Kate Borthwick

The Language Box: Re-imagining Teaching and Learning Repositories

In this paper we describe the Language Box, a teaching and learning repository for language teachers based on the EPrints framework. Language Box differs from other content repositories in that it is designed as a living space, where teachers and lecturers can keep and manage working documents. It is focused around three key services: Hosting materials online, Organizing materials into collections, and Sharing them with the community so that they can be exploited, remixed and extended through activities. We believe that our novel approach may help to solve the problem of low user interest in teaching and learning repositories, and can inform others working on teaching and learning repositories in other domains.

The HumBox: Changing educational practice around a learning resource repository

The HumBox is a learning resource repository for the Humanities educational community in the UK. Over the last three years the challenge for HumBox has been to act as not only a shared library for its community, but also to change the working practices of individuals in that community by encouraging them to work in a more open way and to actively share their materials and ideas with others. Getting users to engage with and adopt innovative systems is a well-known problem; with the HumBox our approach was to focus on user-experience (UX) design through agile development and ongoing participatory and co-design activities. In this paper we present a mixed-methods evaluation of the success of this engagement over the past three years, focusing especially on the way that users have appropriated the system and its services in order to solve real problems. Our evaluation reveals that for many HumBox users we have been successful in creating a technology that is invisible (meaning beneath the level of notice and concern) and that the result of this is less micro-appropriation (users adopting and using specific features in new ways) and more macro-appropriation (users adopting and adapting the site as a whole). We conclude that in the case of HumBox invisible technology coupled with the social framework of co-design and user engagement activities, has allowed a diffusion of ownership, and created a safe social and technical environment where the community can debate high-level issues, and that this has led to changes in both professional and pedagogical practice.

Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubric: The Challenges of Remixing Learning Objects in the Wild

Learning Objects are atomic packages of learning content with associated activities that can be reused in different contexts. However traditional Learning Objects can be complex and expensive to produce, and as a result there are relatively few of these available. In this paper we describe our work to create a lightweight repository for the language-learning domain, called the Language Box, where teachers and students can share their everyday resources and remix and extend each others content using collections and activities to create new Learning Objects more easily. However, in our interactions with the community we have discovered that practitioners find it difficult to abstract their teaching materials from their teaching activities and experiences; this results in Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubrics that can make it difficult for other practitioners to reuse their content and build new Learning Objects.

The Community Café: creating and sharing open educational resources with community-based language teachers

The Community Cafe project ran from 2010 – 2011 and was a collaboration between Southampton City Council and two universities in the UK. The project’s aim was to create, publish online and share a collection of open access digital resources for community-based language teachers in the Southampton area. The project addressed a particular problem: the scarcity of up-to-date, online resources for community languages. These languages are often learnt in informal situations, and teachers are often reliant on creating their own materials but have limited access to training. Engaging with open practice offers this group the potential benefits of improving their access to resources, enhancing digital literacy and practice, and gaining insights into alternative pedagogical approaches through using existing online repositories. The project used a mix of informal ‘cafe’ sessions and formal training to successfully engage the local community languages group in creating and sharing OERs. The group reported that there were real benefits to their pedagogical practice through working on the project and engaging with open practice: knowledge and skills gained continue to inform their teaching. The paper concludes that while community-based languages teachers are enthusiastic learners and benefits of open practice can be significant, they need encouragement, training and a neutral environment to engage fully with the open movement.

‘Inspiration, ideas, encouragement’: teacher development and improved use of technology in language teaching through open educational practice

This paper describes a study undertaken with language tutors who were engaged in a project to publish and create open educational resources. We sought to investigate how far working with open content could offer language tutors opportunities to develop professionally and acquire new technical knowledge for language teaching. Language educators face particular motivational challenges, and often have a lack of training in the use of technology for teaching. We applied a self-efficacy theory of motivation to understand the extent to which tutors felt confident and capable about open practice, and whether they perceived development benefits. On the whole our findings suggest that open practice may be an effective vehicle for professional development, for enhancing knowledge of technology in teaching and for alleviating some specific motivational barriers faced by language educators. However, they also revealed significant issues which challenge tutors’ likelihood of continuing with open practice, which would need to be addressed for the benefits of open working to be fully realised.

Employability for languages: a handbook

The newly formed Linguistics and Modern Languages subject area at University of Huddersfield sought to revamp our curriculum to embed employability into our teaching so that students could understand the relevance of their subject to life outside and after university. To this end, we decided to adapt and specialise the generic placement module that was compulsory in the School of Music, Humanities and Media for our particular students to service their specific needs and linguistic skillset. The result is an innovative second year placement module called Language in the Workplace. With the help of funding from the Higher Education Academy (HEA), we carried out a research project to ensure our placement module is as effective as possible. This involved assessing our students’ employability skills and needs, gathering the opinions of placement providers and employers, and putting together case studies on our graduates’ employment experience.

The Community Café: Open Practice with Community-based Language Teachers

This book is an edited collection of examples of good practice in using open education in the language classroom. The publication arose from the two-day conference “Learning through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open Communication” organised jointly by the EUROCALL Teacher Education and Computer Mediated Communication Special Interest Groups at the University of Bologna (Italy) on 29-30 March 2012. The main objective of the book is to showcase the many ways in which practitioners in different settings are engaging with the concepts of open resources and practices, and to provide ideas for language teachers who might want to dip their toes into the Open Educational Resources/Open Educational Practices world, or experiment further.The last ten years have seen a considerable increase in the sharing of resources and practices in education, mainly based on the huge potential that online technologies and the internet have for making knowledge available openly (Pantò & Comas-Quinn, 2013). The shift now is from an interest in Open Educational Resources (OER), defined as “materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone” (Downes, 2011), to the realisation that openness itself, rather than the resources alone, can bring enormous benefits to the education community. Hence the focus on Open Educational Practices (OEP) defined as practices which “support the production, use and reuse of high quality OER through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as coproducers on their lifelong learning path” (ICDE, 2011).

Support Unsung Heroes: Community-Based Language Learning and Teaching

This chapter suggests that the UK has the potential to jump-start its capacity for language skills if it supports the language knowledge held by its community groups. Community-based language teaching and learning is widespread across the UK but relies heavily on volunteers and charitable work to survive. The chapter includes a case study of community languages in Southampton, which is typical of the situation across much of the UK. The creativity, innovation and collaborative nature of community-based classes and supplementary schools offers a vision of how language skills and cultural knowledge could be built up and embedded across society. It concludes that learning lessons from community-based language classes can help the UK to meet the challenges and realise the opportunities of an interconnected and globalised future.

CALL in a climate of change: adapting to turbulent global conditions – short papers from EUROCALL 2017

2017 saw the 25th conference for the European Association of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL). Every year, EUROCALL serves as a rich venue to share research, practice, new ideas, and to make new international friends – and this year was no different. It is an innovative and inspiring conference in which researchers and practitioners share their novel and insightful work on the use of technology in language learning and teaching. This volume of short papers captures the pioneering spirit of the conference and you will find here both inspiration and ideas for theory and practice.

10 years of the LLAS elearning symposium: case studies in good practice

The speed of technological advance in the mobile phone, netbook and tablet markets has meant that learners increasingly have access to digital devices capable of enhancing their learning experience. This case study reports on how language learners, taking Italian as an option on the Institution Wide Languages Programme (IWLP) at Coventry University, use their digital devices to support their language learning. Foreign language educators in higher education need to be aware of the degree to which learners utilise their digital devices and what they use them for. This knowledge will allow tutors to be able to offer help and support. Learners were observed using their devices in the classroom and were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire. More detailed data was then collected from a focus group of students reflecting on the numerous ways in which they used their phones to support their language learning. The case study found that the use of digital devices to support language learning was widespread and often took place outside the classroom. It also revealed that tutors were unable to recommend appropriate apps and that learners tended to use their devices autonomously and unintegrated with their modules. Learners expressed a desire for the integration of mobile language learning resources with their existing course books and on-line learning materials.