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.