captions and powerpoint lectures

We discussed teaching with audio videos with translation captions vs. no captions vs. subtitles. If I don't know much about a subject, then captions would help me learn more faster. If I just listen, and I don't know a lot about the subject, then I won't retain much information cause I'm a very visual learner. But, if I already know about a subject, then I generally find captions distracting. I can listen to someone speaking, and pick up on new information if I'm not also struggling to understand the general topic. 

For students just starting to learn another language, I think the same is true, captions with audio enhance learning. Advanced students might benefit from no captions or subtitles in their L2. 

I've been considering how this might apply to the lectures I write for my Intro Oceanography class of ~170 students. The powerpoint lectures are packed with pictures, words, links to more information, and I show a lot of videos during class. I realize that most of the powerpoints I show have WAY too much information on them (cognitive overload), but the words on the slides partially serve as study materials for students. Next time I teach this course, I'm going to pare down the number of words on a slide (and the number of slides). But a complication I've come to realize is that when there is something on the board, students have to write it down (I'm guilty of this myself), especially if it's new info. So when I click to a new slide and start talking about it, the students aren't listening, they're just writing down whatever is on the slide (even though they can download the presentation before coming to class, or even have it with them in class). I think it's good that they're writing, I think it's a good strategy to commit things to memory, and maybe they are listening to what I'm saying...but my worry is that if I say something that isn't on a slide, are they going to write down what I'm saying? Or are they relying on their memory of what they've heard? Or are they only going to treat the written info as "potential test material"? Furthermore, I've recently had students ask me to "go back to that slide" so they can finish writing things down, which is annoying cause they're wasting precious class time since they already have access to it! Why don't they print out the lectures? That's what I do, then I take notes on that paper with the slide right there.

I don't record my lectures, although other Oceanography teachers have, so the lectures are made available for students to listen to later (over, and over again). At the other end of the spectrum, other Oceano teachers create sparse and short lectures, and mostly talk about the material. I'm trying to find a good middle ground to appeal to all types of learners without committing cognitive overload. Sigh, maybe I'll create a feedback survey and ask the students if they found the presentations too wordy or not wordy enough, too long, or an ok length. One more thing added to the never-ending end-of-the-quarter to-do list.

Google Earth

I presented Google Earth to our class, and tried to come up with ways it could be used to teach culture or practice language skills. 

https://www.google.com/earth/ 

I think it could be useful as a tool to explore, or walk students through a lesson. For exploration, you could show your class your screen and show them where something is -- maybe you're teaching your Santa Barbara-based class about Colombia, you could start in SB, spin the globe around to Colombia, and zoom in on places of interest. Or practice learning the countries surrounding Colombia. You could talk about the distance, or time it takes to travel in an airplane.

For creating a lesson that the students work through themselves, you could create a tour and annotate it with links to websites or pictures. You could create a worksheet for the students to work through, answering questions about the things they learn during the tour. Here are some guides for creating a tour and embedding media in Google Earth. Pro tip: tours work best over short distances.

Place descriptions

Adding photos

Touring

Embed audio

Ideas for tours: 

• become familiar with a town or city
• compare different university campuses
• compare cities in the same or a different country
• scavenger hunt: find certain buildings, monuments, businesses, parks, etc.
• practice giving/following directions (left, right, north, south, etc.)
• practice listening comprehension with embedded audio files (using something like Vocaroo)
• learn about natural hazards, points of interest, or environmental facts with the "Global Awareness", "Gallery", and "Ocean" layers
• practice or learn about the weather in different regions with the "Weather" layer 

What other types of Google Earth tours, lessons, or modules can you think of for your class?

It's been a long while....

I've always been a sporadic blogger...I get too caught up in other work and things, and forget to sit down and write. I think it's a very worthwhile exercise, to blog, or just sit down and write every day. Even if the writing isn't related to my research, it would be good consistently practice sitting down and getting thoughts out in a coherent manner. Then, maybe it wouldn't be so difficult to get back into the groove of writing when I need to get a manuscript out? Maybe the words, sentences, and paragraphs would come more easily? 

Practice, practice, practice.

It's hard for me to do any reading or writing that isn't related to my research (classic grad student guilt). But, realistically, any reading or writing is practice at improving those skills, not just an exercise in broadening my knowledge base (or confusing myself).

I'm overdue for a few blog posts reflecting on things we've discussed in class -- gaming/gamification, Google Earth, Twitter, Panopto/GauchoCast, reddit....

Coding as a second language?

We've talked a lot in class about multiliteracies, and recently we've been discussing coding as a language teachers should be familiar with. We've discussed how familiar a teacher should be with coding -- just enough to build an interactive website as a classroom resource, or comfortably fluent and proficient? We talked about the site codeacademy.com as a way to get started learning a coding language. I started using the site to learn Python, which is an enjoyable experience because the exercises feel relevant and examples are cute and funny (Monty Python references abound). 

I noticed they even have "goals" which look like tutorials on making apps and building websites, both for personal and interactive sites, which I'm going to check out soon.

I'm also going to have to figure out what "build your own galaxy" is about...could be cool. They have a few popular programming languages including python, html & css, javascript, php, and some I hadn't heard of including jQuery, and ruby (which the codeacademy site is built in).

I never really thought about math as a language, or coding as a language, but both are languages very relevant to science and teaching that I'm thankful for being comfortable with using daily. That's something to remember, for ourselves and for our students, is to keep up with learning and practicing language every day. Sites/apps like codeacademy and duolinguo make it easy for you cause they send obnoxious emails to remind you how great you were yesterday. I didn't really start to learn and understand coding until I had to use MatLab every day for my research. I feel like I can "think in MatLab", so I feel like I can say I'm fluent in MatLab, or at least the basics of coding. Now I can branch out from MatLab and learn to make websites and other interactive tools for teaching. I would encourage my own students to learn coding languages with a tool like codeacademy because it's fun, accessible, and easy to use. 

Looks like codeacademy has support specifically for teachers too....

What coding language are you learning? Which language seems most useful for you as a teacher?

Take it, Prensky

This week we discussed 2B or Not 2B? From Pencil to Multimodal Programming: New Frontiers in Communicative Competencies by Lotherington and Ronda, 2014. The following passage stuck out to me as being so honest and so true, and made me react with "Yeah, that's right! Take it, Prensky!". 

There is no speaker native to the virtual world, and the concept of digital native (Prensky, 2001), which assigns innate expertise by birthright, is both dated and ageist. Digital competencies are socially learned, not innately developed (p. 21, Lotherington & Ronda, 2014). 

We've  discussed the terms digital native and digital immigrant as a class, and generally agreed the terms are offensive for a number of reasons. First, as L&R point out, they are dated and ageist terms. Secondly, especially today, the word immigrant has such negative and racist connotations, it doesn't adequately convey the attributes of someone who is learning a new skill set: naïveté and continuous improvement. Third, the choice of labeling individuals as one of two end members is a narrow-minded generalization. Digital competency is a spectrum of digital familiarity, confidence, exposure, and practice, all of which increase over time or with continuous dedication. Sure, kids who grow up playing with an iPhone are going to take to similar technologies because it became second nature to them over time, and with lots of practice (screen hours). But I agree with L&R, that children these days do not have an "innate expertise by birthright". I feel lucky to have a bit of a head start on learning to type at a young age and having a shared computer in my house at about 5th grade. But I know I know more about computers and technology than "kids these days".


I'm reminded of a TED talk I saw about Sugata Mutra, an educational researcher who installed a computer in a hole in the side of a wall on the edge of a slum outside New Delhi, India where children grow up without access to technology. He filmed their curiosity and progress of learning and teaching each other to use the computer. There are a couple different videos about his "School in the Cloud" idea, but here's one. I found it quite interesting that no matter the language, the children could learn to use the computer. Mutra's Hole in the Wall studies remind us that children are fearless and naturally curious, something Neil deGrass Tyson has talked about in terms of science and technology.

3D video chatting -- future cultural experiences and exchanges

In class, we talked about cultural exchanges and interactive cultural experiences as being almost as good as studying abroad, but generally more affordable. For only $900, you can have an immersive virtual reality environment :D (that's an estimate for 3 kinect cameras and an oculus rift, like the setup in the video below). Something else we talked about in class is how awkward Skype/video conference calls and lectures can be -- you don't know where to look. You end up looking at the video feed of yourself, or the camera, but then you're not looking at a person, you're looking at your computer. It's not a realistic interaction with another human. You can hear them, but you're not really with them. The thing that's really cool about video chatting with another person who's using the oculus rift is you can make eye contact with that person. You can both move through the same virtual reality construct (second life, a VR enviroment I hadn't heard of till I read it in Kayla's blog), or collaboratively look at data with a colleague (that's what I've thought about using it for). 

We live in the future.
Oliver Kreylos (@okreylos) is a very smart and clever scientist -- he's designed all the virtual reality software I've used to create 3D movies of my carbon isotope data sets to explore ocean circulation changes across ice ages. I hope to be able to collaborate with my colleagues using a kinect camera/oculus rift setup to look at data in a video call -- people can explore the same data, and make measurements, all remotely. Below, he demonstrates what 3D videoconferencing looks like in a virtual office using an oculus rift, and 3 kinect cameras set up on tripods in the shape of an equilateral triangle. He talks about his brain being tricked by the virtual table, that he wants to lean on the table, and he can't help but move his legs out of the way of the virtual table leg.



In this video, Oliver is building a molecule in the 3D virtual reality cave (KECKCaves at UC Davis), then watching that 3D video playback in the Cave with the oculus rift...mind blown.



For an immersive cultural experience, this sort of system would be ideal for the language class room. Cultural exchanges could be carried out in 3D where students could have L2 conversations with native speakers, and explore virtual worlds with second life for C2 experiences. One kinect camera would work for a low-tech 3D experience -- the only visible part would be what the camera is pointed at (i.e., the front of your body, but the back of your body would look like a gray shell). I worry that the high cost of this technology might be hard for educators to come by -- it seems like funding agencies aren't too keen on shelling out $$$ for 3D immersive "toys and gadgets" cause they don't fully realize the value as an educational tool, and not just for gaming-fun-time. We live in a 3D world -- our remote collaborations and interactions should seem just as real.

Just for fun: augmented reality sandbox where you can build hills and valleys, elevation lines (contour lines) are projected onto the sand surface, and virtual water flows according to shallow water equations of Saint-Venant. These sandboxes are starting to be used as a teaching demonstration tool, especially for science outreach at schools.

Internet cultural experience? Tangent on augmented reality

This is a new idea for me -- learning and exploring culture through the Internet. Of course, we use the Internet to find information like photos, videos, music, and words that are some aspects of culture, but what about the parts of culture that can't be transmitted through the Internet, like food? I suppose you can share recipes via the interwebs, but that's not the same as experiencing a meal with friends. Although you can learn a lot about culture through the Internet, I can't think of an experience comparable to physically immersing yourself in another culture: seeing the buildings in a city, smelling the city ;-) (^_~) and food, hearing native speakers communicating with one another, observing mannerisms, seeing how people live (and living among them), etc.

I have an American geologist friend who just moved to England to start a Post Doc at Oxford, and he recently tweeted the following: 

Hardest part so far is training myself not to step to the wrong side when encountering ppl in halls and sidewalks. That and learning coins.

 You can learn (in books, or the Internet) that in England, they drive on "the other side" of the road, which causes people to walk through halls and around corners in the same pattern, but it might not sink in that it is a cultural norm to hug the left side of a hallway when going around a corner until you yourself smack head on into a stranger! Similarly, you're not going to feel that panic when you're trying to buy a snack, and you're holding a handful of British pound coins and realize you don't know which coin is for which denomination unless you're in that situation in real life (unless someone designs a game or some type of virtual reality environment where you're shopping in England, which would be weird, but kinda cool?). The Internet is not a substitute for reality, but it can be used as a powerful learning tool...more as a primer for a "real" cultural experience where you're physically present.

On the flip side, this brings augmented reality to mind...some of you might be familiar with Google glass, just one example of augmented reality. There are different definitions and examples of augmented reality, but let's look to wikipedia for a definition:

Augmented reality (AR) is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements areaugmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPSdata.

I think about it like this: 

Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world.

Let's say you visit Pompeii, and you know people who lived there a long time ago died because a nearby volcanic eruption rained down loads of fiery ash on the former city, but you don't know a lot about the details, and you want to learn more. Instead of just looking up information online, you can use an app for your smartphone or tablet that gives additional information about a place or an object. You point your phone at some mural or skeleton, and information about the it will come up on your phone, like a virtual "informational placard" which enables you to learn more. 

When I visited Pompeii alone a year or so ago, I somehow missed the informational maps, so I was wandering around the city, reading the few placards they had around the sites, but absorbing very few facts about the things I was looking at. If I'd had access to some augmented reality app, I could have learned more while physically being immersed in the culture of Pompeii...from most parts of the ancient city, you can see Mt. Vesuvio looming in the distance, an ominous reminder of the fate of those unlucky Pompeiians. 

But there are more details to learn -- archaeologists and anthropologists have been able to figure out who was who in Pompeii, from merchants to rich folks. The benefit to augmented reality is you can teach yourself at your own pace without having to use "the map" or hiring a docent to walk you through the ruins -- you choose what additional information you access. Additionally, you save time and effort because you're not stumbling upon Googling the right phrase to learn about the thing you're looking at. Actually visiting a cultural landmark is superior to learning about it on the Internet -- but technology, like the Internet and augmented reality, can help people learn more, and enhance cultural experiences.