Thursday, February 24, 3:30-5:00pm [ZOOM]
Title: Open Education, Open Scholarship, and Second Language Learning and Teaching: The Rise of a New Knowledge Ecology
Zoom Link
Presenter: Carl Blyth
Abstract:
Compared with STEM fields, second language (L2) education has only recently begun to embrace open education, open scholarship, and the new knowledge ecologies openness produces. L2 educators may have been hesitant to participate in the “open movement” due to a lack of research which investigates the benefits and challenges of L2 learning and teaching in open environments. This talk contextualizes open education and open scholarship in L2 learning and teaching in terms of a complex, dynamic ecology, along with a discussion of how the open movement affects L2 education beyond the classroom context. Also discussed will be the new ways of creating, adapting and curating OER for L2 learning. The talk will be drawn from the book recently published by Multilingual Matters(link is external).
Biographical Blurb:
Carl S. Blyth is Associate Professor of French Linguistics, and Director of the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His research interests include discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics and language learning technology.
Thursday, March 24, 3:30-5:00pm [In person]
Title: OER and Open Pedagogy in World Languages at VCU, UMW, and Reynolds Community College
Presenters: Kathryn Murphy-Judy (PI), Marcel Rotter, Zahra’a Al-Azzawi, Matthew Neal, Che’Nadia Johnson, among others.
Description: We will present our combined projects (French, German, Spanish, ASL), explaining the history of our work and what remains to be done in our interactive, OER, etextbooks.
The work that Dr. Murphy-Judy coordinates is very student centered, so she will explain how she includes students--and not just those in languages-- in active learning throughout the project. Students from her project will explain what parts they have undertaken: Matt Neal has created a style guide for the team and created a Google Classroom to help with the process writing involved in curating and to provide students easy access and scheduling of their work in the course; Zahra’a Al-Azzawi will show the app she has created to accompany the etextbook and to make learning mobile and readily accessible; Che’Nadia Johnson will share her work on surveys, data collection, and scheduling the team. Other team members may also be able to show their work that includes art work, videos, design, etc.
Dr. Marcel Rotter of the University of Mary Washington will showcase his work with his colleague Bettina Hoeninger on an Intermediate German textbook that slots easily into Canvas from its PressBooks base. It has highly interactive modules for learning German and increasing proficiency.