Emerging technologies personal learning environments.(Report)

Language instructors in higher education are finding that the current generation of students is coming to campus with quite sophisticated technology skills and habits. Many are fully conversant with and committed to communicating through social networking sites. They use on a regular basis a variety of Internet-based services to manage much of their lives: to locate and obtain resources, plan free time, maintain contact with peers, access media, stay informed, and maybe even learn a language. These students find waiting for them at most universities a quite different use of the Internet: communication predominantly through email and interactions with instructors and peers through a top-down, fairly inflexible learning management system. Some instructors are finding that they are able to provide a flexible and creative learning environment more in tune with today's students through the use of (mostly) free tools that allow for a customized set of resources and services. Instructors choose a variety of mini-applications or widgets, with the resulting Web site becoming what is often referred to as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

INTEGRATION TOOLS

It has been possible for some time to create a personalized home page through services such as My Yahoo or my.msn.com (now Windows Live). Many teachers have used the availability of such services to create Web sites for their students, particularly in situations where no Web page hosting is available or where restrictions on Web posting hamper teachers' efforts to provide resources to students. More recent home page creation services offer greater flexibility and functionality than earlier options. They are also designed to be easy to use, requiring nothing more than checking off the desired components to create a page. iGoogle, for example, greets first-time users with the message, "Create your homepage in under 30 seconds" with a list of checkable interests, a theme to select, and a location to specify. Filling out the form creates a typical page structure, with three columns and a sidebar, displaying the services selected in self-contained boxes. Google calls its Web page components "gadgets," which include the typical range of news feeds, simple games, search, calendar, email, movie reviews. iGoogle also features localized options such as weather, movie listings, or restaurant recommendations. The page can be customized in terms of both look and functionality but retains the same basic structure. It is also possible to create one's own gadget. This is a simple process of choosing a pre-defined behavior or of pasting in existing HTML or XML code.

Laowai Chinese provides a good example of the use of an integration tool like iGoogle for language learning. The iGoogle page collects and displays the headlines/links to 21 different Chinese language learning blogs and Web services on one page. Since it uses RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to gather this information, the latest additions to the targeted Web sites are shown. Users are able to rearrange, add, or remove content, thus customizing the page to fit individual needs and interests. This provides a quick and easy way for Chinese learners to skim multiple Web sources without having to navigate to them individually.

Oskar Casquero's PLE project also uses iGoogle as a means to put together learning services and materials. The concept is that a university might create a set of fixed, pre-configured widgets containing institutional tools, services, and information. The user (student or instructor) is then able to add individually desired widgets to this mix. iGoogle was chosen as the front-end for several factors. The "canvas" view option in iGoogle enables a full-page display of a given widget, important for optimal use of some communication or writing/editing tools. iGoogle also features topic-based tab creation, which allows search results for a given topic (like "learn Chinese") to be automatically added as a tab with widgets. The project also plans to use the Google App Engine to create server-side applications that collect and process data from selected widgets, and then detect common patterns to build new services such as recommended resources or suggested new interest groups.

Another popular integration tool is Netvibes, a free service from France. Like iGoogle, Netvibes uses "themes" to allow for different looks and also allows creation of widgets. Netvibes allows for users to easily designate pages as private or public. An example of how to put together a Netvibes site for educational/institutional use is the home page for the Kankakee (Illinois) Public Library. The Bamboo Project blog describes a number of interactive widgets used in a Netvibes PLE. The service that seems to currently be among the most popular with teachers is Pageflakes. In fact, Pageflakes has a specific starting page designed for teachers, which features widgets such as a teaching schedule, Google Research search field, grade tracker, and free access to a file server service. It has an especially large number of widgets available, called "flakes," and features a full, multipage desktop interface. It has some innovative features which have contributed to its popularity, including drag and drop of widgets from one page to another (not only within the same page), and a very nice user interface. Like other integration tools, Pageflakes has recently increased the options for integrating social networking services into its sites.

An interesting example of Pageflakes used to create a course-oriented PLE is the home page for Intermediate Italian created by Professor Enza Antenos-Conforti at Montclair State University (link to CALICO 2009 conference presentation). The starting page features the following components: course announcements, a mini-blog (discussion in Italian), discussion forum (practical issues, in English), YouTube video (showing an Italian language video), news in Italian (RSS feed from an Italian newspaper), shared bookmarks, and a to-do assignment list. Professor Antenos-Conforti was easily able to re-arrange the look and feel of the site, dragging and dropping widgets and changing from a 3-panel to a 2-panel display. Pageflakes pages by default are private. The "pagecasting" feature is used to grant others access, which can be either to anyone or to a select group. Guest access by default is read only, but it is also possible to give editing privileges to others.

There tend to be similar kinds of tools and services that are included in such course-oriented PLEs:

Chat. Synchronous private or group communication, which may be through traditional instant messaging, or newer options such as Skype or Twitter

Calendar/To-do-list. Class assignments/announcements and keeping track of work done; can be a clickable list

News Feeds. RSS feeds with the option of customizing to pull in items on a specific topic, from a particular source, or in a given language

Personal Publication Tools. Blogs or wikis, for individual or group reading/writing

Social Bookmarking. Services such a Delicious provide a means to recommend sites to others in a group; some offer rating and annotation options

Writing Tool. Simple text editor or on-line word processor

Media Player. For display of streaming video, podcasts; ideally with audio recording option

Language Tools. On-line dictionaries, word lists

File storage/distribution. Could be a service such as Box.net or collector for specific kind of file, like Flickr

Quizzing/Polling. Tools such as Blog Quiz provide basic assessment types; dukaBUZZ supplies an audio polling widget

Not all these tools would be needed in all situations, but together they offer a variety of language use options: writing in different contexts/registers, practicing speaking and listening, and reading short, peer posts as well as longer native speaker texts. Most integrator sites offer the option to display page info in languages other than English. Other typical teaching services such as a shared whiteboard, mind mapping, or slideshow presentation could also be included. It is also possible to integrate social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, although students sometimes seem to prefer to separate private and educational spheres.

WIDGETS AND STANDARDS

In addition to the tools/services listed above, services like iGoogle, Netvibes, and Pageflakes make available to users a large number of widgets they can add to their personal pages. In addition, there are sites that offer collections of widgets, such as Widgetbox, Widgipedia, and Clearspring. They allow for search or category-based browsing. On the largest of these sites, Widgetbox, a search reveals some 2,600 widgets in the education category and some 80 for language learning. The latter tend to be applications such as flashcards, Web page translators, dictionaries, or word of the day, but also include mini-apps like a multi-lingual text to speech engine, a Second Life language learning integrator, and HowStuffWorks (for content-based English language learning). Not all widgets found in collector sites will work in all environments. In fact, there are two principal kinds of widgets: desktop and Web. Desktop widgets are designed to run in particular environments, such as the Dashboard system for Macintosh OS X or the "sidebar" in Microsoft Vista. Web widgets, on the other hand, can be deployed more widely. While they may be designed for a particular service, they can generally work on any Web page. This may require some adjustments to the code, which, if created in one of the widget authoring environments, will be done automatically through the export/integration process.

Both desktop and Web widgets have the same basic components. Fundamentally, they use Web compatible formats, even if intended to run in a desktop environment. This means that the core of the widget is HTML and CSS code which contains the actual content of the widget, namely text, linked images/video or content pulled from a server of Web service. Alternatively, the widget content can be created using Flash, although this may limit its use on some mobile devices. The content is contained within an XML file that provides essential metadata about the widget, such as its name, version, language, etc. The third component of most widgets is JavaScript, which is used to provide the programming logic behind any interactivity in the widget. To make widgets run in different environments typically necessitates only changing elements of the metadata contained in the XML file. There are sites such as Wix.com or Sproutbuilder.com that provide tools for creating widgets through a simple drag and drop interface.

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