Weaving

Dear All,

My 'Send to a Friend' word for this week is: integration. Making as many pieces as possible fit together. Seeing team members collaborate. Making the tasks and the content work go hand in hand. Making next week lessons follow-up on what we did last week. Seeing what we expect and what students deliver somehow compatible. Making a language teacher and, for that matter, any teacher, embrace what technology has to offer, inasmuch as the resources allow it. Seeing students taking the leap guided by the teacher. Seeing the teacher taking the leap with the students. Seeing the teacher scaffolded by fellow teachers.

These are the colourful yarns I have found in my box this week. Not all of them can be included in the fabric we as teachers have to weave. Not every one of them actually fits the pattern of our everyday classrooms, staffrooms, schedules, our students' schedules, educational policies and reforms, syllabi, and the ever-changing tide of technological and methodological developments. Some of these yarns can only be used as an ideal to aspire to in our professional practice. Others will lose their beauty and even wear off when fitted in that fabric. Some of them are only there to add the flair and sheen to the fabric and are to be used sparingly. Some are essential, so without them the fabric would fall apart. There are also a couple of loose ends at the end of each day – the reminder that our mission is not accomplished.

I have looked at the repertoire of human occupations this week to look for a new one that being a teacher involves and found that of a weaver to fit into my disposition. Writing a report of what I have been doing in my class was a challenge even though I had been taking notes from the very start. One of the reasons is that I knew I would have to make it as clear as possible to the reader – my peer reviewer, our moderators and, ultimately, my coursemates. Another reason is that, little by little, an image of the last month in my classroom started to emerge, the image that I and my students created, but had to write down to actually see it. Another experience which contributed to seeing my own class project and project report more clearly was reading my peer reviewer Dilip's report and taking a glance at those published early in our Wiki. On my way from the draft to the final report I felt I actually modified it quite a lot. Writing the report was a strenous task, as I tried to consider the reality of the project, precious recommendations from my peer reviewer, the rubric, the template, while also imagining the reader and listening to my inner voice. Integrating all of them, trying not to leave too many loose ends. I am very curious to see whether the image of my class project can be reconstructed effectively by means of the report I wrote.

Another opportunity for us to play at the weaving loom was using an online tool to generate an exercise or use one of the suggested services to create a class website. Among this week's resources I was attracted to the website that integrate a variety of really different tools: SMILE was surprised that the tools offered there are not limited to classic authoring tools tasks such as Multiple-choice, True/False, Drag/Drop, Sentence Mix, Paragraph Mix, Cloze, Multiple-Select (which are available in My Activities section), but also include a surprising array of Rich Internet Applications, about a dozen of them. They could be classified as Web 2.0 tools, as they enable the creation of tasks that are open-ended, and involve active participation of both creators and users /students. Moreover, it is not just an authoring website, but an initiative. A historic overview of task types development over the last 15 years is available here!

I was so enthusiastic about SMILE that I initially set out to create a mash-up containing a video, a graphic, record a couple of questions for students about the video to answer asynchronously and add a matching exercise and a cloze. I wanted to integrate all of them onto one page. Unfortunately, I could not finish my first Drag/Drop matching exercise, as it would not work properly. As I did not want to give up on the matching exercise, I tried Hot Potatoes, where I managed to create one, along with a sequencing exercise. I have learnt a lot form the SMILE website for the time being and will try to do the mash up on another occasion shortly.

So the image that my memory makes of this week is a very positive one. It contained a very significant moment – submitting our project, and another 'first' in my professional biography: my first online exercise in an authoring tool. More importantly, I managed to integrate the exercise into a particular lesson on the great Weaver of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

It is amazing how much weaving and technology actually have in common. The Jacquard loom, the first device used to make the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns easier about 200 years ago, was actually one of the first machines to use punched cards. The rest of the textile industry development is history of course. Yet to think of Mayan textiles in Guatemala still made without any computer technology by weavers each and every one of them is an artist – what does it teach us? It shows us the importance of the human creativity, vision and – inevitably, hard work – coming first and technology, with all its wonders, coming second. I see our authoring tools this week in this light as well: our tasks are the artefacts coming out from our workshops, for each of which a 'mechanical' tool, rather than a pre-programmed solution, was used.

I wish us all a wonderful week ahead of us!

Best regards,

Andreja

Acknowledgements:

• The picture in this week's blog was found on a website of a US fabric artist. It is actually a quilt, so consider it a variation on the texture theme.
• I picked up the story of life (and why not teaching?) as fabric weaving from a recent book by a person I admire, Professor Mirjana Krizmanić from Croatia, who happens to be a psychologist and a great teacher.