Some of the most useful items in the course were the little tech tips, which allow more productive use of some of the main tools covered.  So a big thumbs up for including those! 

These tools allow a great deal of ‘flipped’ guided and independent exploration and learning to take place outside the classroom, freeing up valuable class time for discussion, debate, vocabulary work, questions etc. This is particularly helpful where, such as in our language centre in Florence, the courses are short and there is usually insufficient classroom time to cover everything one would ideally wish to cover. 

I have gained an appreciation of the need for these tools to be demonstrated and experimented with repeatedly over time in the classroom in small manageable chunks for students to really get a sense of their usefulness.  Without this groundwork, students are unlikely to engage with them outside the classroom. Finding the time for this is quite challenging in our short courses in which we have a lot of material to cover in a short space of time.  

I think it’s easy to get carried away by new tools and trends simply because they are new and I don’t believe in using things simply because they are there. So one needs to be clear about one’s reasons for using them and students need to be on board with that too. Students do not unanimously embrace social media or social learning, and this does not seem to be a function of age.  Many have reservations about ‘putting it all out there all the time’, being asked to sign up for multiple services, and having their data owned in perpetuity by Google et al.  This must be respected and factored into decisions about how heavily ‘tech-enhanced’ a course should be. 

I would also like to find a ‘one-stop’ way of managing the multiple accounts we need to use a wide range of tools and hold the materials produced with each of them in a single storage space.  Google seems to be winning the race in that direction,  at least in terms of access, but it would be nice if there were alternatives… I might look into using a blogging tool such as WordPress (which I believe was used – very skillfully - to create this course) as a better, shinier, and more flexible  home for content than standard VLEs. Our creaky-croaky osteoporotic version of Moodle is grim. 

 

It also proved pretty much essential to work with long articles, as short ones generate short wordlists in which many words only occur twice and you simply cannot discern useful patterns of lexical behaviour from only 2 concordance lines. I suggested my students change the ‘minimum frequency’ setting to 5, but even this was often too low to generate any data of interest, and if used on a short article it can easily return an empty wordlist. 

I probably should have done more homework and tested a wide number of articles before assuming the tool would work on most texts.  It so happened that the sample text I processed from the Guardian generated some interesting collocational information, and I assumed that that would always/generally be the case.  The padlet wall below shows my post with instructions to students for the text analysis task we did in class along with a word doc upload in which I highlighted useful collocations identified.  I intended them to follow this template.  We experimented first in class and then I asked them to do something similar at home and post their work on padlet. As you can see, results were very mixed and some students were evidently unsure exactly what they were meant to be doing (though some of the posts were from students who had been absent at the hands-on session). Only one student (Monica) understood fully what to do.

This experience shows that this tool in particular needs to be introduced by degrees and used several times in class for students to see the point and get a feel for it, and the above caveats all need to be borne in mind.