Cool Online Community & 2 Questions

In Thursday's class, some classmates shared a few interesting online communities such as Quora. I have one to share here and it's called "VoiceTube". Basically, it's a website for English language learners to learn and practice their listening and speaking skills. There are thousands of videos imported from Youtube; staff of VoiceTube would translate English into Mandarin and make both subtitles for those videos.

But what surprises me the most is the nice atmosphere created by this "Pronunciation Challenge". It's a place where one staff of VoiceTube would record a short audio clip containing pronunciation of target sentences and explanation of the sentences for ELLs to practice the pronunciation. What ELLs would do is to record their own practice and upload it to the web. At first, I thought people would just upload their practice to the page and nothing more. However, it's not like that and not that boring at all. In fact, people not only upload their recordings but also type some other messages to share how they feel about the today's pronunciation challenge. They talk about the problems they have, compliment on others' good pronunciation or even give advice to other ELLs on how to improve their pronunciation.

An example of how ELLs interacted with others in the online community.

Moreover, I thought people would also just record their pronunciation of their target sentences. But there were several times that I heard more than those things. Sometimes people also record their own viewpoints of the target sentences in their clip. The most interesting one I've ever heard so far is that a young kid recorded his own singing at the end of his practice recording; lots of people responded to his pronunciation and singing and encouraged him to keep his good work! 

This is one of the examples that the kid recorded his pronunciation practice and sang a song at the end of his recording.

I think that's the beauty of this kind of online learning community! Users would be able to help out and encourage each other in learning even though they are totally strangers. And the more interaction they receive via the online community, the more motivated they become in terms of learning the target language. To be honest, I was a little bit surprised to see that this pronunciation challenge works so well without the staff further being in charge of its discussion board. I thought they need to have the host who posts daily pronunciation challenge to respond to the audience/ELLs so as to facilitate the learning atmosphere there. It turned out that the staff and the host don't have to step in and things work quite well!



*** 2 Questions:
From the reading "Technology as Social Practice", Bertram mentioned that in educational settings the question that educators should ask is not why the tool is employed or what is lost by using it; on the contrary, teachers ought to focus on the question how to make the best of the technological tool during the class.


This is a very thought-provoking viewpoint. Looking back on my own teaching journey, I was like that kind of teacher who constantly think about "what kind of technological tools" ought to be used during my teaching. However, I forget to look at the aspect of effectiveness of the use of the tool which I think is a very important question to think about! After all, students are the main focus of learning. I feel that I am being too subjective in terms of choosing what technological tool to be used. I think what "might be useful and helpful" for them to learn from my own perspective. I ought to switch my role to students when it comes to learning with the technological tool! Therefore, the question that I am interested in exploring more is how to choose an appropriate technological tool for students to learn with and how to make it effective in terms of learning.  



Another question that I am interested in knowing more stemmed from our first class discussion. During that time, we talked about "self-identity" in the cyber world. A classmate talked about having different Facebook accounts for different groups of people. Another classmate shared her experience of having different social media platforms for different groups of people. These got me think about how I presented myself in the cyber world. Take my Facebook for example. Some of my friends use their real name as their Facebook account. But for me, I don't do that. I don't feel comfortable in using my Mandarin names out there. Thus, I put my English name up there. For me, it's just like a nickname or an alias. I do so because I don't feel like expose my real name in the cyber world. This probably has something to do with keep my privacy. But the conflicting thing here is that I sometimes post my life on my Facebook wall. So it's quite interesting for me to think about my viewpoint and my behavior on this! So the question that I would like to explore more is how do people construct their self-identity in the cyber world and the factors that affect the whole process.