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.
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.
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.
SLanguages 2009 will take place on 8 & 9 May. I will be giving a presentation about the Dogme ELT movement and how its approach to language teaching has a lot to offer language educators using virtual worlds. Here is the abstract…
The previous blog post on Dogme 2.0 sketches out how the web is becoming increasingly a normal part of our lives as well as an enormous source of both language learning content and opportunities to interact with others as part of the learning process.However, it is really the questions of relevance, meaning and motivation that are the key links between Dogme ELT and web 2.0.
If we see learning as a process of constructing meaning, and therefore one where relevance is key to enabling the learner to both find and create meaning, then the actual medium (be it online or offline) is not necessarily so significant.What seems more pertinent is the ability to create excitement and engagement such that language learning opportunities surface in class.
The web 2.0 is clearly changing how we work, communicate and learn.So, if the textbook is to keep up with these developments, what should it look like?
At Avatar Languages we are using many web 2.0 tools in online language lessons.This “teaching 2.0” approach leads to very different kinds of lessons from normal textbook based ones.When looking for some guidance on how to use the internet in place of a textbook, the Dogme ELT movement has been a real inspiration.But perhaps using 2.0 applications can take the Dogme ELT principles further than technology free teaching does.
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