HUMANIZING AN ONLINE LANGUAGE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT April 10, 2010

The new learning environments imply new learning spaces, new communities, new literacies, and new generations. The tendency shows that everything will be technology mediated; for instance, every single day new relationships rise from computer interaction, business are closed, games are played, and even teaching/learning processes take place online. Does it mean that people will become machines too? Are we losing our human side? It all depends on how technology is used and the role that people takes when using it.

It is known that education is a social process in which interaction among people becomes important, but how can we make of an online language learning environment and effective but still human space? The responsibility of humanizing an online language learning environment is of the teacher who will need, of course, learners’ collaboration as well. Bellow, you will be presented some tips to help you to humanize an online learning space.

1. Instructor’s and Students’ roles

2. Pedagogy Paradigm

3. Introducing each other

4. Presentation of the syllabus

5. Negotiation of rules

6. Birth dates and others

7. Avatars or photos?

8. Conveying feelings

9. Interaction

10. Support hours

Certainly the human side of an online course cannot be forgotten because it is an essential part of people’s lives: emotions, feelings, dialogues, and interactions are aspects that make us feel alive. Hence, it is teacher’s responsibility to humanize their online learning environments, creating a collaborative environment that enhances learning processes.

E-LEARNING CATEGORIES April 10, 2010

After reading the article E-learning categories, I would like to talk about my experience at La Universidad de la Sabana because it has been the only e-learning experience I have had.

In the master program, I have been involved in five of the seven e-learning categories mentioned by Siemens (2004): course, informal, blended, community and network.

Most of the subjects I have taken have been blended courses. Courses because they have had a start and an end date set. Most of them follow a constructivist theory and all of them have had a clear evaluation and assessment process established since the beginning of the course. For instance, the self-assessment class I attend, started on February 13^th and will finish on May 29^th. It is based on a constructivist theory because we “construct knowledge by understanding new information and building on (our) own current understanding” (Brown, 2005). And finally, the evaluation criterion is clear because all the assignments are well explained, with rubrics and the percentage they will have for the final grade. It also has a final project we have to make based on everything learned throughout the entire course.

The courses have been blended because they have both face to face and online sessions. Again, talking about the self-assessment class, we have received face to face sessions and online sessions (synchronous and asynchronous) to reinforce what was studied in the face to face session.

The blended courses at La Universidad de la Sabana have also encouraged me to have an informal e-learning. For instance, I would like to mention the ICELT component in which we had to fulfill some assignments and for doing so, we had to do a lot of search from which we learned a lot. I want to mention Lerner Autonomy and Self-access Materials class (LASAM) in which we had to design some activities and while designing them we found many interesting and useful resources to be applied in our teaching practice. And finally, I want to mention the blogs I have been constructing (ARP and NLE).

The master course has also helped us to become an e-learning community. We have become a community because we share the same and/or similar interests, purposes and goals “A community is a group of people with a common purpose, shared values, and agreement on goals” (Oblinger and Oblinger, Eds, 2006). Furthermore, we are constantly expanding knowledge by collaborating, supporting and encouraging each other. In that way we are keeping ourselves updated and making the knowledge flow.

Finally, I want to talk about the Network component we have develop in the blended courses. While studying the master course we have been also building our own learning network with more teachers from our school, teachers from the master course and the multiple resources we have been in contact with to enhance our function as teachers.

I did not mention the category of knowledge management because I am just capturing knowledge but the availability I have made of it has been little. Soon, I will start making all the resources I have been in contact with, and all my experiences available to the teachers who surround me, especially the ones from the school I work for because I really want them to start improving their teaching experience to enhance the children learning process.

References

Brown, M. (2005). Learning Spaces. In Educating the Net Generation, Chapter 12. Educause. Retrieved on March 10^th, 2010 from www.educause.edu/educatingthenet gen/

Oblinger, D., & Oblinger, J. (Eds.) (2006). Learning Spaces. Educause. Retrieved from

http://www.educause.edu/learningspaces Chapters 4 and 5

Siemens, G. (2004) Categories of E-learning. Retrieved from

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/elearningcategories.htm

COGNITIVE DETERMINANTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE April 8, 2010

According to the cognitive determinants of environmental preference stated above, here I will analyze and compare a physical and an online learning environment based on my personal experiences.

For the physical one, I would like to talk about my literature class at the university. I remember it was an ugly, small, cold and wooden floor classroom. The wall was painted in light green (an old color) and the light was not good. The coherence of the class was not good for learning to take place, although the teacher tried to do her best…it was impossible. Furthermore, there were not any stimuli for catching students’ attention or make them feel comfortable, all the students were looking at the clock all the time, waiting for the class to finish everything in that class seemed to be complicated, maybe because we were not interested on the class. All the classes it was the same, it became a routine and a torture.

The virtual environment I want to talk about is Wiziq. This environment is organized cognitively, it has everything we could need in a physical classroom: whiteboard, markers, pencils, notebook, highlighter, eraser, a projector (the same screen), and the most important, it allows synchronous interaction. It is an interesting environment that can stimulate participation and discussion. It is friendly user and allows to present different contents through different media. Finally, it allows recording the session, which help learners to review the lesson as many times as they want and learn in their own pace.