Last week was the last formal week of #rhizo14.  Even though we crazy lunatics have taken over Dave's P2PU course site and are continuing the course on our own (for now), life goes on and other MOOCs start and finish.  This week was the week I completed the Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, and the course Diseño, Organización y Evaluación de videojuegos

Image by DawnOfHope2012Over the past few weeks I've been knee deep in an initial literature review. This past summer, while vacationing, I met up with a colleague who teaches for my department as an adjunct, but he's got him own full post in Greece as well.  While having coffee and talking about life in general we spoke about my PhD prospects, and my current feeling on the subject is that I am

This past week, crazy events in Boston aside, two new MOOCs began: LTMOOC, on Blended Language Teaching, and the Phonetics and Phonology MOOC from the Virtual Linguistics Campus at the University of Marburg.  The Edx course on the Ancient Greek Hero took a hiatus week to allow people to catch up.  I am still sticking to the Ancient Greek Hero course, and I did try to catch up with the scrolls,

In a previous post I wrote about a call for paper from Language Learning & Technology for their special issue on Mobile Language Learning.  I've been thinking about mLearning, MOOCs and Language Learning for a while as a potential dissertation topic (when I get started with PhD program anyways).  I was thinking that this would be a good place to start building a frameworks for mMOOCs

While looking up the most recent issue of Language Learning and Technology I came across their most recent call for papers. This time around the topic is mobile language learning, both topics I am interested in!  I was wondering if there are any change MOOC participants out there who are interested in mLearning, and Language Learning to work as part of a collaborative research team on the

I am happy to see that the topic of MOOCs as a language learning tool have come up in Change11!Again, even though I am not a PhD student yet, I am considering topics for a potential dissertation. The idea is that if I have an idea going in, and it's partially developed, I won't be stuck in dissertation purgatory :-)In any case, I've been participating in, and observing, various MOOCs over

This semester I was planning on returning to the classroom, the language classroom, to get back into French.  The last time I took a formal french class was my senior year in high school and it was fourth year french (mostly literature from what I remember). In any case, my freshman year in college I frequented Yahoo! Chatrooms to practice my french and I did have a pen-pal for a while. Around

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted

I've been mostly lurking these past couple of weeks on CCK11. I've enjoyed reading both assigned readings and reading through blog entries of participants. Most blog entries are in English, which isn't surprising considering that this MOOC is run in English, but at least once, if not, more times per week I've seen postings in Italian, French and Portuguese - I'm sure I've seen Spanish as well, but

A month or so ago I came across this this post on Salon via OSNews. I read both the OSNews post and the Salon post and I've wanted to write about it since, but something wasn't sitting right - I just couldn't put my finger on it. Well, yesterday - reading about child development, specifically language development, it hit me!Here's an excerpt:Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were

I was reading this article on InsideHigherEd the other day about Drake University's "Outsourcing" of language learning. In short they replaced formal classes lead by tenured faculty (or just faculty who had second language acquisition experience) with the following:small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language

Welcome back to the last part (for now) of the discussion on learning and theory inspired by a video blog that I saw recently (more on that in part 1).In the aforementioned video blog, the blogger (Steve Kaufman of "The Linguist on Language") said that Language learning depends on learner, not research. I suppose that when it comes down to it he is correct. Language learning (or any learning for

Alright, so here is part 2 of my little examination of learning and the role of theory plays on learning and teaching. This was fueled by Steve Kaufmann's semi-recent video blog (see part 1 of this series for link). This part has to do with Research, Politics and the role of linguistics in language learning.First off the bat, we have a comment that research can project just about anything depending

The first post of the new year (that's actually academic), is a response to (or rather an addendum to) Steve Kaufmann's recent video blog entry.While I don't agree with Steve (as always) in everything he says, I did find some of what he said on the ball. For example he said that the brain always learns - I agree. However, I do believe that whether someone learns the language "naturally" (i.e. something

File this under random thoughts...So, we've been talking about textbooks in my linguistics classes for the last couple of semesters and how most of them suck when it comes to language learning. My classmates who do teach languages for their day jobs constantly find creative ways of working through the deficiencies of the texts that they are saddled with. On the other side of the fence, in instructional

I was catching up on my Omniglot Blog unread posts and I came across this post asking people When is a language dead? This whole discussion come up because Manx was declared as a dead language even though there are still speakers of the language.The range of opinions posted in the comments was quite interesting, and it serves to point out there is not consensus on when a language is dead, or in some

Just as I've started taking a course called "structure of the English Language", which deals with English Grammar, here comes a blog post called "there is no grammar".OK, now that the other blog got your attention, I think that I agree with the original blogger. Grammar is a construct made up to understand the language we speak. From a language learner's perspective though is it useful to start learning

Recently I listened to a podcast version of this video-blog.It appears that Steve and I have the same interest in language - learning language in order to communicate :-)While I agree that podcast-only methods of learning a language are not sufficient, I disagree with Steve's thesis that a podcast that has a dialog in a foreign language followed by explanations in the native language is not a good

Recently I had posed an open question to people out there to see how much they remember from their intro language courses. I then stumbled upon two relatively recent starred items in my google reader that I had not read yet:The role of grammar in language studyandMore on grammar.I have to say that I agree with Steve on both his posts, and this comes from personal experience. As an undergrad I spent

Hot off the heels of my little rant (and recommendation) on LANG101/102 for high schools and universities, here is a fairly recent video blog from a linguist blog that I subscribe to. I thought it was interesting, it's worth 10 minutes :-)

I was reading Revising and Defending the Foreign Language Major on InsideHigherEd the the other day when I had a small flashback to recent conversations that I've had with former classmates about their language learning experiences and the language retention that they have.In high school, I was required to take two years of a foreign language in order to graduate. I elected to take 4 years (coming