Avatar Languages Blog

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.

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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.

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Last Thursday I met with other language educators in Second Life to discuss Augmented Reality Language Learning and in particular the ideas and suggestions I presented in the “Augmented Reality Language Learning – virtual worlds meet m-learning” blog post last week.

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.

Scott Thornbury, co-founder of the Dogme ELT movement along with Luke Meddings, will be talking in Second Life on Sunday 26 April at 18.00 (GMT), which is 11.00 PST.

Dogme and Second Life are a very interesting combination and have a lot to offer each other. It will be extremely interesting to listen to Scott Thornbury’s comments on virtual worlds.

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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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