ePal

    The online community ePal provides a great learning platform for people from all over the world to share their work, ideas, projects and everything. The projects are not only about language learning but also about math, science, art and music.

  One project is designed to invite students from all over the world to discuss natural disasters. Students with their ePals discuss how the natural disasters, say hurricane, form, how people react, and how to deal with it. After their exploration, they will produce a presentation and teach others about this natural disaster.

   As for language teachers, ePal is beneficial for teaching language and arranging activities. The project that I like the most is one of the tasks in the Student Speak Video Series: I’m a global citizen. In this task, the students are asked to make a video to define global citizen based on their own understanding. When giving the direction of this task, its generator first includes his/her thoughts in defining a global citizen, such as someone who understands the interconnectedness of the word, who believes in responsible stewardship of the environment, who has a respect for human rights and cares about injustice, and who promotes peaceful conflict resolution. To prevent the video resulting in any other forms, the sample video as a demonstration and the guidelines are presented. One of the reasons that I love this project is the pool of ideas towards a topic. Students with different cultural and educational background bring their unique interpretations to share. By reviewing other’s video, they will sense the cultural diversity, make friends and learn from each other. Another reason is that it also helps to practice critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Besides learning and practicing using English, they could put their English learning in authentic contexts.

A Learner is Like a...

When searching for the analogy to illustrate today's learners, I would like to highlight the idea that a learner has a sharing characteristic as well as a ability to connect his/her learning community. From this perspective, a learner is like a BANK. As we all know, a bank gathers capital earned through interest, transaction fee and financial advice from individuals or groups, and lends it to others for their own development. In this process, the bank itself also benefits a lot with the capital to grow and develop. Similarly, a learner accumulates knowledge from others by varies means of teacher's instruction, peer mediation and, of course, internet connection. Then the learner can share with others in a larger community of what he/she has got. In the meantime, the learner grows, develops with the knowledge.

This analogy is strengthened by the idea provided in the video I just explored. In the video The Impact of Social Software on Learning, George Siemens explained that 

"social software is a very broad umbrella term that includes everything from blog to wiki to social bookmarking to tagging or folksonomy. and essentially it's where through social meets, we are able to share and connect with each other."

The Internet era enables an active learner to become more sharing. By building an online library, with lots of categorized tags and bookmarks, a learner can not only find pretty handy resources to promote his/her study efficiency and to stay current, but also provides bountiful information for ones who is in need of it. Study affairs are not individual, or intraperson. I prefer to use interpersonal study as learners' study mode today. Learners are connected together; they store knowledge in others; each of the connected learner benefits from this network, and "that is the function of the network itself" as Siemens said in The Changing Nature of Knowledge. 

In this way, learners' development can be put into a larger picture, which is the cycles of knowledge development and these elements like individuals and network are essential to it. Like what has been proposed by Siemens the concept called Connectivism that

"the starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual."

What is important for learners is to develop learning skills with social networking tools as informal learning ways.