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Silvana GregorioMay 2006 - Language Learning and Technology
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10 Aug 07
Judy O'ConnellWhile the Semantic Web has been mostly of scholarly interest and not widely discussed outside of academic and techie circles, another effort to create order out of chaos on the Web has proven to be explosively popular. Community tagging is a bottom-up, gr
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21 Apr 07
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Add Sticky NoteEMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Tag Clouds in the Blogosphere: Electronic Literacy and Social Networking -
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Shared tagging invites us to analyze texts and sum up their distinctiveness in keywords. Writing online may involve coding or scripting, as we try to add distinctiveness in formatting or interactive functionality to our texts, blurring the lines between writing and programming. Web browsing and reading must be supplemented by abilities in sorting, navigation, and critical thinking. Integration of other media into texts complicates further the notion of literacy. We will examine in this column some of the ways in which these developments are reflected in new tools, services, and approaches to finding, creating, and transforming texts on the Web, and what this might mean for language learning.
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One of the challenges we face in using the Web, whether as language learners or instructors, is in finding the resources appropriate to our needs. We know there is a wealth of information and opportunity on the Web, authentic texts in all languages, on-line communities of learners and practitioners, wonderfully inviting Web sites spotlighting cultural practices, vibrant exchanges of views on all subjects under the sun, and all manner of opportunities for reading and writing – if only we could find them. New methods of finding and identifying Web resources involve fundamental skills of analysis, contextualization, and conceptualization, not to mention reading and writing themselves. You can't "tag" a Web resource without being able to extract salient points the author makes, considering how to summarize in keywords what's important, and placing that text in the context of others.
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One of the proposed solutions to the chaos of the Web, going back to a suggestion from Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is the implementation of what has been called the Semantic Web, a system in which meaningful information about Web texts can be extracted automatically from Web pages and collected by intelligent "agents". Agents are computer programs launched from a server which function autonomously over a period of time, similar to the crawling programs used by search engines to discover and catalog Web pages. By adding meaning to information, the Semantic Web holds the promise of powerful opportunities for creating educational content through combining resources from many sources, using human or machine means, to build a variety of customized learning resources.
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While the Semantic Web has been mostly of scholarly interest and not widely discussed outside of academic and techie circles, another effort to create order out of chaos on the Web has proven to be explosively popular. Community tagging is a bottom-up, grass-roots phenomenon, in which users classify resources with searchable keywords. The tags are free-form labels chosen by the user, not selected from a controlled vocabulary.
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The tagging process is by no means simply technical – a way of categorizing resources – it also has a strong social dimension as users of the site find common interests and create on-line communities. It represents another example of the fuzziness separating consumers and creators on the Web today. A contribution to a tagging site, seen by other users, may cause additional tags or comments to be added, automatically building and updating and thus ultimately defining a resource.
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Instead of one person making a judgment about a blog entry, photo, or other resource, a consensual classification is created. In effect, a text or object identifies itself over time. This creation of "folksonomies", as they have been called, can be seen as a democratic implementation of the Semantic Web.
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The idea of users becoming creators is one of the key concepts behind what some refer to as Web 2.0. It also involves the kind of social networking and "collective filtering" that can be seen on sites such as amazon, ebay, or netflix, in which users' reviews and comments build a self-generating database of information. The emphasis is on the Web as a gathering place in which users both benefit and contribute.
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stimulates debate, furthers critical analysis, and encourages articulation of ideas and opinions.
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offer interesting opportunities for collaborative projects, debates, or interactive travel logs.
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an environment in which students engage with the topic and with one another
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Electronic texts add value if they incorporate features such as glosses, notes, multimedia annotations, or translations.
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much can be done in terms of presenting texts to students for language learning. In addition to glosses (textual or graphical), audio clips can accompany a text, as well as links to external reference sources such as dictionaries or encyclopedias. Comprehension questions can be included to test students' understanding of what they have read. Indeed, adaptive electronic texts could be made which deliver the text differently depending on student responses, sending a student back for remediation, for example, if a set of questions is not answered correctly. There are tools which can create this kind of interactivity automatically through pull-down menus. CourseGenie transforms Word documents into interactive Web pages. The LessonBuilder by SoftChalk allows for pop-up annotations, in-line questions, and activities. These and similar tools make it easy to create interactive texts and also offer many formatting options, usually by including multiple style sheets or page templates from which to select.
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One of the other alternatives for creating interactive text pages is to encode the text in XML, then to use one of the variety of available tools to display it in a user-chosen manner in a Web browser, converted on the fly to HTML.
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In addition to building structural tags in a text using XML, it would be interesting to enable community tagging of texts as part of a language learning process. This might involve groups of students creating word groups or simply finding appropriate keywords to describe a text or parts of a text. This would offer options for collaborative projects, classes or groups together tagging a text or a collection of texts. Online forums or blogs could be used to discuss the results of the tagging, perhaps in the context of other views/interpretations of the text. In the vision of a future Semantic Web, one could easily see a role for language learning, as texts such as blog posts, newspaper clippings, journal entries, literary texts, are collected by agents, based either on community tags or hierarchical taxonomies (or both). This might involve identifying not only the kind and purpose of the text, but also its language level in terms of vocabulary and style, its intended audience and its popularity (or lack thereof). As a result students could work with different groupings of texts, including much more variety than is the case in the typical language textbook or reader, leading to the development of reading and writing skills in a variety of registers.
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The development of multiple literacies is needed in an environment in which there are no clear boundaries between text and other media. Digital media students encounter today incorporate sound and moving images as much as they do text, and often feature non-linear browsing and interactivity. One of the key features of the evolving online world is that it offers an ever-shifting blend of individualization and community involvement. Working with online media is quite different in this respect from reading a book. One need only consider the experience of using a news-feed collector which accumulates RSS feeds from multiple sources. The subject may change from paragraph to paragraph and, depending on the student's interest level, the text feed might be scanned, the entire post might be read, or the student might go to the Web site to see the text in context, to read more, or to write a comment. There is a clear social dimension to electronic literacy; reading and writing on-line are often collaborative activities. As educators we not only need to facilitate literacy skills in this new environment, we also need to be creating language learning media or applications which mirror the kind of online world students experience -- student-centered with collaborative opportunities, allowing plenty of space for creative and reflective processes.
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