Monthly Archives: January 2020

Vance Stevens Plenary at ThaiTESOL on The What, Why, and How of Flipped Learning: Harmonizing diversity by developing skills in podcasting, webcasting, and digital storytelling

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Learning2gether Episode #434

Find out more about the Jan 20-29 Workshops in Thailand
Skip down to Earlier Events

2020-01-30_reminder

This plenary address was delivered live face-to-face at the ThaiTESOL conference in Bangkok, Thailand, and simulcast by Jeff Magoto as a live webinar recorded in Zoom for the benefit of the EVO Flipped Learning session – here: https://youtu.be/FXEhAHul0bU?t=662

Links to the text

Links to the slides

If you arrive at one you can easily link to the other

2020-02-03_0534myFLplenary

From https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/1725292/assignments/13587716 (link available to registered participants in the Flipped Learning EVO course for 2020)

I was invited, https://tesol.conferences.in.th/?go=invited_speakers, to give a plenary address at the 40th Thailand TESOL-PAC International Conference at the Ambassador Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand, at 13:30 on DAY 1: Thursday, 30 January 2020, on the topic of:

The what, why, and how of flipped learning: Harmonizing diversity by developing skills in podcasting, webcasting, and digital storytelling

The plenary was preceded by 2-weeks of English Language Specialist workshops in Thailand, which can be seen online now at http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/. The link was given out prior to the workshops to institutes where the participants were, which does not mean the links always reached the participants in advance, but this would have made it possible for the workshops to be flipped so that background information would have been previewed by participants, who would then focus primarily on the activities in the workshops themselves. Then after the workshops, all participants still had an archive of what they did at the same link.

Following the workshops I gave the plenary at ThaiTESOL on Flipped Learning and Jeff Magoto streamed it directly to the Flipped Learning EVO session as one of their weekly webinars. My plenary took place right after lunch, so I went to the auditorium ahead of time and got set up there and connected in Zoom with the Flipped Learning Webinar, so that the webinar was in session and on the big screen, audio issues more or less resolved, when the plenary audience arrived.

More about the EVO Flipped Learning session here:
http://evo2020proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/135536043/Flipped_Learning_in_language_teaching

The webinar began at 6 am UTC in Zoom, https://zoom.us/j/188490722

Announcements: Facebook

2020-02-11_0553hanchey

Also announced on the Flipped Learning canvas LMS as follows:

The announcement above and the link to readings (and viewings) can be seen by registered FLEVO participants here:

cert_appreciation4plenary

Getting ready for the big event

Outside the auditorium

2020-01-30_prePlenary

Setting up with Jeff Magoto

2020-01-30_plenary_setup

The 2020 EVO Flipped Learning session figured prominently in my plenary address. For their part, for sharing my plenary with them, they sent me a certificate of participation in their session.

EVOflippedLeaning_certPart

This video explains what I had planned here in its wider context

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More about the Jan 20-29 Workshops in Thailand

These are for an
English Language Specialist Project:  Workshops in Thailand January 2020

At http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/ find the HOME portal for a series of workshops conducted by English Language Specialist Vance Stevens at various universities and language centers in Thailand to English lecturers and undergraduate and graduate university English majors on using CALL (computer-assisted language learning) and technology for blended classrooms. The workshops model how teachers can create blended learning environments using free Web 2.0 tools and websites.

These workshops encourage and train teachers to learn best practices from peer models, in order to in turn model for their students how technology can best be utilized and applied appropriately in their students’ learning.

There are two workshops in 4 and 2 modules respectively. The modules are designed to be delivered in the amount of time allocated to those workshops at each presentation location in Thailand. Details can be found at http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/


Earlier events

Sat 11 Jan EVO Minecraft MOOC kicked off its 6th season in Discord and Minecraft

https://learning2gether.net/2020/01/11/evo-minecraft-mooc-kicks-off-its-6th-season-with-electronic-village-online/

Sun 12 Jan 1400 utc EVO kickoff meeting

The EVO20 annual Kickoff event is on January 12, 2020 at 2 PM UTC (9:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Sat Jan 11 – EVO 2020 sessions begin now until Feb 16

More information, http://evosessions.org

EVO is Electronic Village Online. Its annual 2020 sessions go from Jan 11 to Feb 16 this year.

There’s more information here http://evosessions.org/ and a Call for Participation here: https://www.smore.com/sbzya

In 2020 there are 15 sessions

Click on the links to find out how to sign up

The following invitation was generated from Heike’s Ning …

Invitation to EVO session

Immersive Language Learning in Virtual Worlds

11 January 2020 – 16 February 2020

To talk to others live online is the best and sometimes cheapest way of practicing a language in real-time with via internet. Virtual environments offer opportunities to meet speakers of other languages and native speakers alike but there are many 3D spaces out there and sometimes it is difficult to decide which one to join. Which virtual world is suitable for language education? What kind of equipment or software do you need? How long does it take to get to know this world before we introduce this to our students? Is this virtual space safe for our learners?  Come join to find out. For a period of 5 weeks we meet online twice or three times a week to explore some 12 different virtual 3D environments and look at how these could be used for language teaching and learning. An EVO session is a free online workshop aimed at professional languageeducators with teaching experience, language consultants, language schools or publishers.Everyone can attend even without a fast computer and you do not need an HMD headset nor any special technical skills. We will meet in a video conferencing solution called Zoom and will use screensharing to showcase. We hope our participants join us actively in trying to evaluate these environments to come up with our top 5 virtual spaces suitable for language learning. For more information see http://vlanguages.pbworks.com and we look forward to you signing up using this Google form https://forms.gle/DDtKoB8TiVPsuFUr8

Jan 21 Vanessa Paz Dennen and JiYae Bong describe research on participants a MOOC that focused on social media use

Posted in MyTESOL Lounge, https://my.tesol.org/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=b61e8024-8b22-4635-86be-784225f6dd14&CommunityKey=a4e6ad60-89a2-4c3f-9e37-cb7e3acad5fe&tab=digestviewer#bmb61e8024-8b22-4635-86be-784225f6dd14
Faridah Pawan
The URL below is the recorded conversation undertaken on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020. Vanessa Paz Dennen and JiYae Bong from Florida State University describe their research on the dialogues and the engagement patterns of an international group of participants a MOOC that focused on social media use. Although their perspective is that of instructional designers and researchers, their insights may be of use to the TESOL audience interested in the online medium as a medium of instruction.  As with all ongoing research, the speakers demonstrate constant problematization at several levels including at the theoretical level (Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions theory) and in the appropropriateness and adequacy of the conceptual categorizations of “national,” organizational and tool cultures.  Pedagogical implications are discussed with the caveat that there is much that remains unknown and to be explored.

URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG0ZTFzAZAM

Paper: Dennen, V. P. & Bong, J. (2018). Cross-cultural dialogues in an open online course: Navigating national and organizational cultural differences. TechTrends, 62,  383–392. doi.org/10.1007/s11528-018-0276-7

EVO Minecraft MOOC kicks off its 6th season with Electronic Village Online

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Learning2gether Episode 433

EVO Minecraft MOOC kicked off its 6th consecutive season as an Electronic Village Online session on the first day of EVO 2020, Saturday, January 11, 2020. We dubbed this a “final preparation” to be held in Discord and Minecraft, but besides many of this year’s moderators (and their kids), we had several newcomers turn up. It was encouraging to have several new participants appear on the very first day of our activities.

You can find more about EVO Minecraft MOOC, including a description of the current session, which any educator is welcome to join, along with all our archives since our first session in 2015, at http://minecraftmooc.org .

In this, our first adventure of the 2020 season, we showed our newcomers some of the resources around the spawn point and stepped through the wilderness portal there to arrive at our wilderness outpost. From there we followed a path and crossed a river to reach the nearby village, and headed for a tower due west of there. Continuing west along the river we arrived at a second tower built atop a shelter, from which we set off to neutralize a nest of skeletons emanaing from the spawner that Teacher Vance had discovered earlier in explorations around the wilderness portal. When it was working, the spawner was a great source for bows and arrows.

On the first day of EVO20, and 24 hours before the official EVO kickoff event Jan 12 we attracted several moderators and a few newcomers to Minecraft.

We announced our event

Where? We had announced our meeting to be held in 3 places

Heike joined Vance briefly in Zoom (pictured below) but I left that space after half an hour in order to focus on the others on the EVO Minecraft server and speaking in DIscord

When? The event was set for Sat 11 Jan at 1400 UTC

We gathered at the /warp Whitetower (or /warp spawn) and then went over to the /warp hub

Someone named ~tour_helper joined us there. Could it be … ???

From there we stepped into the Wilderness portal and were beamed up to the wilderness outpost

There is a high point there with a ladder up a tower where you can then jump into the treetops and get a nice view

From there we took a trail signposted “to the village” and crossed the river to the village with a red building added by Dak

Heike had had a run in with a skeleton by then

From the red building you can see a tower to the west

From that tower you head for another tower in a bend in the river at the base of the mountains

Here are the coordinates for the second shelter

From there, going down to the bend in the river, you find your way signposted up the mountain. Follow the torches.

Up the mountain we found the spawner guarded by skeletons

Lots of skeletons (they just kept coming). There was a grand battle

Most of us survived, barely

Hi mom, it’s meeeee !!

You can suppress the spawner by putting torches on it. Mobs don’t spawn in bright light.

Dak built a wall around the spawner designed so that skeletons coming out of the spawner wouldn’t be able to shoot out but someone outside could shoot in.

 

In preparation for EVOMC20 in early January

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear and Jane Chien and Olivetree Grove and others have been exploring the area northwest of the Wilderness Warp at 20k x 20k on our classic server. Those are the X (-west +east) and Z (-north +south) coordinates you see when you press F3 in Minecraft.

Our new area is in the tiaga at around 19.5000-X and 20.5000-Z  Here are some screenshots of the area:

You can tame llamas nearby if you give them about ten bundles of wheat

If you feed parrots seeds they might sit on your shoulder

Be careful, some of the candlelit paths up the mountains come out on a skeleton spawner

woops!

You can recover wherever you respawn. Right click on a bed inside this shelter to set a bed spawn here.

Here are the coordinates for this shelter

Down across from the bend in the river you find your way signposted up the mountain

You can see some of the torches marking the way up behind AbuFletcher. The spawner is a good place to pick up a few arrows, and you might collect some bows if you manage to get a few skeletons before they get you. If you linger there they’ll overwhelm you.

There are ways to deal with spawners. The first step is to light up the chamber. We’ve put enough light there where we can see our way in the dark cave, but we’re leaving this for a group of EVOMC20 adventurers to sort out. Welcome to join us.

 

Earlier events

Wed 11 Dec 1500 and 1900 UTC -Macmillan hosts Deborah Healey on Gamification in ELT

https://learning2gether.net/2019/12/11/learning2gether-about-gamification-in-elt-with-deborah-healey-hosted-by-macmillan-education/

 

Sat-Sun Dec 14-15  OpenSim Community Conference

Get the links from Heike Philp’s tweet, https://twitter.com/heikephilp/status/1205866030637232128

And more from Facebook about the OpenSim conference, https://conference.opensimulator.org/2019/

The link to the conference livesteam leads to a nice thumbnail but not to a playlist of recordings unfortunately,

https://www.youtube.com/c/AvaconOrg/live

 

 

Tue 17 Dec 1200 UTC – iTDi interview with Gianfranco Conti

Dec 17th (Tue) – An interview with Gianfranco Conti

Link to The Teachers’ Room: https://zoom.us/s/867202173
(Zoom Meeting ID: 867202173)

Find out more: https://itdi.pro/itdihome/the-teachers-room/
Check out previous sessions: https://tinyurl.com/utvjan8

 

 

Sat 28 Dec 0100 UTC iTDi Teachers’ Room Open Mic session

Dec 28th (Sat) 0100-0200 GMT – What on your mind? Open mic session

Link to The Teachers’ Room: https://zoom.us/s/867202173
(Zoom Meeting ID: 867202173)

Find out more: https://itdi.pro/itdihome/the-teachers-room/
Check out previous sessions: https://tinyurl.com/utvjan8