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Digital Technologies in Foreign Language Learning

Scott — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:47:04 +0000

Looking forward to this conference.

I have a paper in for consideration for it. I’ll find out if it will be accepted in a couple of weeks.

Here is the link to the site.

Either way, I am interested in seeing James Paul Gee.

It looks like a fair chunk of his work will be a basis for my dissertation.

Schwartz and JSTOR

Scott — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:13:46 +0000

Here is a comment I left over on the Chronicle for Higher Education about the Schwartz case.

Reading through the comments it seems like there are a few misconceptions about publishing Journal articles that people might not know. I have never met anyone who got paid by an academic journal to publish. (If those people exist, I’d like to meet them, or at least talk to them.) Academics must sign away their copyright to the journal if they want it to be included. I will never get the rights to any of my papers back and technically, I cannot copy them for my classes (or friends classes) without violating copyright laws. I was not paid for the publications. I just got an extra line on my CV.

Reviewers also generally do not get paid for reviewing articles either. Generally they do it as a favor to a professor who has helped them, plus, reviewers get the line in their CVs as reward. I haven’t spoken to those who act as editors for “Special Supplements” to journals, but I expect that they don’t get paid either. The only people catching any cash in this system are the publishers.

It seems the JSTOR is only covering expenses as a not-for-profit, so again the money is going back to the publishers.

So, If Mr. Schwartz were to have actually had any of my articles tucked into that 4.8 million documents, good on him. The academics who WROTE those papers weren’t seeing anything resembling cash out of it anyway. Prestige perhaps, but no money. In general, I don’t do the research for the paper anyway. I do the research but I want to find out what is happening in the system I am studying. I write the paper/article so others can see what I did and help me find flaws in research designs or for them to continue down a path I didn’t examine. I don’t get paid for research. I don’t get paid for articles. And the vast majority of academics are just like me. The research is in addition to everything else I do. Oh, and If I do happen to get a grant, my field generally doesn’t allow that money to go towards my salary. But the grant money doesn’t come from publishers anyway, it comes from government and institutions.

A thought about textbooks based on ordinary_man’s comment… Publishers generally take the lion’s share of those books anyway. A new author is lucky to see $2 on a $25 textbook. There are precious few that make ANY money publishing textbooks. In general, I see those people still keeping their teaching jobs, I wonder if there’s a correlation in there…. But the good news is that those aren’t ordinary_man’s textbooks anymore. Because, the basic assumption for textbooks, like articles, is that the author signs away the copyright until the book has been out of print for a minimum of five years. If authors get a better deal, more power to them.

Don’t sign away your copyright. At least license it so that you get it back immediately if the publisher decides not to print any more of your book. There are options now. Self publishing isn’t going to pay you any less for your writing and you might actually make a modest amount of money on it. (And I do mean modest.) You can always hire an editor and cover designer. If you don’t want the hassle, great, go to a publisher. But don’t imagine you are going to get a better deal there.

I applaud Mr. Schwartz. I would like to see JSTOR support themselves, but not at the expense it takes to print a class set of articles. I lay the blame on the publishers. This is not the recording or movie industry. They are not actually producing the material. Academics are donating it and the time it takes to do the research and write it up.

Google Plus and the classroom

Scott — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 06:40:00 +0000

So, the education push about Google Plus has started. For those who may be unfamiliar, both of you, Google Plus is a google implementation of a social network. Somewhat akin to facebook in the ability to connect to people you know and twitter to broadcast to people you may know, yet somehow not quite either one. The tech elite had their own quiet time while the service, oh project, sorry, was gearing up and the doors are starting to open a little wider now and more average folks are finding their way in. Hopefully it will be fully open soon.

Here’s what is pretty widely known.

Circles: a granularized twitter. more control than the facebook wall. Looks very interesting and lends itself to setting up students in classes. This has the potential to be the most used aspects for ed.

Hangouts: video chat and conferencing. The next best this to having office hours/meetings in person. I am hoping and wishing I can convince the powers that be to hold faculty meetings this way. Office hours are a given. Possibly a good way to get students into class via distance. We’ll see after I’ve played with it a bit more.

I imagine that the rest of google services are coming. I expect to see calander, docs et al. to make an appearance as well.

The semester winds down in Japan

Scott — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:45:43 +0000

Hey all,

The semester is finally winding down and the students are all in a panic about finals and final projects. Teachers on the other hand are furiously grading work in an attempt to have all of the grades finished and ready to turn in on the last day of classes. No one really wants to be tied down once the class work is over. For me the end of the semester is generally spent listening to several hours of student generated audio and reading through some original short stories by my writing class.

I am hoping that I can convince a couple of students to allow me to publish their audio. There are a few that stand out and if you are interested in Japan, I think you’ll like them. We’ll see. They have to volunteer and there is little I am allowed to do to coerce them

With the summer here/coming up I have a few things on my plate. I am going to try to get my dissertation work all proposalated and the study run. I am going to try to get one more paper together for publication. I am going to try to get my youtube channel back up and going, as well as get the ol’ podcast renewed so we can make it to 100. And, if I can get 30 minutes together all at the same time, a vacation would be nice. That last one isn’t really likely though.

I have a series of rants about Education in Japan that I am in the process of combing through and hope to have those come out in August. I am slowly working through some of the parts over on twitter, so if you are interested, you may want to follow me

On the upside, the “book”/”pamphlet” is done, approved and should be appearing shortly on amazon. I am thrilled that it worked and can say that without createspace.com it wouldn’t have happened. They are awesome. Now that said. I do not recommend buying the ”book”/”pamphlet” at all. It is a re-purposed paper on the ADDIE model and I’d feel a little guilty about taking your $10. (Even though I only get about a quarter of that.) Ok, so I’d feel a little guilty, but I would get over it. But remember, I warned you. It’s really really thin. Ohhh, maybe I should do an audio book…. any thoughts?

Alright. Stuff to finish, so I’ll catch you soon. with an actual article.

Oh, Huge thanks to Olga for pointing out that I haven’t updated since the earthquake. I believe I may still have a refrigerator magnet around somewhere…. I’ll catch you over there.

You all stay out of trouble,

Osaka by Stefan from flickr. Creative Commons by-sa.

Thoughts on the Tohoku Earthquake

Scott — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:21:29 +0000

Yeah, so last week was rough.

I had felt the original quake while at home in Osaka and posted that up on twitter, then went looking around for mor info on what was going on. Then, every ten minutes, things got worse. And worse. And it wouldn’t stop. I was stuck on Twitter, Al Jazeera English, and NHK watching the horrible devastation with that helpless feeling that lingers in your stomach. I was able to get messages out to friends and family, and they appreciated that. But I was pretty much useless for most of the rest of the day.

I have been watching schools and organizations finally start to climb back and start communicating again to the outside world. But people in the area still need help and will continue to need support for quite some time.

This link will take you to the page that Google set up for relief and you can donate directly to the Japan Red Cross Society, Unicef, and Save the Children.

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

You can also donate direct through iTunes.

For those in the US, I have heard you can text REDCROSS to give a $10 donation.

Do what you can to help those hit in Japan and also those in other parts of the world hit by recent disasters like Christchurch and Haiti.

Thank you

Scott

iOS 4.3 in Japan

Scott — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:30:33 +0000

iOS 4.3 is here and now updated onto my iPhone 4 and iPad. It was a very smooth upgrade and there weren’t anyproblems with making things work, which is always a relief.

The big draw for 4.3 in most places is the addition of the Personal Wireless Hotspot. I was kind of excited about this one myself, but I kept remembering a tweet by Son-san. No tethering via SoftBank. Forget about it. Hmm, I wonder if we should drop the unlimited data too… Ok, those are paraphrases, but the idea is correct. And 4.3 in Japan via SoftBank does not include the hotspot. I am looking around on the web to see if I can find any mention of it on any of the blogs, but no luck so far.

While it would be really nice to have a built in hotspot, at least there are some options available. There are at least 3 other viable alternatives at eMobile, DoCoMo and SoftBank themselves. I was just hoping to not have to come out of pocket even more for something that could already be on my phone.

Maybe KDDI/AU will get the iPhone/iPad and we can get a little competition to move the bars a bit.

Seth Godin’s new book & shipping

Scott — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 07:36:10 +0000

I was browsing through audible.com the other day trying to decide whether or not to pick up the audio book for Hyperion (by Dan Simmons). (I had read it a few years ago when I was trying to work my way through the Hugo/Nebula awards lists. Definitely worthwhile.) The audiobook is great, you should get it!

Anyway, I saw that Seth Godin had a new book out called, Poke the Box. At 2 hours, I was not sure I wanted to spend a credit on it, but I really liked Tribes and the leadership ideas. So I threw caution and a credit to the wind, picked it up and went for a two hour walk. I had listened to Tribes on audio as well and liked it, so I had high hopes.

And… was not disappointed. However, a word of caution to those who have listened/read to Seth before. You should already know this stuff. Rather than a revolution, it is the next step in the evolution from tribes. Tribes said Be a Leader. Do your own thing and show others what you are doing. Well, this book is the unsaid portion. Do stuff and ship it. In many ways it reminded me quite a bit of Ze Frank’s description of Brain Crack. Those ideas that get in your brain that the brain doesn’t want to let go of for fear of failing. Those projects and ideas that sound great but you are afraid to let them go because you are worried about failing.
Ze’s thought is that you have to get that idea out into the world. Seth agrees. And both of them agree that you will fail more often than you succeed, but that it a good thing. Nothing wrong with failing, at least you gave it a shot.
Hmmm, Sounds a lot like ESL. Or any ~~language~~ learning. You’ll make mistakes, but the idea is that the more mistakes you get out of the way, the better off you will be in the long run.
1. Don’t worry, Try.
2. If you fail, see 1.
3. If you succeed, pick a new project and goto 1.
S

Time to switch things up a bit

Scott — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 04:32:45 +0000

I think I am going to move the site over to a disqus sign on and facebook sign on only. This’ll mean that I’ll be removing all of the user accounts except for a select few.

There has been a pretty large amount of spam fighting going on in the background lately and there really isn’t any reason to mess with it to the degree I have been.

So, as of today I have turned off registration. But you can still post comments via disqus and I am looking into a facebook login solution. The changes are coming soon, but I’ll have a couple other papers to finish before all is complete

Scott

My New Hero, Jesse Schell

Scott — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 03:26:10 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I ran across Professor Schell by following a link to his DICE talk and pretty much cheered through the majority of it. His mention of Lee Sheldon, formerly of Indiana University, now at a school in New York.

So this talk is a TEDx event from Philly, and he eventually focuses on education. The idea of individualized education has been around for no less than 100 years. But it seems like we are on the verge of being able to actually put a methodology in place, easily… well, easier.

Take 15 minutes, check it out and let me know what you think.
S

So a post on twitter caught my attention…

Scott — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:39:43 +0000

The post was to the NY times article called Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction, and can be found here: http://nyti.ms/9eacWa I was reading through it and came across the reference to an article from 2007 in the journal Pediatrics. (the abstract can be found here: http://nyti.ms/9eacWa ) and so I went and looked up the article. Very disappointing. I know that there are a lot of restrictions on how many subjects (because of money) can take part in a study, but 11 then cut down to ten?

And then to continue on an declare an actual effect because of it…. very very sad. Now had they hedged the bet a little it would be marginally ok, but the correlation does not necessarily indicate causation applies. It looks like there may be a place for a path analysis here in which you could determine causation, but you can’t do that with 10 people. *sigh*

The worst part is that I would have totally bought this a couple of years ago.