that students and teachers should consider is how and when to use it.

Second Life

The first thing that I’d like to tell in my blog is that I’m totally confused. I think second life is not designed for me, it is designed for people who enjoy virtual life and they figure out how to do that. Perhaps, my “Real/First” life is better than this “Virtual Second” oneJ

Second Life was a quite challenging experience to me, because before this I’ve never heard about it and I’ve never tried. Today I spent approximately an hour to get the essence of this virtual game, but the only thing that I managed to do was dancing with other people in a club and chatting with them. After spending some time in Second Life and trying to expose interesting things on my own I got so nervous that I quitted with the game and started to read the articles that my professor provided. Only a few minutes later I realized that Second Life is really amazingJ

As the cost of education grows year by year and students are forced to pay higher tuition fees, share resources, and even drop classes, thus, educators created a special thinking learning space, called “Second Life”, which supports and strengthens the ongoing mission to deliver world class education. As far as I understood different virtual worlds, among them Second life can solve many of the challenges faced by educational institutions. Firstly, the learning space is always available, regardless age, nation, social and economical status, as well as   geographical position. The worth mentioning point that I found out from different articles was that over 700 educational institutions from all over the world are in Second Life today. So this means that the advantages of learning in 3D environments are many.

 Second Life delivers a wide range of courses, field trips, and events, such as distance and flexible education, presentations and discussions, simulations and role-playing, multimedia and games, as well as language learning practice.

So we can assume that Second Life became a powerful way to create bridges and to collaborate with one of the 700 educational institutions. Many learning institutions have created cooperative learning programs in Second Life with great success by using various collaboration tools. You can easily connect with other teachers and professors who are open to collaborating, sharing, and creating joint learning programs. Moreover, in Second Life, residents meet and interact with friends around the world, enjoy entertainment from live music to role playing games, explore unique environments and communities, and much more.

Now, I love Second Life:) 

Video Production in an EFL class

Firstly, I'd like to express my thanks to this course, because only due to it I revealed how critical and fascinating the field of video production is. Only few days ago I didn’t even know that video production can be used as a vital tool for learning. This technological tool became extremely useful for the development of students’ creative and critical thinking, as well as for the improvement of students’ speaking skills. After discussing video production with our professor I started to think about interesting performances that can be conducted with students of different ages and levels. This kind of digital technology gives a chance for both teachers and EFL learners to organize and accomplish various interesting activities, such as role plays, performances, storytelling, or video production on the specific topics that they are covering during their class. To be honest, it’s quite difficult for me to think of more activities that can be carried out with the help of video production, because my generation was deprived from this wonderful chance to use technology in classroom settings. But I’m sure that there are a lot of possibilities and creative activities that can be conducted by the teachers in an EFL classroom. I hope that one day our Armenian schools will be equipped with all kind of technology and digital media and out teachers will be enough competent to use those technological tools to their students’ benefits.

Podcasting

IPod and Broadcasting! These two concepts were quite familiar to me, but the combination of these words was something new and absorbing.

Podcasting – “learning through doing"! Podcasting is considered to be a shift in learning, which enables us:

·        to access course content on a twenty-four-hour basis

·        to take the learning mobile so that listening can be done on the bus, at the gym, or on a walk between classes

·        to develop creativity and flexibility

·        to download podcasts from the Internet for free

Moreover, as Manning (2005) mentions, voice humanizes and personalizes, it lessens the heavy text burdened of a computer screen, and helps the listener connect with the speaker. Podcasts can help elicit comments and continue a discussion that may have begun in the classroom, or began in a podcast and continues in the classroom. Besides, a person can talk about something of interest, make it an audio file and then post the file on the Internet making it available for others to listen to. In this way by listening to the content, instead of reading it, students can develop their aural skill outside of the classroom and also they can improve their pronunciation. It’s not a secret that whatever is new, it captures out attention and raises the motivation. Hence, today podcasting became a vital tool for both teachers/professors and students to enhance their learning and study skills via this new technology. Different researches show that podcasting enriches the learning, it stimulates students’ interest in the subject and it is helpful in motivating the students and helping them to stay focused on the course.

After reading several articles on podcasting I realized that I missed something important in my learning so far, because none of my teachers and professors at school and previous university ever implemented technology in our boring classes. But today I understood how essential podcasting and other type of software could be in my overall language learning process. 

Developing writing fluency and lexical complexity with blogs

     I have read a number of articles and different chapters about blog writing, since we started to examine the importance of weblogs. But today, after reading an interesting article about writing fluency and lexical complexity with blogs, I started to look at this oncept from different perspective.

    When I started to write blogs, firstly, I thought that it’s a place where one can have a lot of fun, because here you can express your thoughts and ideas freely, you can share it with your friends and professors, as well as with thousands of people visiting your weblog.  Later, I realized that it’s not an easy task to write a blog and to reflect on something you have listened, read or watched, because there a number of factors that should be taken into account when keeping a weblog.

    Perhaps, the first critical thing that comes to my mind is the audience, because every time you need to consider for who you are writing for. Your writing should be explicit and worth reading, your thoughts have to be obtainable for the audience of various ages and nationalities. Moreover, the overall language and grammar used in your writings need to be accurate and to the point.

    As this article considers writing fluency as one of the essential factors in writing a weblog, thus I’d also concentrate on this issue. According to Brown (1994) fluency is a steady flow of language for a short period of time without any self- or other correction at all. But this paper defines fluency in writing as the number of words produced in a specified time frame, together with lexical frequency, irrespective of spelling and content, provided that the writer’s meaning is readily understandable.

    Though in this research the main focus was on writing fluency, a number of other factors, such as self-expression, time limit, authenticity, materials and activities were also considered.

     As for me, all these factors are of equal value for writing an interesting and meaningful weblog for the real audience. 

A Hole in the Wall

When I watched this video I thanked God that in our country we have a chance to be computer literate and more or less our schools provide all the necessary conditions for the so called “Educational Technology”. The experiments that a group of people conducted in northern India really amazed me. The most interesting thing that I found from the results of their experiments was that over 300 children became computer literate in only 6 months with one computer. The thing that shocked me was that all these children, who were from the most undeveloped rural areas of Northern India, where they have no idea what a computer and Internet explorer are, they were actually browsing without anybody’s help and instructing each other in small groups. Moreover, younger children were teaching the older ones.  

So as Sugata Mitra says “learning is a self-organizing system and an educational technology and pedagogy is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized”. While conducting these experiments Sugata Mitra and his group considered two issues. The first one was “remoteness”, with its two meanings: remote from urban areas, that’s to say far from the center of India, and socially and economically remote. The second issue was the quality of education. The thing that they concluded was that the remoter the school was the worse were the results, and the reason for that was that the schools in remote areas do not have good teachers and infrastructure. I also agree with S. Mitra’s idea that if children are provided with computers and they have free access to the Internet they can teach themselves all the necessary things, such as basic windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting, games, educational materials, music downloads etc.

I’d like to wrap up and say that everybody should watch this video in order to understand that learning computer skills is not a big deal. The only thing that we need to know is that “We learn by doing and not watching”. 

                                                                    The World is Flat

The only thing that I revealed for myself while listening to Thomas Friedman’s speech was that "I was sleeping" as well! I knew that the world was round, but Flat? That was something new and unexpected for me. Due to T. Friedman’s speech I hopefully understood why he calls the world flat. I guess he wanted to show the world as a global platform in terms of commerce where all competitors have an equal opportunity. And by saying flat he means that the world shifted from being vertical to horizontal, that is to say the world became globalized. Several technological and political forces have converged and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance or even language. This is a real revolution and this revolution enables the whole world to be interconnected with each other. So it means that the world became a global market where people can work together and they can collaborate regardless their historical and geographical divisions.

Friedman mentions six flatteners that are viewed as leveling the global playing field and these flatteners are the following: 

• Outsourcing
•  Open sourcing (e.g. Firefox, Wikipedia, etc)
• Supply-chaining
• Offshoring
•  Insourcing
•  Informing.

He mentions that until the year 2000 the above mentioned flatteners were independent from each other and the proof of that is the incapability of one machine performing several functions. But today due to the emergence of hardware and software multiple functions such as e-mail, fax, printing and copying are able to be done from one machine. Thus, he assumes that finally all these six flatteners started to reinforce each other and they became interconnected. And actually this flattened the world.

That was how I understood and interpreted Thomas Friedman’s words.