Real revolution or phony war v1.0

Several people were asking about recommendations for apps – that post is here.

App Snaps – 20 apps in 30 mins LTSIG PCE

Flags everywhere on show

Last week I spent a week in Libya as part of a higher education blended learning consultancy for the British Council. Travelling is usually a pleasure for me  - there is always something new to be seen, to be learned, and often to be tasted. In that sense, some might call travelling a privilege. In this case, with no sense of irony, it was an honour.

Libya is still coming through a very dramatic and traumatic moment in its history. On February 17 they commemorated the first anniversary of the uprising against the Gaddafi regime, something which involved the deaths of thousands of people. The regime went to war on its own people and it was everyday people who fought back, not a formal or professional army.

Balconies and bunting

So what is the connection between these clearly significant events and some educational visit? Nothing to do with the visitor and everything to do with being visited, noticed and heard. In the professional English language teaching community, a truism repeated to the point of cliche is that the learning of English is seen by governments around the world as an essential universal skill for their citizens. In Libya it hasn’t been like that until very recently.

The Gaddafi regime even banned the teaching of English in universities and secondary schools for several years in the 80′s.  In case that strikes you as an historical footnote, imagine what effect that must have had on talented people making choices about which academic career to follow or on students regarding any type of career prospects that might result from studying English. That particular decision was reversed later with English teaching recognised as being essential for key sectors such as the oil industry and to enable students of engineering and medicine to engage with the outside world.  Indeed many of the latter qualifications are now completely taught through English.

Another aspect of this mixed picture is the seemingly excellent LETUP project where, through an official agency, the British Council signed an agreement with seven universities in 2007 to provide a language centre, trainers and  training programme. The programme worked well and the number of centres increased but the success of LETUP did not mean the learning of English generally was prioritised or rewarded generally. Under the old regime, the English language faculties – unaffected by the programmes above, were often badly under resourced – poor classrooms, no resource centres, no libraries, no language labs.

Fast forward to 2012. Two consultants familiar with the region, though with no direct experience of the country, arrive in Tripoli less than four months after the official fall of the previous regime. The brief: to explore ways in which the UK’s experience of blended learning can benefit the teaching of English in the English departments in Humanities faculties in a number of universities.  We start by visiting institutions in Tripoli and two neighbouring smaller towns Zawia and Sabratha. The report isn’t yet written and will be owned by the Ministry of Education and the British Council. This post has no relation to that content; instead it is about impressions.

Student demands

Picture this. You are invited to, in effect, inspect several institutions: the heads of department welcome you and rearrange their timetable at short notice; meetings are scheduled with all available members of staff; opportunities to present to and engage with students and teachers are organised; people willingly submit to be interviewed and focus-grouped. And all this is done under no sense of obligation beyond that of being as helpful as possible, as generous and flexible a host as the circumstances permit. Even if the circumstances were normal, this would be unusual.

But the circumstances are far from normal. These people, teachers and students alike, have no sense of self importance interrupted. They actively welcome the interest for itself and for the stimulus it may provide students with as much as any potential future benefit. Hospitality is warm and genuine.

Now e-learning advocates like the language of change and empowerment, can feel comfortable, even a little smug, being the bearers of the good digital news (we like to think). How will a talk on e-learning for beginners go down with groups of teachers and students who are talented and frustrated in equal measure?

Student demands - though someone had scrawled in the corner "Yes, but we also want to pass our exams"

Blended learning? – haven’t heard of it, mostly. E-learning? Vaguely, something to do with the Internet. Web  2.0? No.  Wikis? No.  Discussion groups?  ‘What is that Doctor’? Project Gutenberg for those teaching classical English literature? Not always. Internet access? Unreliable and poor to non-existing if you live more than 5k from a regional centre.

To be clear. If we came across a student who wasn’t on Facebook, we were unaware of it even though most students didn’t have smartphones and may well have needed internet cafés to keep in touch. No one had told them or many of their teachers that it was possible to do things differently. The teachers often worked pretty heroically with very limited resources – which also restricted, of course, the pedagogic choices available to them.  Many of those teachers, including those who had studied abroad, had to grimace and bear it. Let’s also be clear that technology enhanced learning isn’t the complete solution for a sector which needs broad investment and support in multiple areas.

So perhaps all this is an unusual situation in developing countries but this isn’t a developing country. It’s Libya with oil reserves. And the reason that the departments are hugely under resourced in every sense, the staff lacking in opportunities for communication with the wider world and for personal development (something which can be too easy to take for granted). The deliberate policy of a regime which has just changed after 42 years.

Particularly poignant was the attitude of the students. Their frustration with the lack of, essentially, a modern approach to the teaching of English was due not only to the policy of a previous regime but a policy connected to a regime which many of their friends and family had literally died to change.

This

Next to this - One of the slogans of the revolution

I wouldn’t have been much of a witness of the student unrest in Paris in 1968 – 2 year olds aren’t good news reporters. I don’t know what it was like to be on either side of the Berlin wall when it came down in 1989. Some Libyans draw parallels with South Africa when Mandela was released.

I do know it was an honour to come to Libya in 2012 and talk to students with a burning sense of entitlement, not to privilege or good jobs but to quality education,  to access to the outside world, to explore what the world had to offer in terms of resources, approaches and even just ideas that they could decide what to do with.

The teachers we talked to had our respect on another count. Our focus groups, in many cases, mixed teachers and students. The students, conscious of the new era dawning, openly challenged their teachers on many fronts.  Personally, I didn’t always agree with them. The teachers can’t have been comfortable but accepted many of the students’ passionate comments, and even their anger.

It is important to note also that everyone was talking in an atmosphere which was still tense. For example,  almost 500 young people, mostly men and many of them students had been killed in Zawia, their pictures displayed on campus noticeboards. In Sabratha the fighting hadn’t been as fierce but we just missed out on an art exhibition held in honour of a highly regarded student who had ‘passed away’.

Pictures of those who have passed away - these were striking and common in Zawia

So,  so many thanks to new friends in Tripoli, Zawia and Sabratha, for welcoming, for opening up and for sharing. May our visit contribute, in some small and very humble way, to a better future.

Here are my top four books on digital learning  with greater or lesser relevance to English Language Teaching (ELT) which were published in 2011.  One is ELT specific but deserves a wider audience.

Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools with Digital Media
Mark Warschauer, Teachers College Press
Read: in paperback
Available in:  Paperback, Hardback

 Enter the competition here.

Enter the competition here.

As my ereading habits become ever more entrenched, the reasons for reading books in a digital format seem to multiply. Often I need to consult a book for work or research and won’t be reading the it from cover to cover. Or I remember my creaking bookshelves are running out of space. Or I just don’t want my wife to know I’ve bought another book.

Then there are the classics: historic works are are often available in cheap or even free editions so I can disguise the usual escapism as a drive to read improving literature. ebooks are usually cheaper than the paper version, though often not by much. Paying near £20 for an actual physical book can require a deep breath but at least I get something to hold for my money. That said, I like the fact that both Kindle and iBooks can be priced variably like music depending on how recently they were published.  Or that the first book in a trilogy can be reduced to near giveaway price in order to hook readers into the remaining titles.  My experience of Google Books is limited so far and I don’t use any of the Kobo, Sony or Nook readers which may do the same thing.

Ebooks’ immediate availability is a strong draw: a book can sometimes be whistled up in the middle of a discussion just as I increasingly expect to be able to summon Wikipedia or Google in support of whatever argument I am having in the pub.

You don’t necessarily need an ereader device  in order to read ebooks. This is the case with Amazon Kindle’s format and surely one of the reasons for that format’s vast popularity. As it can be read on almost any device that you already have, an actual Kindle Reader isn’t necessary. Lots of people aren’t aware of that so if you want to give ereading a free trial run, just create a free Amazon account, get the Kindle reader for whatever device takes your fancy, download one of the many free titles and off you go.

Having a book available on multiple devices also means I can read in different ways depending on the device: a book bought mainly for reference or just to keep up with what is going on, can be skimmed on my phone, read more closely on my iPad or subjected to extensive note taking on a PC or netbook such as the one which I’m writing this on. By the way, I’m not offering any recommendations for what type of reading should be done on each device. It just happens to be how I sometimes do things.

For the occasional insomniac or people like me who haven’t managed to find the bedside light which is good enough to read by but won’t disturb their sleeping partner, ereaders and the devices that ebooks can be read on often allow a read-in-the-dark mode. My wife is a more powerful influence on how I read than she knows.

Those who haven’t tried it yet may find themselves caught between the impersonality of reading on a larger laptop or PC screen and the seeming impracticality of reading on something the size of a Smartphone. Well, it ain’t necessarily so. After a few ereading try outs on early smart phones years ago, I decided small screen reading wasn’t practical. For anyone. It didn’t matter that plenty of friends were happily doing so or that I knew a majority of the bestselling books published in Japan every year are written to be read on Smartphones – that was just a cultural thing. As far as I was concerned, iPhone reading was a forced discipline grimly practised by Apple addicted subversives belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Windows Users.

What I needed, of course, was a catalyst. I could read on a large screen – I just didn’t want to.  Then along came my iPad which had been a huge liberation for someone who needs to read a lot of PDFs. Just as an aside, if you need to keep up with any topic or field which circulates information in PDF format, this is a really compelling reason for getting some sort of tablet PC like an iPad.

However, I still found reading on an iPod sized screen less than comfortable. Then I bought a smartphone with a larger screen which I could cope with and gradually got used to the ‘in between’ size.  After all, it is fine for reading email and blogs – why not books? My conversion was complete when I found a novel I really wanted to read which was being heavily discounted on Kindle. Matterhorn is one of the great Vietnam war novels and was available for 59p against the £7.99 I was prepared to spend to treat myself.

That’s when I found that size didn’t matter nearly as much as I thought. Dear ereader, I was hooked.

Please sign up here if you would like a copy of the white paper when it is published in March 2012

Our session was 50 minutes with a smallish group so we were able to be flexible and mix slides with discussion. Over the last year we have talked around the topic a few times. At first it was lead by our research into hundreds of language learning apps so we tended to emphasise how far we had travelled, how much we had seen and, generally, how unimpressed we had been. Feedback recently has been that the overview and the trends are interesting but can there be more focus on apps for particular purposes. Also can we see things in action please?

Caroline brought her iPad 2 with connector so we ran the presentation off that. Good for people to see a tablet in action but iPads are designed to be as light and thin as possible and don’t take well even to officially approved plug ins such as projector connections. Heresy perhaps but can someone invent the iPad docking station?

We centred the presentation around the Learning productivity apps slide – see illustration above – with demos and questions.  As with other presentations there was a large variation of mobile experience among the audience: some were looking for a basic overview and had limited hands on experience; others were in the midst of a big mlearning push and wanted to a sense check. What they all had in common though was the sense of lagging behind and of needing to respond to student demand.

My parting shot – more to the novices than the experts – was not to be put off by the technology and jargon but absolutely  ’Do try this at home. It’s the only way you will learn.’

PDF of our presentation is here.

The relevance to e-learning comes from the fact that, according to a Spanish colleague who visited the still preserved lectured theatre, the room layout / function / implied methodology of lecturer delivering to lots of note-taking students is also still preserved in thousands of universities world wide – nearly four hundred and fifty years later. As we are still saying ..

As I haven’t been saying: I am just a little embarrassed at how long I managed to not post anything here. So many projects, so many ideas, not enough time to turn them into posts.  Yes, there are other ways of getting information out there since I started this blog: blogging now has to take its place as just one of the favoured forms of personal publishing and community discussion. First there was Twitter. More recently the curated content platforms such as paper.li and scoop.it.  All of those things, yes, but the need for good, original content remains. Also, where better to sound off, if not a blog?

BESIG App presentation 2011. Other symposium presentations on slideshare here.

Summer wasn’t much in evidence in Preston, at least to a relative Southerner, but the atmosphere was warm and welcoming. It was the perfect size for a small conference: enough people to have variety but not so many that you couldn’t have chatted to quite a few by the time it was over.

I was nabbed by roving guerrilla operative Andi White for a quick interview at the end. See below. Thanks to everyone for a fun and extremely well organised event.