Author Biography: Award winning language professional, I work at the University of Warwicks Language Centre in the UK.

Tweeting as WarwickLanguage. With 25 years experience in language teaching and education management I find the opportunities available to language teachers through technologies invigorating and challenging. If we are to harness the possibilities of web 2.0 we need to apply the principles of effective language teaching, connect with student needs and offer a sound pedagogy which embeds the technologies successfully. I am a connected educator and you can find my networks here: http://myfav.es/warwicklanguage Activity Summary
An account of creating an online environment to foster best practice in language teaching and learning. Class or subject area: Online language learning in Higher Education Grade level(s): Higher Ed Specific learning objectives: Intercultural interaction Computer mediated communication

Anniversary Book Project

5th

Breaking Out of the Walled Garden

By: Teresa MacKinnon Creative Commons License: CC BY-ND Author contact:

Classrooms can be exciting places, places where great teachers inspire young minds, modelling good learning behaviours and building the confidence of their young apprentices as they explore and navigate new areas of knowledge together. However, we also have to recognise that some classrooms can be uncomfortable places where transmission takes precedence over discovery, rigid roles and poor subject knowledge limit learner autonomy, where the curriculum is overly dominated by an unhelpful assessment regime. At the Language Centre (University of Warwick) I have been busy developing an online setting which reflects and supports the very best of classroom experiences for language learning whilst encouraging the development of a community of practice for our educators as they become more familiar with embedding blended learning opportunities into their practice. My aim is to mainstream change in the nature of language teaching for both learners and practitioners. In this chapter I hope to explain what we have done and why it is so important for my profession. The rationale for portal development. For language teachers, interaction and communication are at the heart of our activity. A face to face language class requires plenty of exposure to, and practice of, the target language through listening and speaking activities. (Klapper, 2006: p295, Swain, 1985), These necessitate careful planning and sensitive execution on the part of the tutor. One rarely feels so exposed in class as when trying to negotiate a task or respond to questions in front of ones peers in an unfamiliar language. Embarrassment and social anxiety can have a devastating effect on memory. Learners are tussling with the physical demands of processing and producing new sounds. It is difficult to justify a virtual language space that doesnt include the tools necessary to provide opportunities for speaking and listening activities, carefully constructed to nurture these skills. Many teachers in online platforms will routinely provide video and audio resources for their students. However, if we are to create the best of learning experiences we also need to facilitate the provision of tailored, authentic opportunities for real interaction and communication, not merely transmit material already available. The Languages@ Warwick portal has a range of process tools designed to help tutors replicate the best of their listening and speaking activities. Of course, even the very best of face to face practitioners can find the technical aspects of the virtual platform demanding. It is known that tutor expertise within the online setting is a significant factor contributing to the success of online environments (CALL) For this reason the user -friendly interface of the components within our online environment was of paramount importance in the tool selection process. Practical support through a YouTube channel and face to face demonstrations are vital in confidence building. Furthermore, if tutors are to be enabled to reflect fully on how their activities are best translated through this new medium of computer mediated communication, they need time to trial, evaluate and discuss their innovations. Aware of this, we adopted a Community of Practice approach (Wenger, 2000) to the training of our tutors. This allows the sharing of insights and experience amongst a community of peers involved in shared activity. The professional discussions prioritised also takes educators on a challenging journey as they exposure the sub conscious beliefs that influence their teaching. A major development in our understanding of the learning process has arisen through the web 2.0 revolution that is social media. Use of social media has increased by 159% in the UK. Prevalence of these networked tools for connectivity has provided an illustration of Vygotskys theory of social learning. The sharing of information and skills is easier than ever before, and we have witnessed the proliferation of online collaborative communities who connect and create in wikis, nings, blogs

and micro blogs as well as social networks such as Facebook and Google+. This offers us insights into the human need to communicate and learn with and from each other. Informal learning is at last recognised as a contributing factor to progress. Shock, horror all learning does not happen in classrooms! Nor does it all happen within the walled gardens of virtual learning environments. Web 2.0 has brought an expectation of immediacy in communication, distance is no longer a major barrier to interaction in foreign languages. Instant messaging and collaborative document creation are more commonplace and clearly fit a society where the pace of our working lives has increased significantly. Mobile devices such as tablets and phones are frequently the point of access to the internet. This has significance for our language learning portal, as described by linguist David Crystal: In a statistical sense, we may one day communicate with each other far more via computer mediation than in direct interaction. Crystal (2001, p.241) As communication channels proliferate we see young people preferring the immediacy of text messaging over talking on the telephone. Young people in the UK send on average 3,417 SMS a month and there can be no doubt that they are very attached to their mobile device. As new media become the default choice it is of course important that we involve ourselves as educators in these spaces and attempt to uncover the effects they have upon the nature of communication. It is clear that traditional rules of language usage are often bent or broken in these environments, this is language evolution in action. A perfect place of study for both student and researcher. We are interested in the use of these media in intercultural communication and so we need to create circumstances whereby this can be captured. It is against this context that the Languages @Warwick portal was designed. An initial pilot of 300 students and a dozen staff was well received and led to the investment in a larger scale deployment for more than 2,000 users. The site framework is moodle 2, complemented by an integration of Blackboard Collaborate tools for reliable online spoken interaction, both synchronous and asynchronous. An integration of the mahara e-portfolio software has also extended our moodle to give greater opportunity for social networking and the piloting of an e-portfolio for assessment. This is now home to blended learning provision for all our Institution Wide Language Programme courses in the Language Centre. The flexibility of the space also allowed us to carry out innovative activities including: A virtual French exchange in partnership with the Universit Blaise-Pacal in Clermont Ferrand. A Higher Education Academy portal language lecturers wishing to explore connecting at a distance. A community of practice area to help our tutors become connected educators. A reflective-portfolio project for 100 students at level 5 in French, Chinese and Japanese to develop their digital literacies and employability skills.
Table 1: Languages@Warwick portal.

Portal core components Hosted Moodle v2 BB collaborate: IM, web conferencing, voice Mahara

Criteria for selection -reliability, cost, user friendliness, support

The components of the portal were vital to enabling these developments and the choices were informed by extensive practitioner research and testing over a number of years. I would like to share these with you as an example of an approach to creating exciting online spaces which become a focus for community interaction and development. Getting traction. Extensive reading has identified the barriers to adoption commonly faced in deployment of online environments. These posed challenges of a pedagogic and technical nature. As our resources were limited, we aimed to iron out most of the potential technical difficulties through careful choice of technologies as already mentioned. Resource deployment within the portal was consciously restricted to a five minute rule, common interfaces and full integration makes it quick and easy to achieve your desired aim. It was recognized that the more time consuming aspect of tutor activity would be the transfer of their existing teaching expertise into this new environment and that would require sharing and collaboration for mutual support. We adopted Wengers Community of Practice approach (2000), focusing on the sharing of best practice and the identification of language tech champions. Using a core course we encouraged staff to identify their personal learning network and to experiment with new technologies such as twitter and Google documents in order to connect and share ideas. Face to face sessions gave opportunities for staff to show and tell and showcased the approaches adopted by our champions. A regular time slot was allocated for technical support and targeted specific needs for staff or students. Some external moodle training was arranged for those who had the lowest levels of confidence online. In this way we have achieved a baseline capability for all our academic tutors and are now able to focus on embedding best practice. Increasing ownership. Our virtual learning environments have evolved as designed spaces, but the designers are in fact outnumbered by those who are expected to be comfortable to work within the spaces. Today it is increasingly important to allow the user to create their own spaces and bring their preferences to the space. We are looking to enable students to become active creators not just passive consumers of technology. Our deployment of moodle includes the mymoodle facility, a personal space that allows users to customise their landing page. All users can also edit and manage their profile to suit them, creating their own language learner identity. A more powerful user centred area is provided by mahara which allows the creation of personal web pages using a range of widgets to bring external content and files together for sharing. The templates are limited but our experience was that students enjoyed the creative process and quickly grew in their confidence. They can also set up web groups that bring together users from across the whole site, for example Russian learners of French for mutual support and advice in their native language. This helps to counter the push of moodle. A student area of mahara is not accessible by the tutor without the express permission of the student. The walled garden turns out to have a personal flower bed for each user. Ownership is vital to engagement and significantly reduces the time needed to encourage adoption. Interaction as the norm. Much is written about the phenomenon of lurking in online environments. It is not something one would wish to discourage, in fact it is very normal in real life to spend time observing, taking in ones surroundings and gathering information about others before committing to any interaction. However, interaction is the main reason we are bringing learners into the Languages@Warwick portal. It can be very frustrating as a tutor when, having spent time setting up a speaking activity, student

participation is disappointing. This is however not unusual. Along with a small group of champions I embarked upon identifying the best practices of computer mediated communication that would support greater engagement and we presented our conclusions in a recorded presentation for Edulearn last year. We continue in this endeavour, looking to identify features of tasks that were well received by students. There is without doubt something engaging about listening to the voices of others in your own time, something that helps to counter the rather ephemeral nature of listening in a class situation. Providing time to reflect, prepare, record and re-record prior to submitting answers to questions or participating in a spoken discussion doubtless can lead to better quality contributions. Such opportunities as are provided by the affordances of the voice tools are well received by students who are also keen to suggest ways in which they can be used. As tutors we must also respond in timely ways to interactions, we know that immediacy behaviours are significant in supporting interaction and engagement. This brings me to the vital ingredient of the Languages@Warwick portal. Through the course of its development and deployment it has provided a real focus for dialogue and discussion. Feedback and interaction with students has helped to shape the development, professional discussions between tutors have gone to the very heart of our understanding of our role as a language tutor. We are starting to see that handing over control has many benefits. These interactions are as important as the many language learning interactions that we are facilitating as we discover more about the nature of learning. Rhizomes reaching through the walls. The next chapter of our development is coming as a result of the learning fostered through our virtual French exchange. Using a moodle course as a seed bed, 300 French and English students have been able to browse each others profiles and connect using any of their preferred channels of communication. We are still researching in this space, but it is clear that, having found conversation partners the seeds were sown for real intercultural communication. Many of our young people, even those with more than one language, tend to use social media in their mother tongue. This opportunity enabled students to find new connections and negotiate meaning even if they had only a moderate level of second language expertise. Their conversations took place both within our moodle for a (where they spoke intently about the #occupy movement), on Facebook on a student created group (where interactions included the sharing of popular culture) and in real time spoken chats on skype and BB Instant messenger. For me these are the signs of the chinks of light penetrating the walled garden and the growth spreading into the wider community. There is a brief presentation of the details of this project on YouTube here. We plan to extend this approach to our Chinese and Japanese learning communities where the pragmatics of physical interaction are particularly challenging. No doubt there will be new barriers to face but we intend to keep speaking to the world beyond our garden to foster greater mutual understanding across cultures.

References Klapper, J. 2006. Understanding and developing good practice. Language teaching in Higher Education. London:CILT. Swain, M., 1985. Communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. M.Gass, and C.G. Madden, eds., Input in Second Language Acquisition. Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind and society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wenger, E., 2000. Communities of Practice and social learning systems. In Organization, 7 (2), pp225-246.