Teaching, Learning, Technology & Reflection

Context Since 2012, I have been directing the Center for Language Technology (past name Center for Language Technology and Instructional Enrichment). This is a center with a very modest size (one full time non-teaching faculty, me, as the director, and four full time staff, and several part-time lab assistants) that serves a large group of faculty and graduate students who teach world languages at Indiana University--more than 50 different languages are taught on the Bloomington campus each Fall and Spring semester in the past years. This center has maintained a web-based portal of language archives that cover all the languages that have been taught at Indiana University, as well as analogue materials that have been digitized.  These materials have been given to  CeLT by various instructors as instructional materials to be shared with students. Some of them are copyrighted materials shared with password protection, used under Fair Use guidelines. Some of these were instructor ...

Read  3 E-Learning Lessons Learned on the Road , and impressed with the first tip. It is really enlightening. This can go to one's teaching philosophy. Maybe I should add a section of distance education in my teaching philosophy. This is also a good research topic: how to make elearning courses warm and personal? The scenario is below: "I stopped in one of those airport shops to pick up a couple of knickknacks for my kids. The young woman who processed my sale really stood out.  It was one of the best customer service experiences that I‘ve had in recent years. ......What’s funny is that she really didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.  ...Yet, the experience with her really stood out.  Why? It’s because she connected with me in a real way.  She had a welcoming disposition, warm smile , and actually engaged me.  As a busy traveler, I felt less like a sales order being processed and more like a real person.  What she did was connect with me as a p...

E-Learning Questions You Want Answered

Table 1: Mechanisms of Community Formation in Philosophy for Children Group solidarity through dialogical inquiry The primacy of activity and reflection The articulation of disagreements and the quest for understanding Fostering cognitive skills (e.g., assumption finding, generalization, exemplification) through dialogical practice. Learning to employ cognitive tools (e.g., reasons, criteria, concepts, algorithms, rules, principles Joining together in cooperative reasoning (e.g., building on each other’s ideas, offering counterexamples or alternative hypotheses, etc.) Internalization of the overt cognitive behavior of the community (e.g., introjecting the ways in which classmates correct one another until each becomes systematically self-corrective)—‘intrapsychical reproduction of the interpsychical’ (Vygotsky) Becoming increasingly sensitive to meaningful nuance of contextual differences Group collectively groping its way along, following the argument where it leads (Lipman, ...

...symbolic interactionists were among the first in the social science community to join issue with postmodernism... interactionists have rejected the subject-object dualism , spectator's theory of knowledge , and correspondence theory of truth , opting instead for the subject-object relativity , participant observation , and perspectival approach to truth . (p. 303) emphasis on the marginal, local, everyday, heterogenous, and indeterminate (p. 304) self-identity, seen as socially constructed, emergent, and plural (p. 304) Unmistakable though it is, the affinity between interactionism and postmodernism is highly selective.   Source: Modernity, Postmodernism, and Pragmatist Inquiry: An Introduction by Dmitri N. Shalin (1993). Symbolic Interaction, 16(4):303-332

 Register thus accounts for the probabilistic relationship between particular situation-types and the meaning choices most likely to be realized in the texts that are constructed in relation to them. However, it does not account for the sequential organization of those meanings as a text that enacts a particular, culturally recognizable type of activity in that situation. For this, the concept of genre is more appropriate.(p. 9) Source: Wells, Gordon (1999) Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge University. URL: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/31334/sample/9780521631334wsn01.pdf