Community Building Tools for Online Language Learning

A presentation by Vance Stevens, Amideast UAE/MLI Project

TESOL Arabia, Abu Dhabi

February 24, 2000, Zayad University, Abu Dhabi

Vance's website: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/4631/esl_home.htm
Email vstevens@emirates.net.ae

This handout at http://www.netword.com/vance@tesol2000zu

Overview

This session covers several tools found useful in synchronous mode online language learning. These tools have been used to great effect in the online class Writing for Webheads < http://www.netword.com/webheads >, a class conducted under the auspices of English for Internet < http://www.study.com > as a hobby by the presenter in conjunction with online teaching colleagues Margaret Doty and Michael Coghlan. The WFW class has been meeting continually and developing a strengthening sense of community among 30-40 participants since 1998.

The following has been prepared to briefly overview and demonstrate the freely downloadable online synchronous communications tools we have used over the past year during the course of this class.

Preparations for this session

ICQ installed

3 ICQ accounts were set up and installed on 3 laptops with dialup connections. The instructor is using his own ICQ number 2774215:

ICQ Name	ICQ#	password
Tesol001
Tesol002
Tesol003

 

Email accounts set up and registered with egroups

3 Email accounts were set up at hotmail.

An egroup was set up via http://www.egroups.com. Called zu2000tesol, it is reachable at zu2000tesol@egroups.com

The three email accounts were subscribed to the egroup

Passwords were obtained for the egroup accts by visiting http://www.egroup.com and following simple instructions after clicking on the word: forgot?

The hotmail and egroups accts were all visited, to clear all the subscription offers at both sites.

Passwords for the hotmail and egroups accounts were all set the same (an egroup name is the subscribing email address, and the egroup site is accessible by means of the name and password)

Hotmail and Egroups acct numbers	Passwords (for hotmail and egroup accts)
Tesol001@hotmail.com	12345678
Tesol002@hotmail.com	12345678
Tesol003@hotmail.com	12345678

 

Installations

The following programs were installed on 4 computers:

ICQ from http://www.mirabilis.com

The Palace from http://www.thepalace.com (we had trouble downloading the latest and are using a 1997 client installation)

Two browsers, Netscape and IE. Of the two, IE is likely the most current.

Networds created

To make web access more "friendly" I created "networds" for the following urls:

To make a netword, visit http://www.netword.com

To use a netword, either go to the url above and enter a netword, or the url above slash netword; e.g.

Netword	Netword url	Page description	Realworld url
webheads	http://www.netword.com/webheads	The main page of Writing for Webheads	http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/webheads.htm
Webheads_chatclass	http://www.netword.com/webheads_chatclass	The synchronous chat page of Writing for Webheads	http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/software.htm
Webheads_textchat	http://www.netword.com/webheads_textchat	The text chat page of Writing for Webheads	http://www.homestead.com/vstevens/
Webheads_voicechat	http://www.netword.com/webheads_voicechat	The voice chat page of Writing for Webheads	http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/hearme.htm

Guests invited

Finally, I invited the teachers and students of the online class Writing for Webheads to join us.

As we get underway …

• By the time the session begins, the presenter will have tried to make contact with the teachers and students in the class. Normally, this is how we do it:
• We log on the Internet
• ICQ starts automatically. We have entered each other in our "buddy lists" so we look to see who is online.
• We steer each other to the following locations:
• Lately, our meeting place of choice is the voice chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_voicechat. This room is ok if everyone has a version 4+ browser and a sound card. Mic is not absolutely necessary since if you can hear, what is being said, you can respond in text chat.

• If anyone has difficulty with the voice chat, we retreat to the text chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_textchat

• If possible, we meet at the Palace. This is the text chat venue of choice. Instructions for reaching the Palace chat area can be found at http://www.netword.com/webheads_chatclass

What we will try to do in this session:

Three members of the audience will emulate a class of students.

The "students" can log on to their email accounts. They should have messages waiting from their egroup. They can dash off replies to their egroup.

The student can visit http://www.egroups.com and log in giving their email address and password. They can ENTER the chat.

The students will now visit the Palace. We will try for campus.thecampus.com on port 9998. Once there, let's meet in the Kiosk (if lost: Options / Goto Room / Kiosk 130)

The students can then attempt to meet at the text chat room, http://www.netword.com/webheads_textchat and the voice chat room at http://www.netword.com/webheads_voicechat

The amazing thing about these two chat clients is their simplicity of creation.

• The text chat was created by visiting http://www.homestead.com, using the page builder on the web site, and dragging a chat icon onto it.
• The voice chat was created by visiting http://www.hearme.com and registering for emailed code which is simply cut and paste into notepad, saved as an html document, and uploaded to any website. Anyone who visits the url can use the chat.

Other things we can do:

You can browse around the Writing for Webheads site at http://www.netword.com/webheads to get some idea of how the class is conducted.

You can visit the following urls to try to download the real videos illustrating our attempts to communicate audioVISUALLY via freely available Real products:

• Vance at http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/welcome.htm
• Felix at http://members.tripod.com/vstevens/efi/felix_see.htm
• Michael's Real Slideshow presentation: http://www.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/Sound_Files/adelaide.htm

We should by now have achieved a certain sublime state of pandemonium tempered with an impression of edification, at which point we can disband.