language learning
June 28 - LS6 Webinar: Empowering future language learners: Formal and informal language learning through social media
Invited speakers:
Pierre-Antoine Ullmo, P.A.U. Education, Barcelona, Spain
Stylianos Mystakidis, University of Patras, Greece
Pere Arcas, Catalan TV, Barcelona, Spain
Moderators:
Laia Canals, P.A.U. Education, Barcelona, Spain
Nina Timmer, P.A.U.Education, Barcelona, Spain
Join us for the special live debate (videostreaming webinar)
For free registration email now: barcelonawebinar.ls6@gmail.com
Fiszkoteka
Fiszkoteka.pl is an educational portal that converts the flashcard learning method (i.e. with little pieces of paper bearing information on both sides) into a multimedia online experience.
PUMO Project to Help Pupils Abroad with First Language Skills
Teachers, Parents, and Pupils asked to support PUMO in Developing unique Online Courses and Teacher’s Training through Seminars and Survey
The PUMO Project has set out to address the education of pupils living away from their home countries in situations where there are no schools in their first language. PUMO intends to develop a series of online courses to support learning progress in subject areas specific to their countries of origin – this includes language skills, but also other subjects not necessarily addressed by the schools in their country of habitation. The potential educational disadvantages of mobility due to, for example, parents’ employment are thereby to be minimized through a detailed training programme for interested teachers and technology-enhanced support in the form of online educational resources (courses). In order to ensure this training and support programme successfully approach the needs of both mobile pupils and the teachers who help them, the PUMO Project is conducting a series of questionnaires and introductory seminars for teachers, parents, and representatives of the state educational systems to describe the state-of-the-art, to identify the needs and requirements, and further to help teachers to integrate and use these online courses.
The PUMO Consortium has already organized successful seminars in the partner countries of Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden in order to present the project’s aims and receive feedback regarding project subject matter. A series of personal interviews will take the place of an introductory seminar in Germany and will be held in June – Primary and secondary school teachers, representatives of the state education system, and involved parents are invited to participate. These interviews will be held per telephone or via Skype (with or without video accompaniment as desired). Parent organisations are especially welcome, as their intimate familiarity with the situation of their children and subject matter in their countries of origin are of special relevance for PUMO. The introductory interviews will address the identification of the current educational situation of the emigrant population in the country, the support of distance-based language and culture courses, and the best composition of the teachers’ training programme.
Both the German introductory interviews and the other completed seminars are complemented by an on-going online survey for all target groups of the project. PUMO thereby invites all interested individuals to submit their opinions through the following multilingual links:
- For state representatives of school systems:
http://www.unipark.de/uc/PUMO/Questionnaire_for_GQ
- For parents of mobile pupils:
http://www.unipark.de/uc/PUMO/Questionnaire_for_Parents
- For pupils in primary education:
http://www.unipark.de/uc/PUMO/Questionnaire_for_pupils_PE/
- For pupils in secondary education:
http://www.unipark.de/uc/PUMO/Questionnaire_for_pupils_SE/
- For teachers:
http://www.unipark.de/uc/PUMO/Questionnaire_for_Teachers
PUMO appreciates your insight and desire to support pupils on the move. For more information on the PUMO Project, please visit the project website at www.pumo.info.
“We will offer learner-centred MOOCs built on European values like equity, quality, and diversity”
Fred Mulder talks to us about OpenupEd, the first Pan-European multilingual MOOC initiative, "We started OpenupEd to offer a good alternative to US-based MOOCs by putting the learner rather than the teacher at the centre and by delivering quality learning materials in a wide variety of languages".
Dr. Fred Mulder, UNESCO Chair holder in Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands and former Rector of OUNL, is leading the recently launched OpenupEd, the first Pan-European multilingual MOOC initiative.
What is different about OpenupEd, as opposed to FutureLearn or Spanish Miríada?
We started OpenupEd to offer a good alternative to US-based MOOCs by putting the learner rather than the teacher at the centre and by delivering quality learning materials in a wide variety of languages. We have included many European countries and also some countries outside Europe, such as Russia, Turkey, Israel and we are open to universities in other countries to join, for which we have received quite some interest already. This initiative is not revenue driven but rooted in the public domain. Moreover, it is deliberately decentralized towards institutions, and has a European flavour building on values like equity, quality, and diversity.
Does OpenupEd provide a platform to run different MOOCs? How many courses are already available?
We don’t have a central platform, the courses run on the institutions platforms that are already in place. We do have a central portal, however, which provides information about the current 61 MOOCs, the common features that hold for those courses, the institutions that provide them, the languages they are in, as well as links to the platforms where the MOOCs are running.
Does OpenupEd provide any guidelines as how MOOCs should be structured?
The MOOCs have to satisfy eight common features, the most prominent being ‘openness to learners’ and ‘digital openness’, which in its combination is both attractive and distinctive. After the launch of the portal, we received an email from some master students at a prestigious university in Portugal who wanted to explore the possibility of having MOOCs from their university under the OpenupEd initiative. It is interesting seeing students becoming an active stakeholder in favour of MOOCs.
How do you choose the universities?
We started as an initiative from the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities which, among other members, includes all the open universities in Europe. If you are a full member of EADTU you can join without any further quality check. If you are not a full member, we have to make sure that you adopt the above-mentioned eight common features, that you are a recognized institution in your national higher education system, and that the quality of the MOOCs is ensured, as well as that the MOOCs operation will be evaluated and monitored. I would, by the way, certainly encourage other European consortia to get on the move with MOOCs, thereby offering an interesting alternative to participation in edX or Coursera.
SpeakApps OER
SpeakApps Open Educational Resources (OER) consists of a set of online tools for practising oral production and interaction when learning foreign languages.
The SpeakApps openly licensed tools are directed at different types of activities and are suitable for all students, regardless of the level they have reached in a particular language.
The platform's OER repository allows teachers to find a growing amount of activities and experiences to be carried out in their classrooms. Moreover, and since the repository is build in a wiki environment, users are able to actively contribute to the project by modifying and adapting activities to their needs.
ALICE: Creative Intergenerational Learning
Intergenerational learning (IL) aims to improve dialogue among generations through civic participation in common social and institutional spaces, and carry out informal learning of key competences for lifelong learning, both by adults and children. IL has as its goal fostering social cohesion.
Contemporary European society needs social cohesion that is built on the basis of a new integrated and complex dimension of social tissue, where diversity (among cultures, age, gender) is considered an opportunity.
EuroSentiment Language Resource Pool
The main concept of the EU-funded project EuroSentiment is to provide a shared language resource pool for fostering sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis has emerged as a new discipline whose aim is the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment and subjectivity in texts, often available in so-called social media.
Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, combines different techniques, in order to extract and identify subjective information in source materials. Some of the main business applications of sentiment analysis are brand and reputation management, social media monitoring, mood analysis, advertisement optimisation or product comparison.
The goal of the EuroSentiment project is to create a self-sustainable and profitable data pool for sharing language resources. The resource aims to be used by sentiment analysis systems, thereby extending the WordNet Domain to sentiment analysis, as well as specifying a schema for sentiment analysis and normalising the metrics used for sentiment strength.
In order to ensure not only the sustainability of the language resource pool but its business orientation, a community governance model will be defined and applied, following the successful community approach of (profitable) open source communities
The EUROCALL Review
"The EUROCALL Review" is a biannual online magazine published by the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL), a network of language teaching professionals.
Edited by EUROCALL's President, Ana Gimeno, member of the Department of Applied Linguistics, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), the publication includes regular section offering information about Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) issues, upcoming events, special interest groups (SIGs), on-going projects, recommended websites, reports and good practice examples in language learning, among other subjects.
EUROCALL aims to:
- promote the use of foreign languages within Europe
- provide a European focus for the promulgation of innovative research, development and practice relating to the use of technologies for language learning
- enhance the quality, dissemination and efficiency of CALL materials
- support Special Interest Groups
University of Cambridge OCW language learning resources
The Language Centre of the University of Cambridge offers a range of Open Courseware (OCW) learning resources under the Creative Commons Licence.
Most of the OCW resources offered by the Language Centre were initially developed for the courses run as part of the Cambridge University Language Programme (CULP). The materials were designed for use in a blended learning environment combining ICT-based learning with face-to-face learning in the classroom.
The resources can be used for self-study, but for their most effective use they will benefit from a learning environment with some face-to-face contact.
Basic and intermediate Chinese, basic German and Russian essentials are currently available in the OCW language platform.
ICT for Language Learning - ICT4LL 2013
The 6th edition of the “ICT for Language Learning” Conference will take place in Florence, Italy, on 14–15 November 2013.
The objective of the ICT for Language Learning conference is to promote sharing good practices and transnational cooperation in the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to Language Learning and Teaching. Experts in the field of language teaching and learning are invited to submit an abstract of a paper, which should be written in English (max 500 words) and sent via e-mail to conference@pixel-online.net no later than 24 June 2013. All the papers presented during the conference will be published on an ISBN publication.