Current trends are moving towards mobile apps on smartphones and tablet devices. Apps, in my opinion, are quite panacean; anything we want or feel we need to do can be simply remedied by an app… “there is an app for that.” So I want to learn a foreign language, and I can’t justify investing in Rosetta Stone nor do I have the time to take a formal course (there are multitudinous, but this goes beyond the scope of this post!), so let’s shop the app store. Searching for apps as, if you will, a layperson (i.e., not as language professor) is surely overwhelming. So many apps (this morning’s quick search of “language learning” numbers  728 iPad apps and 1135 iPhone apps!), that it would take an army of research assistants far endless weeks to investigate them properly (and as we all know in academia, assistants and time, together with money to pay for the apps, is something we don’t have).

So, I would like to ask you, professionals and laity, which apps have you downloaded, which would you recommend, and which would you dismiss. I’m interested in all apps: the good, the bad and the ugly (you’re not too surprised that I make a cultural reference with Ennio Morricone, are you? )

Thanks in advance for sharing and helping me better understand mobile assisted language learning.

I actually gave two talks but the first, the powerpoint of which I share here, was the one of which I am particularly proud. It gave me an opportunity to revisit much about Twitter, including the *new* Twitter, new research and where I am with Twitter as an academic and avid twitterer. Discussing Twitter in higher education is always a rewarding experience because there are always some good discussions which ensue, especially those comments that begin with “I want to play devil’s advocate”

Clearly, the research on Twitter in higher ed I share in this presentation is not comprehensive. I am grateful to dana boyd for sharing research on Twitter and Microblogging on her site. Here you can find more articles, conference talks, etc.

For those of us who feel that these decisions are outwardly wrong, we unite and make our voice heard. This has been the case with the language programs cut at SUNY-Albany. If you aren’t aware of the dastardly attack on the humanities, here is the decision being protested from around the world.

In October, UAlbany president George Philip announced that the campus is suspending admissions to five programs — French, Russian, Italian, classics and theater — in the wake of an unprecedented budget shortfall.

This decision has created quite an uproar not only from academics directly affected, but from constituents in higher education from administrators to scholars to students. Stanley Fish blogged about this crisis (in two parts). Other institutions are aiming to revive the humanities.

Ultimately, once decisions like this one reached at SUNY-Albany are made, there is little hope at reversing it, despite the most comprehensive attempts made by all. As a faculty member, I have participated in letter writing (both in its traditional sense and by email correspondence), and have disseminated information to others too.

I even zealously tweeted about the online petition immediately after I learned about it. I imagine a smile or a smirk appearing on the lips of you readers as you get to this paragraph. You are probably thinking, “There she goes with Twitter again. Isn’t there a statute of limitations?!” No, there isn’t!

On Sunday, October 10, 2010, I learned about the petition via this tweet:

It was retweeted by a number of members (more than just the 2 in the image above!) in my personal learning network (PLN). One tweep asked if international signatures would be accepted. I did not know whether their signatures would be counted, nevertheless many of us pleaded with everyone in our PLN to sign the petition and retweet the information to their PLNs. Three days later, I tweeted this:

My last tweet on October 13/10 showed an increase of 2,960 signatures over the three days in which I tweeted it and it was retweeted. I am not naive enough to think that Twitter was solely responsible for this increase of almost 3,000 signatures in 3 days, but I do credit my PLN on Twitter with helping disseminate information about the petition quickly and effectively. Tweeps in Italy, Spain and England, people across NJ and the rest of America united to be heard on the SUNY-Albany cuts.

The penultimate paragraph of the timesunion.com articles tells us

The document has garnered signatures and comments from 37 foreign countries, particularly in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, as well as 49 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Although I will never know for certain, I firmly believe that the far-reaching arm of Twitter contributed to the extensive national and international representation of the signatures on the petition.

You may think this is a lost cause and I have tweeted and blogged for no reason…but there were and still are so many lessons to learn from this, at so many different levels.

I’m happy to state that my audience was fantastic, knowledgeable and willing to participate with my numerous requests, above and beyond my expectations. Thanks ITANJ for this wonderful opportunity!

In spite of my inability (read: fear) to run a race, running has given me great satisfaction. This is a goal that I’ve managed to achieve because it is a truly selfish accomplishment…I have nothing to prove to anyone, I set my own pace, I defy myself.

This is so conspicuously different from my writing, which has waned considerably. With each sentence I write, I imagine endless challenges from reviewers and critics–unsupported theses, poor discussions, irrelevant conclusions. After an entire academic year (the one immediately subsequent to tenure) in which I was given endless administrative duties, I find myself unable to write. I need to find a way to write for me first, then for an audience…to make my writing analogous to my running. And then maybe this restlessness will pass, maybe…

After my last post on how I’m learning Spanish (and now Portuguese too) on Twitter (my language goals for the summer!), in Spanish I thanked a number of people who had retweeted my blog post. Of course, there was an error in my tweet and I had two friends advise me of them, in two different ways…one in a direct message explicitly stating my error, the other in a reply message using a recast to note my error.

How do others approach error correction on Twitter? This is fundamental to me as a language instructor and I wonder what others do too!

Thanks for your anticipated feedback

So I have praised Twitter as a tool for creating connections, networking with professionals in my field and related fields, communicating with people across the world. Then, a few months ago, after the AAAL conference in Atlanta, Georgia, I put forth a challenge to fellow linguists to explore technological tools not solely as a researcher but also as a student. I requested they use Twitter, Second Life and other social networking tools to learn a language in a mode that would be analogous to tasks and goals they set for their students. A formidable recommendation, right? Well, would you know that I thought I had been doing just that…but the reality of my use of Twitter to learn Spanish was, well, quite limited. So after I set forth this challenge, I decided to make a more earnest effort to emulate the efforts I had demanded from my students to learn Italian. Basically, physician heal thyself.

My following of Spanish-speaking tweeps is amazing. Some were already in my timeline prior to my issuing of the challenge—they are scholars, language teachers, teachers, interesting people whose tweets appealed to me. They indulge me and despite my lack of Spanish language skills (remember, I grew up in Canada so my third language is French!), engage with me when I tweet them.

What are my “tasks”?
Well, let me first preface all this by saying that my Italian has been quite helpful for me to jump in feet first. I started first by reading tweets and deciphering what was being said and how it was being said. The reading of these short updates—the least intimidating form of communication—is not only entertaining but also educational.

The next step for me was sharing some of the tweets with followers in my timeline. So as an exercise, I would retweet a Spanish tweet and translate it into English and Italian. By the way, I don’t know how my monolingual followers felt about this…I never asked.

Finally, it was time to open up the channels of communication beyond the “hello, how are you?” tweets. I started replying to their tweets, comment on their avatars and generally make myself “open” to conversation. Remember Erving Goffman’s seminal work The Presentation of Self Everyday Life? Well, that’s what I did, started presenting my everyday life in Spanish. Generally, it never amounted to more than a few tweets, but this parallels the type of exchanges we would expect our students to complete in ITAL101. Okay, so I think I’m have achieved the novice-mid/high level on the proficiency scale for reading and writing!

Then yesterday, I had a lengthy exchange in Spanish that spanned 8 hours (tweeting was intermittent, not constant!). I think I hit the intermediate level of writing, because I was able to

create with the language and communicate simple facts and ideas in a loosely connected series of sentences on topics of personal interest and social needs, primarily in the present.

The beginning of the exchange is reproduced here for readers who understand Spanish. After the customary apology by the language learner (me) for messing up in the target language (Spanish), one of the highlights of this exchange occurred. The words every language learner wants to hear—my tweep told me he understood me very well.

So, wherein do my errors lie?
Well, prepositions for one. The difference between “hacer” and “tener”. Limited vocabulary. Now, to confess (#yoconfiesoque): yes, I did use WordReference to translate expressions…after so many years of language teaching, I automatically recognize that idioms won’t translate. Now, did I think in English before I tweeted? Noticeably, it was more Italian in which I though but for the most part, I was able to immediately start replying in Spanish. Then, I’d be stuck and switch to WordReference to look things up.

Do I feel confident enough?
I’m OK, but hesitant to engage in more specialized language. For example, I read a tweet from another tweep in Mexico who was looking for help transferring text from PowerPoint to Word. Yes, I had the answer. I didn’t however have the language to tweet her through it in Spanish. Luckily, I recalled that her bio page is in English so I tweeted with her in English re the software issue, but after that in Spanish about ourselves. And she corrects me! :p

If I were to take the Spanish placement test, how would I fare?
I don’t know, maybe I could take Spanish 103. Need to build vocabulary and not rely so heavily on Italian (e.g., comer / mangiare / to eat) and, of course, verb conjugations. Are these findings normal? Well, given my desire to learn Spanish (on a scale of 1-10, it’s an 11), and my training as a language teacher, I would have to say that these are not. But I will acknowledge that in these exchanges I am a student and I too experience the anxiety of social networking in the target language.

Even with my training, different things put me off a bit, especially the unwillingness of tweeps to engage. Now, when I follow a new Spanish speaker, my first tweet to them is a greeting telling them I’m trying to learn Spanish so they are forewarned!

Google asks you if the transcript was useful. I’d say yes and would love to use it an intro course to Italian phonetics!!

Here is the voicemail in Italian, if you care to play a linguistic game comparing Italian phonemes to English words

Buon pomeriggio dottoressa Conforti. Ho ricevuto il suo messaggio ma non ho avuto l’opportunità di risponderle quando ha chiamato. Sì, mercoledì andrebbe bene se avremo la possibilita di incontrarci. Umm, se ha la possibilità di richiamarmi sarebbe fantastico altrimenti mi lasci un messaggio per cortesia almeno per sapere a che ora possiamo incontrarci e parlare, okay? Grazie mille e buona giornata.

So then I thought about getting off my a** and creating the personal start page on Netvibes that I never got around to. Then, I thought, why not a wordpress blog as a web space and could use various widgets there too. Then I thought, maybe my knowledge is far too limited and there are other tools that I could be using that I don’t know about. Then I thought…it’s time to stop thinking and start asking questions to my personal learning network. So, PLN, what do you use for your web space? My space currently is like an online CV, but it could be so much more, couldn’t it?

Any suggestions would be so greatly appreciated. Thanks

As teachers/researchers, we always deliberate the implementation of new tools (especially Web 2.0 ones) in our classes. We research the literature, we outline our agenda, implement the tool and make the necessary adjustments as our project proceeds. The most rewarding part of our research is when we analyze our data and review the students’ perceptions so then we can reflect on the challenges and reconsider the project for future implementation.

So we’re ready to go with our action research, right? Well, why not familiarize ourselves first hand with what we want our students to do by putting ourselves in their shoes? I know that although we are already bilingual (or trilingual or polyglots), we are interested in learning other languages. So why not use Twitter as a tool to language learning ourselves?

Start by finding speakers of the language on Twitter. Start following them. Create a Twitter list (see my list for my Spanish tweeps from whom I’m learning) so you can follow their tweets. If you are a little gun shy initially, that’s OK…just read their tweets, follow their conversations, view their links (no, this is NOT stalking ). Eventually though, you may want to say “buenos días” and “¿cómo estás?” so that later you will be in a position to interact with them as you become more comfortable with the language you are trying to learn.

Can you learn the language by using Twitter alone? Of course not! But the tweets are a good springboard and I hope they encourage you to discover all other media available out there (books, blogs YouTube videos, music, movies (and clips), etc.)