Augmenting online proprioception

Back in April, I wrote about how we need to develop a substitute for the paralinguistic cues we get face-to-face for when we are teaching online.

I referred to this as a kind of online proprioception.

Bob Dignen, who has been leading the way in this area for some time, outlined a handy list of skills required for teleconferencing last week, mentioning the difficulties of speaking as a group without seeing each other.

He notes that in teleconferences 'silence is not an option' as participants have to show that they are engaged, assenting or otherwise, and wanting to take some kind of action, such as speak themselves.

In the traditional teleconferencing scenario, those cues which are usually intuitive, both in their display and interpretation, have to become explicit.

The rules have to be clear to everyone and everyone has to show overtly that they are following them, much as some autists have to negotiate interaction with others explicitly.

But what of online conferencing?

Code red

Do your learners take tests?

If so, what colour will they see in the room where they take the tests?

And how high will the ceiling be?

Perhaps, like me, you've never thought about it.

However, it turns out these apparently incidental details can have an effect.

Proprioception: I see learning people

What makes online teaching different from classroom teaching?

The ever-astute Maxim Achkasov suggested that the difference lies in the way we communicate in the classroom, in  a manner which exceeds the grasp of our five senses.

'There must be one more,' he avers, 'which makes it really different and probably "genuine" from any other way of communication.'

In trying to put my finger on what that sixth sense might be, I found an analogy in Oliver Sacks' excellent book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

In it he relates the story of a patient of his who suffered from a viral infection in her spinal cord, and, as a result, lost the ability to move properly or control the tone of her voice.

The cause of this alarming impediment was the loss of proprioception.

Choice architecture

There is no such thing as a "neutral" design.

So say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their now-classic book, Nudge.

Every design you can think of, from canteen displays to school layouts, nudges people to make one decision rather than another.

They call the people who craft these designs 'choice architects'.

According to Sunstein and Thaler, 'a choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.'

Educators, for them,  are choice architects par excellence, organising the context for their learners' education in a 1000 different ways.

Seating is one of the more obvious types of context in a classroom.

Comfort

From Cleopatra's burnished throne to the leather and wood electric variety, the chair has many guises.

My favourite is the armchair, simply because it is the most comfortable.

I have long dreamt of an armchair I could take with me into the mountains or to the beach.

This is simply so that I may enjoy nature's bounty in comfort, rather than perched on a wet rock, or wedged in between a million pebbles.

This small wish was finally granted  this week when I chanced upon the elegant Flux chair.

Finally, a lightweight foldable armchair enabling me to sit down wherever I want.

My dream has come true.

The mediaeval octopus

Listening to colleagues, it seems that, in our less sanguine moments at least, we imagine the mind of the language learner as something we lay siege to.

It is a recalcitrant mediaeval town, refusing to pay homage to the sovereignty of Application and Diligence.

We must bring it to heel with all the shock and awe at our disposal, engaging the enervated cradle of idleness in every way possible - with the classroom equivalent of cannons and tunnels and plague-ridden corpses lobbed over the battlements.

The mightiest siege engine of them all, however, the trebuchet in the classroom cupboard, is the computer.

IATEFL Online

It's that time of year again.

The clocks go forward, the price of petrol goes up, and your daffodils are destroyed by a late frost.

But amidst this doom and gloom, there is a ray of sunshine so strong your very soul will be charged with light.

Your mind will revel in the glories of a thousand ideas.

And your heart will sing with the companionship of your fellow-travellers.

And all that's just what's happening in the pub.

I speak, of course, about the IATEFL conference, this year in Brighton.

The re-distracted goldfish

I have been experimenting on my students.

I haven't gone the whole Frankenstein, although some of my more languid learners might perhaps benefit from neck-bolts and lightning.

Rather, I have attempted to see whether there is any validity in my proposition from a previous post, that 'in order to engage the new learning mind a lesson now needs multiple points of abbreviated contact'.

Not wanting to overdo it, I decided to double the points of contact in one lesson to see how effective it might be.

Class routes

If you use Gmail, you probably prefer salty to sweet snacks.

Should you be a Yahoo mailer, you probably lounge around your home in pyjamas.

And if you use AOL, there's a good chance that you're overweight, at least according to a fascinating report on Hunch blog.

Your email address apparently says a lot more about you than where you can be contacted.

The design guru, Swiss Miss, for example, admitted that she refused to consider employing a  lawyer because he had an AOL address and therefore lived in 'a different solar system' to her.

All of which led me to wonder what other things influence learners' opinions of us before we've even met, or, as is the case with that lawyer, not met.

Before a learner gets to me, and I get the chance to deter them personally, they have to go through a number of other potentially alienating hoops.

The distracted goldfish

'We are not only what we read,' says Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid.

  'We are how we read.'

The internet has changed both.

We read 140-character Tweets, Facebook updates, news tickers, digests, digests of digests.

And we don't actually read either; we flit and we float - our attention permanently diffuse.

We skim sideways across the net, like a long-legged fly, touching only faintly any text.

How can anyone learn a language in such conditions?

More pointedly, how can anyone be taught a language in such conditions?