Notes of a Wanna-Be Linguist

Notes of a Wanna-Be Linguist
Hi! I am Lilia Joy, a Russian immigrant living and teaching in the U.S. with an "unhealthy" interest in linguistics, language acquisition, and acculturation. :) Currently I am teaching college writing in Western Kentucky. It is challenging and exciting at the same time.

Re: Free for all

Mark wrote:

There also seems to be an underlying assumption that everyone is as open and honest and as trustworthy as everyone else - all at the level of honesty and integrity of Mr. Downes. Hello! I don't think I need to take this one any further.

Mr. Downes has some wonderful ideas, and some wonderful ideals. They work - to a point. But we have to figure out what that point is."

My response:
I mused over it for two weeks now and finally found a metaphor that might be able to explain why Downes’ ideas are reasonable.
Imagine standing on a cliff from where you can’t see the bottom of it or the horizon because of the fog. If someone tells you, "Jump off the cliff. You won’t fall, but, instead, hover or even fly higher", would you do it? I know it would take me a radical mentality change to make that step off the cliff. First of all, - I would reason - people don't fly; second, the gravity will take me down.
It’s similar to donating your expertise/wisdom to others. If someone tells me, "Give, and, in return, the opportunities will find you”, my first thought matches yours, Mark: my priority is to provide for myself and my children; if I work for free, how will I provide for them? And what if opportunities don’t find me and I end up all the way down, on the rocks? However, it’s all the matter of that first step to realize that you will not fall but rather grow. From donating your expertise you will give opportunities to others (those who are deprived of them or excluded) and gain opportunities for yourself, ultimately fostering better minds and making the world a better place to live. These opportunities will include financial, professional, and personal growth. Any guarantees? I don’t know. But the examples show that giving to the community something valuable is almost never left unpaid. Here’s a list of only some of the examples: Google, Blogger, Linux (Linux offers an operating system with word-processing, an accounting system for small businesses - an alternative to Quicken, and many other programs), music by Mathew’s Band (which doesn’t really apply to Downes’s ideas but still supports the point).
However, I understand how you feel. Even after having said all of this, I still would need to change my viewpoints and expectations of the world completely before I could make that first step.

Constructivism vs Constructionism

Constructivism is a theory of knowledge originated from the works of Piaget. As far as I understood, constructivists believe that humans must construct theories in their minds and reflect on their experiences in order to truly understand the world around them. Also, in the constructivist point of view, new knowledge is not acquired bit by bit but rather constructed into "knowledge structures" where ideas are organized and rearranged based on the person's previous experiences.
How this applies to teaching: 1) ask students to reflect on what they do - simple verbalization usually helps reveal gaps in problem-solving and comprehension; 2) avoid giving ready-made explanations - give them an opportunity to find answers on their own; 3) organize the instruction according to learners' stage of "readiness" (Is this where ZPD comes in?); 4) offer scaffolding and modelling in a form of think-aloud protocols; 5) make self-questioning a common method of knowledge construction leading to the ultimate habit of inner dialog.
Constructionism, on the other hand, is a theory of learning that places constructivism into the heart of teaching/learning and serves as its extension that is applicable to child and adult learning processes. This theory was developed by Papert who re-evaluated Piaget's stages of child development and came to the conclusion that concrete thinking is not inferior to formal or logical thinking but rather a prerequisite to active learning and theory-building processes.
How this applies to teaching: 1) provide hands-on experiences where students can create, manipulate something tangible or visual; 2) discussion and collaboration are essential mediums of knowledge-construction. Therefore, computers and other technology play a crucial part in modern constructionism.
See more at http://www.seriousplay.com/what_science_const.html and Glaserfeld's article on constructivism at http://www.umass.edu/srri/vonGlasersfeld/onlinePapers/html/geneva/
(It was a real eye-opener to me.)

Re: What is Multiliteracy?

Here is a definition of "multiliteracy" I found at http://intel.si.umich.edu/news/news-detail.cfm?NewsItemID=136 . I thought it was simple and comprehensive.

Multimedia literacy includes "nontext writing," such as new approaches to learning that place production technology in the hands of the learner. This makes various forms of technology an instrumental part of the learning process. "We really mean literacy that incorporates text, images, and sound and recognizes the importance of interactivity and nonlinear skills," Daley says.

"interactivity and nonlinear skills"... That would be a dream come true in my writing classes. :)

I also came across an interesting article by Susan Parks et al. Crossing Boundaries: Multimedia Technology and Pedagogical Innovation in a High School Class that investigates the success of three Canadian high school teachers who employ collaborative, project-based, multimodal (computer-assisted) approaches to learning:

The development of these multiliteracies is apparent in the two projects described above (i.e., the PowerPoint developed during the space project and the Web site entitled "Moi hier et moi demain" (Me yesterday and me tomorrow). For the PowerPoint space project presentation, students had recourse to the representational resources of print, visuals, and audio. Similarly, in for the Web site project, as illustrated by one student’s (Charles’) project, we note that, in addition to print, meaning is additionally conveyed through the use of colored fonts, images, and graphics. [...] By drawing on the representational resources of various media, students like Charles were thus able to convey a semiotically richer portrayal of themselves than the print texts alone would have permitted. As noted by Kress (2000), it is exactly this lack of a broader perspective on literacy and meaning-making that many TESOL professionals have tended to ignore:

TESOL professionals continue to act as though language fully represented the meanings they
wish to encode and communicate. Yes, they admit that other features are important, but if
pressed, the linguist and the applied linguist (the language teacher, let us say) would maintain that their business was language, after all, and these other things were someone else's to look after. (p. 336) more

September 16, 2004 from http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num1/parks/