Several people in the Dogme Yahoo discussion forum have attempted to give greater shape to the idea of Dogme teaching using web 2.0 technologies (“Dogme 2.0”). Graham Stanley has suggested formulating “vows” for Dogme 2.0 similar to the original Dogme model. Here are my thoughts on what some guiding principles for Dogme 2.0 could include.
Methodological Guidelines
In “Dogme: Dancing in the dark?” Scott Thornbury sets out the original guidelines (“vows”) for Dogme. The below guidelines for Dogme 2.0 draw on these Dogme principles to suggest an approach appropriate to a web 2.0 world. As such they focus on the areas where 2.0 technologies are changing our relationship to knowledge and therefore our approaches to learning.
Enabling conversation: technology can enable dialogue, broadening the range of participants, or deepening the conversation by involving others.
Content co-creation: materials stimulate conversation, but the content for the lesson is driven, indeed created, by the students themselves. Collaborative tools (such as wikis) can encourage students to work together to create the lesson’s content.
Locality: mobile devices can help students relate to their current location, through photographing, filming, audio recording or writing descriptions relating to where they are. A Dogme use of mobile devices helps students to better relate to their immediate surroundings, or to places that are important to them.
Connections: strengthening communication with others (near or far) to facilitate connectivist learning that involves not just individuals but also broader networks or communities.
Relevance: the internet is used to ensure greater relevance of the subject matter for the learner. Students are able to find more specific information and connect with networks that are more suited to their interests.
Voice: online publishing (be it text, audio, images or video) allows learners to be heard and included in specific and yet global discussions.
Identity: students have space to express themselves and in so doing to focus on different aspects of their identity (perhaps in Second Life or by participating in different online networks or communities). Students develop language skills that are relevant to them as individuals, through exploring their identity and relationship with the world.
To give some background to these suggestions, I discuss below some related concepts with respect to Dogme.
The new Skype (4.1) has a screen sharing facility that allows one of the participants to show his/her screen to the other.
So far it is limited to just one user (not both sharing at the same time). However, it is a very simple way to show the other what is happening – especially useful for using Google Street View.
In a recent lesson with Pierre we read some tweets together by the CNN correspondent Nicole Lapin. It was Pierre’s suggestion that we look at her twitter page because he was having some difficulty understanding the tweets.
At SLanguages 2009 I gave a presentation on Dogme language teaching and its relevance to virtual world language education. Here is the presentation as text…
I have been using virtual worlds such as Second Life for approximately two years and during this time I have done some interesting and engaging activities with students. However, I have also being looking for methodologies to draw upon to ensure that these activities are pedagogically sound and beneficial to the students’ learning. More recently I have taken a closer look at Dogme ELT as a pedagogy to guide these virtual world activities and Dogme has stood out as an approach that has much to offer virtual world language learning because of its focus on real life communication as the basis for developing language competencies.
One of our students, Pierre Moussy, has been using the 3d virtual world, Second Life, to gain conversation practice. His presentation below was given at the SLanguages conference (for language education in virtual worlds); you can listen to Pierre’s presentation and follow his PowerPoint. Pierre’s talk is especially interesting because it gives us some insights into how languages learners actually use second life to talk with others in a foreign language. It also shows us how they benefit from such experiences and how language teachers can better guide their students so that they gain the most from virtual worlds.
The event took place at Dennis’ villa on EduNation – so thank you Dennis for hosting the meeting. And thank you to all for attending and making it such a interesting conversation.
I think you can only hear 3 voices (most participated via text-chat within Second Life) and they are of Dennis Newson, Scott Thornbury and me.
Talking with Graham Stanley last month and seeing Pierre Moussy’s G2 Android smartphone in action got me thinking more seriously about mobile learning for languages. Some of the G2 phone’s features make use of augmented reality, which seems to fundamentally change (indeed improve!) the possibilities of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL).
This blog post is an attempt to sketch out some initial thoughts on how Augmented Reality Language Learning (ARLL) could be used in a student centered way. Both Task-Based Learning (TBL) and Dogme approaches seem to offer guidance, as do the experiences with Virtual World Language Learning (VWLL). The focus here is very much on mobile access to geo-tagged Wikipedia (Wikitude) and location-based social networking (Google Latitude and BrightKite).
Avatar Languages has yet to develop ARLL lessons, so this blog post merely looks at what may well be possible.
What is Augmented Reality?
AR is the combination of real-world and computer-generated data so that computer generated objects are blended into real time projection of real life activities.
Wikitude – An Immersive Wikipedia
Wikitude is a program that overlays information in Wikipedia about physical places onto the camera screen of a mobile phone.
Wikitude places markers and summaries on the screen exactly where you can see the relevant building or location. These markers also link to the relevant Wikipedia article, which then opens up in the phone’s internet browser (via a 3G connection).
Google have just presented a preview of their forthcoming Google Wave – a communication tool that combines email, IM and collaborative work-spaces. Effectively it is a mash up of Google Docs, Google Talk and Gmail.
The above YouTube video is worth watching, even though it is over one hour long. It very nicely sets out both what the tool can do and starts to look at how it will change how we work in the future. Of course, there is always the question of whether it will catch on, but given that it is an open source, there is a good chance that this or something similar will become the norm in the forthcoming years.
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
I intended to write this blog as a follow up to the one on students writing for Wikipedia – and I checked back to see when it was written – almost exactly a year ago. Since then quite a few articles have been written by our students for Wikipedia. And now we are looking at other wiki sites, such as Wikitravel…
Language learners often travel and so they have plenty of travel experiences to write about. Even those students who aren’t travelling much can write about where they live or another place they know well.
SLanguages 2009 will take place on 8 & 9 May. I will be giving a presentation together with Pierre Moussy, a student at Avatar Languages. Pierre will be presenting his experiences with practicing his English in Second Life, whereas I will focus on how language educators can best guide language learners with using virtual worlds to practice their languages. Here is the abstract…
Skype us!
