"Ning-ing" in a Foreign Language

Have you ever though Facebook or Twitter would be a lot more pleasant an experience were it not for all of the pointless banter about celebrity gossip and sports drama? Or the inescapable flood of posts where the not-so-closest to you tell the world where they went shopping today and who they are watching a movie with? Even more extreme, do you ever just wish you could create your own social network for meaningful discussion and networking ONLY? Well, apparently the creators of Ning, Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, didn't think this was such a radical idea when they launched it in 2005.

Ning is an internet-based platform for individuals and exisiting networks, companies, organizations or other institutions to initiate their own custom social networks. What's cool about Ning is that it provides users the ability to create that network as part of a larger community page with full customization abilities for settings, appearance, theme, and so on. Group administrators are even free to charge current and potential members of their social network. The social websites on the Ning Platform are referred to as Ning Networks, and currently over 90,000 of these Ning Networks are operating.

With that much freedom for the user to customize the network site to such a great extent, its logical that there would be an enormous amount of variety across the Ning Networks in terms of theme or focus for each group. Indeed, Ning Networks are based on everything from sports and entertainment (which you may want to avoid if the above circumstance applies to you) to professional networks of lawyers and educators. Included among them are language educators and those with interest in linguistics.

As a prospective language educator and someone with a strong interest in language diversity and acquisition, the ability to communicate with peers of the same interests in a focused, centrally-themed social network is great news. But is there a Ning Network out there that relates directly to my interests? Yes!

Though my studies focus on ESL and EFL, my personal interest is in French, both in terms of culture and as my L2. This Ning Network, simply titled French Language, aims to allow users to "discuss and learn French," including "French vocabulary, French grammar, French culture etc." A perfect match, or so say the administrators of this Ning Network. But what features make the French Language network worth visiting?

After a scouring of the pages of this network, I quickly found many helpful and centrally located, easil accessible resources to assist in advancing French language learning. The site is packed with links to French language videos, lessons for practice, a French-English dictionary page, vocabularly lists, and even links to French language apps for smartphones. This selection of learning tools is a great informal supplement to the language learnign journey.

But what makes it unique among a huge universe of language websites? Interaction with others. This Ning Network is complete with a list of members that you can contact directly, discussion forums for posing questions about difficulties you are having or just to share the joys of learning French, and best of all, a direct chat feature. Not everyone, even my close friends, has the same interests as I do. Perhaps I might be interested in discussing French with someone who is interested. This allows me to "chat about French" without boring my car-obsessed and sports-maniac friends to death.

Not to be lost on us is the usefulness that this Ning Network (and those similar to it) might have for us in education. As an ESL instructor, I would find it very appropriate to recommend a similar network oriented toward the English language to my students to supplement their classroom learning. The degree to which it benefits their SLA process will go as far as their interest and effort allow it.

I strongly encourage all educators, professionals, and hobbyists alike to give Ning a try. Perhaps you'll find a network that appeals to you or augments your current network of peers and resources!

ePals: An Online "Teacher's Convention" for Social Learning

By the day, more and more educators from all subject areas are becoming more aware of both the value of social learning and the ways in which the internet can make this more and more feasible. Particularly in second language learning settings, the ability for students to interact with other learners and even native speakers is extremely conducive to an enhanced learning experience. However, until the last 10 years, and even less than that in some cases, classes and student groups connecting with these learners or foreign language speakers has been difficult and rare, if not impossible.

Today, with the ever-expanding internet where more and more of the world is connected and able to communicate in real-time while on opposing sides of the globe, learners and educators have a much higher capability to learn a foreign language in a social context ; the way which many researchers suggest it is best accomplished. A large assortment of tools make this possible: social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogs such as those found on Blogger and eduBlogs, and of course individual websites of organizations and teachers all provide (either directly or through reference/links to other resources) a sort of populist assortment of learning tools. The problem with such an expansive battery of resources is that there is, to date, no centralized collection of these user-created tools that saves an educator valuable time and attention by presenting a vast selection of tools that are "peer-reviewed"; not in the research sense, but in terms of user-ratings. Using the internet, it is indeed very possible to get completely lost from the comfort of your home. One site, ePals, is potentially the start of a solution to this enduring road block in using the internet for focused social learning.

ePals  is an education technology website that connects users to learning networks that are both safe for students of all ages and effective. The fields of study and project foci are greatly varied but are targeted on the primary and secondary school levels. The bulk of the site in terms of value are the Member Projects. These projects are social learning plans that are not only designed by educators, but are in practice now. Even more, the site allows registered users to rate projects. Of course this is subjective, but it provides at least some means of sorting through the fog in an open-community to find projects that are truly advantageous.With a self-reported 700,000 users, ePals does have what could be seen as an overwhelming amount of "stuff" to share with you, but keeps them all in one space where you can search it, sort it, sneak a peak it it, then use it. Or move on to the next project.

As an example, one project I find interesting and with great potential in the field of social learning of an L2 is Far or Close Language Always Flows (A Culture and Language Project) submitted by an educator in Turkey and a partner in Italy. The project aims to allow teachers and students from different language backgrounds to share and teach language to each other using lexicon from a number of practical topics such as household items, food, clothes, animals, etc. The project puts students from the larger group into pairings to provoke them to both teach and learn their partner's language socially. The aspect of this project that these learning exchanges was precipitated by an actual, physical visit to one anothers' home countries. This may or may not be feasible, depending on many contextual and environmental circumstances, but, while ideal, may not be necessary thanks to tools like Skype and web-conferencing. That's what the site is all about... finding projects out there that you can use or that inspire you to modify them so they suit your class' situation. Visit the project's own external site to learn more about it.

So how do you take the above project and make it work if you can't afford 20 airline tickets from Buffalo to Paris? Well, another project of value to me that would aid in putting a modified project, as discussed above, into fruition virtually is Connecting Classrooms with Skype submitted by educator Betsy Weigle of South Carolina. This project attacks the hurdles of distant social learning. The project synopsis linked above shares the teacher's goals for this specific project: "...to open my classroom to the world by bringing children from Washington state and South Carolina together virtually to share insights on Native American cultures".They did this in a shared virtual classroom by doing research, creating PowerPoint point presentations and other digital exhibits, and maybe most importantly, verbal presentations. "Combining these presentation techniques with Skype allowed in-depth, real-time interaction on shared content," according to the submitter.

Of course, the topic of Native American cultures may not at all be pertinent to my L2 classroom or your own. But, the topic of study in the projects you find on ePals is not necessarily relevant at all. The biggest advantage of the site is the ideas the projects provide regarding how to teach a lesson socially and how to use technology to do it. This is how I would use this site in the future; not to carbon copy a project and duplicate it with my students. Rarely would all of the circumstances be the same to make such a duplication as effective as it could be. The networking of information and ideas that you can incorporate into the best possible use for your specific classroom is what makes this site great. Again, these benefits are amplified by its centralized nature, ease of "search-ability", and its user-ratings.

Teachers Tweeting on Twitter?

As Twitter has swept the U.S. and to an extent the developed world by storm, there are seemingly two main types of people created by its arrival on the web: those who use it and love it, and those who have not heard any compelling reason to get their feet wet tweeting with their thumbs (and fingers, if you're at your computer).

After all,  using Twitter effectively can appear time consuming and seems like a full-time job for some (or something that they just do all day AT their full-time job). There is a middle ground, however.
More and more, professionals and specifically teachers are diversifying what this application can be used for. Undoubtedly most people have the conception that Twitter is no more than an endless stream of celebrity gossip and pompous athletes spouting off in between fawning and attention-seeking by the laypeople who subscribe to their accounts. Well, that is in fact what most people using it do, but by no means is it limited to this role. As this article by Dr. Ernesto Priego notes, Twitter has an amazing potential to keep instructors, researchers, authors, and even students just as tuned in to what is relevant in their respective fields as it does for keeping teenagers informed who may want to see what Lady Gaga or LeBron James had for lunch this afternoon.

Even more, Twitter along with other 'microblogging' apps and websites is changing the way many educators and researchers go about sharing their ideas, findings, and experiences. In some respects, it is the embodiment of the term "peer review" on the grandest of scales. Twitter is a so-called two-way street, where everyone who has others following their posts on Twitter (and without followers, you may as well write in a journal as this defeats the purpose of social networking) is subjected to responses by those followers. And just as with the tweeting celebs, inevitably some of the responses will be critical, or downright negative, but this is the point - putting your ideas out there, along with recommended articles, possibly some original writing of your own, your research, etc. so that the tweeting public (including your colleagues, peers and even students) can check these things out, and Tweet back their opinion after following your links or reading your thoughts.

Beyond the dissemination of information and resources, it serves as a great tool to get in touch with others in your field of work. In this regard, it is as much a professional networking tool as it is a social networking tool, and you might find more people in one day on Twitter who can be of some use to you than you will in a life time of conferences and brunches through any professional organization. How much you pursue these new connections will determine where it takes you. If you're still not sold, check out this blog post by an edu-blogger for a first-hand account of how Twitter might impact you as a professional, teacher or otherwise.

Of course, I would be remiss to ignore the downfalls of Twitter, and there are indeed negatives that will turn people off. for instance, if you simply use a Twitter account and start following a educator or ESL researcher, you will get every post they make about ESL, linguistics, teaching technology, and so on. The bad part is, you will also be subjected to every tweet they post about their drive to work, the rude woman in line at the grocery store, and their complaints about their bratty kids (just examples of course). In short, anything they say, you will receive on your Twitter feed. There are ways around this with additional applications and tools, and this article is a good way to get started in figuring out how to filter out the junk from the meaningful information that really is available on Twitter.

As in the world in general, the seas can be rough, but if you navigate well, the journey through Twitter can be rewarding. Will it revolutionize the way education functions as the first article suggest? Well that's probably a stretch from someone in an early infatuation with the Twitter-verse, but nonetheless it is part of a networking revolution. It won't make one a better teacher necessarily, but it can definitely help you get there, and as a user, I would recommend it to even the very slightest tech-savvy individual.