Thursday, September 6, 2007

Commentary on Sep. 6

Thursday: meet at PC lab and work on wiki

We first googled "second language acquisition" and logged on to the wikipedia's SLA page.

David: Please take a look at how it is structured. Browse the wikipedia page. See what's included/missing/all the info out there.
Sangki: I'm going to show you how to edit infomation and use page history.

That went on for a few minutes as Sangi explained how it worked.

Next, we went to SLS 750 wiki homepage. there was nothing...we had to do SOMETHING with it.

Sangki taught us how to make a new page, create a link, make an external link, and then link everything together. After the lesson, we gave it a try and played with it for 10 minutes.

Then, we started creating the first page for our wiki. Brainstorming for table of contents took quite a while. Here's the list we came up with:

1. Definition of error feedback
2. Types of error feedback
oral vs. written
teacher vs. learner-initiated
implicit vs. explicit
feedback on form vs. content
feedback on oral vs. written language
offline vs. online
intensive vs. extensive
reactive vs. preactive
group ve. individualized
(David was busy typing everything in.)
It's when we were about to make the third one that we started having trouble with bullets, numbers, all that stuff. We decided to clean it up at another time.

We went back to the first one on the list: definition of error feedback, trying to create a page for it. Here's what we wrote:

Error feedback is a reaction to students' interlanguage performance.

Then, Sangki suggested everyone edit the page, add their own information to it, and make new pages, just to see what happened when people were editing it simultaneously. That kept us busy for 5 minutes. Sangki walked around and asked us NOT to change the main page.

Final goal of the day: create a new page, make a link, and save it.
Thank Sangki and David for go over the basics with us.
Now you can check out our wiki website and add your comments!

1 comment:

Lourdes said...

Ping-- Your description is very helpful to make me "see" what you did in the lab :-) Thanks David and Sang-Ki for leading the session. I have reserved the lab again for next Thursday (the 13th). That way we don't have to cancel class (I will be already at the airport, heading to Japan, at that time), and you get another opportunity to consolidate what you learned abotu wikis this past Thursday, and to keep planning our wiki space as a group.

Remember everything can be edited and changed all the time, so making changes and trying things out is fine (even single-handedly, if you think an idea is good; the group will veted collectively as part of the process).

Maybe one suggestion: It may be good to think of a "page" in the wiki space as something different from a "content bullet" (like "definition of error correction" or whatever). Think of each "page" as a short article on a "theme", not necessarily a bullet in a bulleted summary. Any theme in our discussions that has intrigued you so far? Pursue it, by creating a space and writing down some prose about it.

At least that is how I intuitively envision some of the process. But of course, we will see, it is all a big unknown experiment... but interesting!