13-05-05 Copyright Mats Deutschmann PhD

Språkundervisning i virtuella miljöer.

Exempel från pedagogiska projekt vid Umeå universitet.

Hanna Outakoski & Mats Deutschmann

Projects

•  Språkens hus – Hanna Outakoski •  ASSIS (A Second Step in Second

Life) – Mats Deutschmann •  Financed by the more general Flex

project at Umeå University.

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Background- Virtual Worlds

•  Second Life – Audio, –  text chat, – private IM – possibility of including various audio-

visual tools, – open environment by default, –  ‘buildable’ environment,

•  multi-modal (very) complex environment

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Virtual MontMartre

Advantages

•  VWs allows for the integration of the physical space into the pedagogic design.

•  This can greatly strengthen aspects such as the social dimension and the cognitive dimension of the learning process.

•  Result = a more holistic approach to learning

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Språkens hus- Looking for new ways to strengthen an endangered heritage language

•  Teaching and learning North Sami, Finnish and Spanish in Second Life

•  Special emphasis on Sami here

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General background

•  All Sami courses at Umeå university – distance learning or net based learning

•  How do we teach spoken Sami and oral language skills?

•  How do we make the students a part of a learning community?

•  A regular language course for beginners and a course for identity seekers

”Språkens hus”- project description

•  Two main aims: 1.  Building an environment for

meeting and lessons (available for all in the department of language studies at Umeå University)

2.  To develop exercises, material and methods that strengthen the oral profiency dimension in distance/Internet language courses.

Ideological goals

•  Find a way to maintain and revitalize the heritage language of the Sami people

•  Make it possible to rebuild a minority identity in generations that were thought to be lost

•  Raise the standard of the teaching of spoken skills on net-based courses

•  Make learning a new language fun

Example 1

•  Go to Animal Island. Work in pairs. On the map you have been given there are six places you should visit. List all the animals you encounter in each place. Return and report your findings to your teacher and the rest of the class.

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Example 2

•  The students working in teams read instructions and questions in North Sami and must find a way to interpret this into action (moving in the virtual world). The goal of the activity is to thus to find/locate the different places that are described in the instructions and to answer the question concerning just those particular places. The aim of the exercise is also to get the students to communicate and work together on a task.

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Example 3

•  The students work in pairs and get to prepare for a meeting with a salesman from a travel agency. There is no manuscript but the teacher can suggest which roles the students can have (e.g. a married couple, two friends, son and mother, etc.). When they have decided on location for holiday, they can make a virtual journey there in SL.

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Example 4

•  Visiting Muinji’j Island: On this island a group of First Nations’ members from North America have given “life” to a legend. Members of that community can now visit and follow the legend in Second Life and outsiders can learn about their customs and traditional way of living in the past. A visit to this particular place in Second Life can encourage the students to want to build something similar for the Sami people one day.

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Advantages

•  Authentic meetings with native speakers or others studying the language

•  Possibilities for collaboration between students and teachers from different universities

•  Free to join (given that you have a good Internet connection, good graphics and a headset)

•  Can be accessed through other online conferencing tools (Adobe Connect)

•  Presents new possibilities for teachers to vary their teaching and construct their own materials

Draw-backs

•  Requires a lot of time in the initial stages

•  Technical hitches (there are usually ways to solve problems though)

•  The teaching requires a lot of preparation if students are to work independently

•  There are aspects about the environment that students have to be aware of (adult content etc.)

ASSIS Project description

•  To connect language students with native speakers through virtual international exchanges in collaborative tasks relevant to their subject (authentic communication)

•  To raise students’ awareness of the pedagogic affordances of Web 2.0, in particular teacher trainees

•  To use the affordances of virtual worlds to raise awareness of gender and language issues among teacher trainees.

Challenges

A: to go beyond theory and introduce more experiential learning models in questions related to gender issues in order give teacher trainees a more internalised understanding of these matters.

B: to give students a chance to discuss course issues with others from different institutions.

•  Idea: to get students to act under assumed gender identity in Second Life using avatar manipulation and voice morphing and get them to reflect on this experience. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyXlT3cNHRk

•  In reality: we had to abandon the idea of getting students to gender morph because a) female -> male morphs were of inferior quality, and b) there were several ethical problems associated with the design.

English cont. Design – pilot.

•  In pilot there were two tasks that involved gender morphing: A Matched Guise test and collaborative discussions with students from University of Concepción, Chile in which students could choose their gender and observe the behaviour of others in relation to themselves.

•  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeQdlFzYXjc&feature=related

•  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMYMl8nSoTI&feature=related

English cont. Design – main.

•  In the main implementation we worked with 34 students studying sociolinguistics in Etapp 3.

•  2 workshops pbl-tasks in collaboration with peers from all over Europe

•  Teacher acted in two roles- male and female and students reflected over this.

Rory, Rico and Mats

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Results

The female teacher assistant was rated higher:

  addressing male and female students equally

  “taking over the conversation”,   being a better listener, a trait often

connected with female teachers. However, this was not consistent with

data from the sound recordings.

English cont – What did we learn?

•  Second life is very technically complex and hard to implement in large groups.

•  Ethical issues with this type of environment and design

•  Less is more – A simpler “lecture model” proved more effective in illustrating the point we wanted to make.

Your thoughts

•  Are there any applications of this type of learning environment in secondary school education?

•  What do you think?

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Thank you!

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