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.

More information on the Skype website.

Thanks to Alexei for keeping me up to date on this!

Photo of Dennis’ Villa in Second Life (image by Sanja).

Carol Rainbow kindly recorded the audio of the meeting and you can listen to it on Blip.TV or download/play this mp3 recording of the discussion about Augmented Reality Language Learning in Second Life.

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.

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.

What is a wave?
The following is how Google sums up Wave …

• 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.

Enterprise 2.0 –> Learning 2.0
Google have clearly designed wave with the business team user in mind (rather than the individual/private internet user as noted by ZDNet). And it seems likely that it will enable a flatter (less hierarchical) way of team-work within and between organizations. And so if it is going to change the way we work, it is likely that it gives us some indication of changes in learning approaches we can expect with languages. A few initial thoughts below…

Real-time collaboration
The collaborative editing of waves is faster and more continuous than currently possible with Google Docs. It has very much a document layout (in the same way as Word or email does), and so does not seem to combine the freedom of a whiteboard into the wave work-surface. However, it is as responsive as any online whiteboard and allows editing tools that enable participants (students/teacher) to collaboratively create and edit texts and include multimedia.

Playback
Playback is a video style version of a wiki history. It lets you slide through the history of the wave to see how it has changed over its history. This can even be done for one particular participant and so could be used to see how a certain student has interacted with the document.

Commenting / Editing
Wave makes a distinction between editing a document and commenting on it and so a teacher (or student) can comment on the text. For example, this could allow a teacher to highlight areas for correction and give a hint of what the issue is.

Games and Widgets
There is a games function that has been used to create Sudoku and chess games that you can see in the demo film above. I can see potential for interactive quizzes and ‘exercises’ with this tool.

Opinion Polls seem very easy to create within Wave and so it adds some interactivity for students to quiz each other and for teachers to create checks for comprehension.

Spell Check & Automatic Translation
There is an automatic spell check and even an automatic translator for simultaneously communicating with speakers of another language. This raises the question of what skills we need to teach language learners so that they can draw on these tools to improve their communication skills. There may be scope for language education to move further away from accuracy and more into communicative approaches. In fact, if translation bots become more widespread (through the integration into conventional communication tools such as Wave), will the use of English (and other languages) change in an equivalent way to how English is changing as it becomes increasingly a global language with decreasing influence from native speakers.

Conversations rather than Publications
Google Wave certainly appears to be taking us further into the process of information and away from the publication of knowledge. Email and Microsoft Word are still very much focused on the completion and publication of information (with a clear time and date stamp) – even if shuttled to and fro in email conversations or as edited attachments. Wave, however, reflects the continuity of a conversation. The playback function allows us to look at how the wave changed over time, but there is no sense of finishing, publishing and archiving a particular document. This must surely take is in a different direction with knowledge construction and therefore learning approaches. Will language teaching become more obviously the management of conversations that run through various different lessons? Could language lessons become much more interactive with participants beyond the classroom? The very term “conversation” suggests that there may be some synergies to explore between Dogme and Google Wave in the language classroom.

A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.

View Larger Map

In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.

Because the photos were taken with a camera fitted in a Google car, there are set routes along which you can “walk” along the city. The white arrows and line (marked with red circle in the picture below) show where you can walk along. In most cities this is almost any street you can get a car down. The arrow keys take you along these lines and allow you to spin around on the spot. There is also a zoom function to get a closer look.

At Avatar Languages we are making more use of this in lessons – there are a lot of ways it can be used and it makes an interesting alternative to a 3D virtual world such as Second Life. There are no avatars, so you can’t actually meet anyone using Google Maps Street View, but you can share your exact location and even your exact view using the link function (as marked with a red rectangle in the above image).

In other lessons the students have done matching tasks using information from real websites (such as matching restaurant descriptions from Lonely Planet’s site and pictures from Google Image searches) and then done some analytical work with the short texts. The below screenshot shows this matching exercise using the online whiteboard Dabbleboard.

Students then go and visit the locations using Google Maps Street View and are able to describe the surroundings of the restaurant. A similar task is to use property descriptions and photos from online property agents and then visit the neighborhoods to discuss the location and talk about what the student thinks about it.

Street View is very easy to use – go to the map of a city in the countries with Street View (not all country maps have this function – currently it’s USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, France; UK to follow soon). Then drag the yellow avatar (see top left corner of map above) to where you want to visit on the map. Alternatively the balloons offer Street View by clicking on the little photo. The map then shrinks to the bottom right corner.

Although it seems right to say that it’s “almost as good as being there”, from a language lesson’s perspective it is better! We can now “visit” places while taking lots of supporting resources (namely, the internet!) – all from the comfort of your home, office or wherever you are.

Btw, Google has created an explanatory video…

In the screenshot below I am about to highlight in yellow the text “Take good shoes because Berlin…”

The text was already written by a student who is preparing a podcast (a travel podcast about Berlin, which will be on this website shortly). I’ve included a screenshot of the text above and you can see that I have highlighted some text that I want to discuss. I can then elicit responses from the student and the student can change the text.