April 9-13 Second Life

This week’s interesting presentation was on Second Life.

Personally, I have not played second life or other online games.  However, I have heard about Second Life and Final Fantasy XI.

I have heard that Final Fantasy XI is so addicting that in Japan, so called NEET (Not in Employment or Educational Training) are into it and they do not leave their desk.  They do not go to bathroom because they could possibly miss target or treasure while they are at the bathroom.

The amount of time those NEETs and into-game player spend playing FFXI is gigantic.  More than four digits they have played. 

Andrew explained me well about Second Life and it is a tool to socialize on online where people can interact by chatting and sending messages.

I am not very familiar with online games, but I love playing games generally.  I have been stayed away from those online games because if I get addicted I will procrastinate schoolwork and fail courses.

Response to This week

This week we had presentation from Dzufkli and I was absent on the other day, so I will go over the presentation.

Dzufkli’s presentation started out very entertaining.  He asked questions to students and it was very funny and I thought it was new different way to start presentation.  I thought it was good to draw student’s attention and warm up the class.

His presentation was about SLS learning and affordances.  The question that I liked was a good method of learning second language.

In my opinion I think social interaction is the best way to learn a language, I believe in Vygotsky’s interactionism.

Study abroad really helps people to learn languages through conversation and interaction, such as hanging out and living in target cultures.

You can learn many different aspects of language, such as humor, jokes, slangs, different registers through conversation and interaction with native speakers.

 

Response to Podcasting

This week we finished creating our video podcast.

This was my first time making a video podcast.  I had much more fun than audio podcast because there are more things that can be done using videopodcasting than audipodcasting because there is visual approach.

I made one on cooking and I fad fun with it.

The editing part was pretty hard.  I used iMovie, but I am not very familiar with it and I had hard time inserting things, such as music and sutitles.

I searched tutorials on youtube and the video was pretty helpful and I realized that youtube videos were similar to videopodcasting because youtube videos also do tutorials.

It was overall good experience for me and I like doing videopodcast.

There were things that I can improve or do differently on videopodcasting, so I want to try those in the future.

Response to Hikari’s Presentation

Hikari’s presentation was pretty interesting, but article itself was pretty hard to understand the full concepts, but since I am taking SLS 302, I am familiar with scaffolding and ZPD.  

Hikari’s presentation had several good questions that made me think.  

When I first came to Hawaii I could not speak English and I was ashamed of my pronunciation.  I did not want to speak at first because I was thinking people think of me as a weirdo.  

When I took the Speech class when I was 9th grade, I was feeling the same at first too.  However, as a class went on I realized that native speakers did not care about non-native speaker’s accent or pronunciation.  

I still had the feeling that there was a big gap between my performance and classmate’s performance. It was a good opportunity because my friend was helping me when I had problem pronouncing words and when I had hard time constructing sentences.

Question about new media literacies: I am not very supportive toward new media literacies because I feel analog paper materials are better.  This is my personal opinion.  

I think as technology goes on the role of teachers will decrease because anybody can upload videos on tutorials because people can be better than teachers.

Response to Quest Atlantis and Atsushi’s Presentation

First of all, I did not really find Quest Atlantis interesting because the quality of images and 3D were outdated and it did not draw much attention from me.  The quality of images might not directly relate to the easiness of the play, but I found Quest Atlantis challenging and hard to control. 

I am living in a period in which technology has advanced so much and everyday life we are surrounded by high-tech gadgets and high def images, I was not very connected to Quest Atlantis.  Also, I think children now days are exposed to high-def images, videos, and games, so I think children will feel the same away as I did or react the same way.

If quality will be improved in the future, then I think Quest Atlantis will be useful tool for children to learn while they enjoy the game, like roller coaster tycoon.If Gaming and Learning can be reinforced at same time I think it is very good environment for children to learn.

What I draw most of attention to Atsushi’s presentation was a MUVE (Multi-User-Vertual-Environment).  I think MUVE has higher level of scaffolding than regular class because in class, expected highest knowledged person is a teacher, but in MUVE there are many people who are well-knowledged and professionals out there.

However, what MUVE lacks that classroom has is reliability because you are not 100% sure if user in virtual world is telling the truth or not without the source.  However, other than that, MUVE has higher potential for scaffolding and attunement.

Response to Kelly’s Presentation: Participatory Culture and Fanfiction

Kelly’s presentation was on English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction.

She mentioned us Affinity Spaces and Fanfiction as examples.

Affinity Spaces are informal learning environment, such as online gaming.  Kelly introduced us one example that her son is playing roller coaster tycoon.  It is a game, but he learns how to manage businesses too.

Fanfiction is a website that people can post their stories and readers can interact with the author by posting comments, reviews, and critiques, etc.  Kelly gave us example of Tanako who is a Chinese girl posting 14-chapter story called Love Letter based on anime.  Tanako improved her English significantly by interaction and practicing writing stories.

I think affinity spaces are great environment to practice and enhance English learning because learners can choose and stay in a environment that they are interested.  This will drive learner’s motivation to learn L2 learning.

There are many places that you can find affinity spaces, such as Facebook, Twitter, World of War Craft, Starcraft, etc.

However, there needs to be creativity because by playing games you do not really learn or study English.

If teachers will use new design for language learning: affinity spaces and participatory culture, teachers need to come up with learning design that both enjoyable for students and also academic.

 

Video Podcast

I am thinking doing cooking show on how to make Japanese food, such as Nikujaga, Beef stew, etc.

I am not sure if I should speak in Japanese and have English subtile or just speak English straight and all the way.

Response to Kaitlin’s Presentation: Chat room

Kaitlin’s presentation was about learning L2 socialization, focused on chat room.

New thing that I learned was the bilingual chat room.

I have not tried chat room before, but I have read some information about it from the textbook that I had in Linguistic 102 class last semester.

The story was about two Chinese girls who were learning English in America as their target L2 language.  They came when they were pretty young and research was about study abroad affecting learner’s L1 growth.  

Even though two Chinese girls did not have opportunity to sharpen their Chinese in America, through bilingual chatting they learned English, but same time their awareness of grammatical structure of Chinese was enhanced, by translating English to Chinese and finding difference in grammars.

I think socialization is one of the important and influential factor to learning L2 and chatting is one of the approaches to it.  You cannot really practice pronunciation with chatting unless there is voicing feature, but you can practice writing and getting feedback from the chatmates.

I have not tried bilingual chat rooms, but after this presentation, I became interested in and I want to try some time.  I heard LiveMocha has chatting, so I should try once.  

 

We shared podcast today in class and I particularly liked Jacqueline’s podcast about Bible verse.  I liked the fact that she add music to it and she spoke very smoothly and at very good speed in order to suit for the audience who are children.  It was very professional.  I think she paid attention to voicing principle and pase that she showed us during her presentation about multimedia.

It was good opportunity to listen to me speaking English too.  I think it was my first time to hear my speech.  Podcasting is useful for practicing pronunciation.

Response to Jacqui’s presentation

Jacqui’s presentation was about multimedia literacy.

My first impression of multimedia literacies was a bunch of information put together with multimedias, such as videos, musics, and pictures.

Jacqui introduced us many principles that go along with making multimedia literacies and she showed us video that follow and violate the principles.  It was good opportunity to really learn how multimedias are formed and what creators put their effort into.  I thought multimedia literacies are just creating a video or some kind of format that explain or produce information that creator wants to express.  I thought there are no rules or ideologies behind the scene.

However, I learned that creators need to pay close attention to relationship between the contexts to the multimedias, such as video that they choose or pictures that identify the context.  I learned that pictures need to be somewhere close to the explanation or definition, which is called spatial contiguity principle.  Narration needs to draw audience’s attention in order to fully produce materials to them, which is called voicing principle.  The video that Jacqui showed us lacked the principle called pretraining principle, which introduces basic definition or explanation of a specific term or vocabulary that are shown during the multimedia literacy.  Without this principle, audience can be left out because they do not know what the media talks about.

I thought this particular form of multimedia literacy, which was a video clip, can be used in language learning courses.  I am currently taking SLS 441 and studying about phonetics.  I need to learn places and manners of articulation and how each movement affect creating sound.  Video clips can show the tongue movement and movement of larynx to help students learn phonology.

 

Response to Tankia’s Presentation

Tankia’s presentation was about Podcasting.

I enjoy listening to podcasts from iTunes, I particularly listen to Japanese comedy podcasts.

When I think of ways that podcasts can help L2 learners to improve their language skills are free-speech like free-writes.

L2 learners speak freely about the topic in target language without any notes or brainstorms, just speak about things that pops in their head.

Podcasts are helpful to hear own pronunciation and train/ practice pronunciation. Learners can listen to their podcasts and re-record to correct previous pronunciation.  In order to make podcasting more efficient, learners need feedback from the native speaker of target language listener to make corrections.  I think podcasting is also helpful to build confidence in speech.

I think pronunciation is important factor of language competence, however,  I also think that priority of pronunciation is for intermediate or above because I think grammar is more important and beginners should focus on grammars more than pronunciations.

Podcasting has its potential to be used in a school program, such as SLS and foreign language courses because podcasting gives students opportunities to speak the target language.

For my podcast, topic I have in my head is to have Japanese speaker who is learning English here at UH explain Japanese culture in English and I give feedback to his/her speech.  Valentine’s day is coming up soon, so maybe have speaker explain the difference between Valentine’s Day in America and in Japan.

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