I have talked about using social networking sites in the classroom (and so has John). But today I would like to highlight del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. Instead of saving your favorite websites as links on your computer, you can save them online and share them with the world. It is so easy to use del.icio.us. First, you set-up an account and put two little buttons in your toolbar.

From there, it is pretty simple. Every time you want to save a great website, you click the “Tag” button and put in some tags or keywords. And it is saved and everyone can view your favorite links. Browse my links at: del.icio.us/mitchelk

Here is a YouTube video about using del.icio.us

Here are some classroom uses:

- Research Projects

• Create a network and share your materials.

- ESL Reading Assignments

• Identify a webpage’s topic and subtopics. Use topic and subtopic as tags.
• Summarize webpage. Write the summary in the del.icio.us note section.

One of the hardest things about learning a language is the fear of making mistakes.  Of course, the environment of so many students working together here on English, baby! makes it easier to avoid a confidence problem. But I suspect that there are many out there who are afraid to type because they know it won’t be perfect.

Well, I’d like to share a cool little hand-printed book I recently came across. It’s by a woman named Raquel Machín Herrero from Madrid who came to Portland for three months. I  really like the title: “How Are U?” since that’s always the first phrase you learn in a language. The back cover even says “Fine, thanks,” even though the book is all about how the author is not fine exactly.

The book is a beautifully illustrated short guide to Herrero’s trip to Portland and the problems she encountered, most of which arise from lack of money. The book even spells out a special message about that when you look at it from a distance.

Here’s my favorite page. I like it because Herrero’s boyfriend is a local musician I know and I think the picture of him standing next to the records and nagging her is funny.

You’ll notice that the English isn’t perfect, but that’s actually part of the charm. Not only was Herrero not afraid to make a few mistakes, but they endear her book to me. Phrases like “for study here” really give her text a memorable voice.

So anyway, of course you wouldn’t want to make mistakes on purpose, but I think that as long as you can get your point across, you shouldn’t worry about mistakes. Eventually your mistakes will go away, and until they do, they can be a lovable little quirk.

This Monday the music lesson will be about Lefty, a one-armed guitarist who performs on street corners near the English, baby! downtown Portland office.

This is definitely the best taking it to the streets video we’ve made so far. It’s not just a slice of life, it’s a whole story. Watch Lefty play and talk about how he thought his days as a musician were over when he lost his arm.

When I was learning Spanish, some of the hardest people to understand were older men with gravelly voices. But I think Lefty does a pretty good job of annunciating for a guy with a real whiskey voice. Hopefully our members can get some practice understanding people who sound like him from this video.

I also interviewed Lefty at length for an upcoming newspaper piece I’m going to write. We sat at his “office,” a table at the old town bar Captain Ankny’s Well, which also happens to be where we film lots of our lessons (like this one).

Every other person who walked by knew Lefty and said hello. He has a lot of fans around town. Some of them are even photographers. He let me scan in some photos people have given him over the last three years he’s been performing at the Saturday Market, an open air bazaar in Portland. The ones in this post are my favorites.

While it’s taking a fair amount of time, many educators are coming around to the idea that students can learn valuable skills from each other while interacting online, even in social networks.

The Economic Times reports that according to a new 6-month study by the University of Minnesota that watched the online behavior of students from 13 high schools in the Midwest, social network users were found to learn lessons in technology, creativity and “being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.”

How about that? Sharing ideas can encourage learning.

A student-empowerment movement is happening. Learners are becoming more reliant on their peers and less reliant on their teachers to disseminate information. Sure it’s valuable to have an English language teacher help correct grammatical mistakes, but it can be just as helpful when a friend shares that the most important phrase he learned on a recent budget trip to New York was “Where can I get some pizza?”

Teachers are an important educational resource but students often do a better job sharing real-world experiences. What sounds more engaging – memorizing how to ask directions or listening to a friend tell the story of how she misunderstood a bus driver and instead of riding to San Diego, she ended up in Las Vegas? A little bit of context goes a long way.

I gotta say, the Freakonomics commenters are definitely some of the sharpest on the Net. A lot of the responses to the quorum on globalization and Language that we got to participate in were as interesting as the official post! Here are some things I learned from the 80-some posts that are up so far.

Even though as John mentioned in his contribution to the post, there isn’t a country that has volunteered to change its language to English for economic reasons, a commenter named Ari Fromm says there’s an industry that has done so.

English is currently mandatory for ALL air traffic control worldwide. That’s a pretty strong indication of what the universal language of the world is……

It’s clear that with the rise of English, multi-lingualism is on the rise as well. But what’s the most bilingual continent? According to a commenter named Bjog, it’s Africa, which makes sense when you think about it.

Every African is minimally bilingual–more than any other people on the planet. Every African speaks their native language, the language of nearby ethnic communities, plus the language in which their country was colonized–any of the Europhone languages.

The Koreans are hedging their bets when it comes global super powers. Alan says:

…note that there are 100,000 Korean students at Chinese universities and 100,000 Korean students at American universites.

Finally, people seem really preoccupied with this notion that English is going to morph and change into pidgin or creole English. Probably half the posts on the quorum are about this idea. It seems intuitive and it’s not new to us, but a commenter named Neil Wilson has a suggestion to the contrary.

Look at the written word. It seems to me that there were far more changes to the English language between Jefferson’s words in 1776 and Lincoln’s words in 1863 than between Lincoln and Obama. This is true even though it has been 7 score and 4 years (It hasn’t been 5 years yet.)

English is far more stable today than it ever has been.

Thou art quite right, sir. ‘Tis sooth that our English tongue hath been a changling historickly.

Though were English to change as rapidly as everyone suspects, would the result be horrible and Orwellian? A commenter named Ramon Cashon says, “Yes!”

Think of the users’ manual of a Japanese or Chinese product and apply that to the spoken word. THAT is the English language that will gain dominance… if you can still call it a language at that stage.

At least information about any language is available now. It didn’t occur me to that it’s easier to pick up a local tongue of another locality than ever before until this comment from Tieler:

You can’t go to your local library or bookstore and buy books on Kurdish, but go online and there is a wealth of resources for grammar, vocabulary, online dictionaries, and so on.

All in all, it’s great to see how much interest there is in this topic. And I can’t wait to see if I’m speaking pidgin, Mandarin or the Queen’s English in five years.

Humans love ritual. There’s a style for doing anything. So why would social networks be any different? Of course there’s behavior that’s looked down on in online communities. And leave it to the British to formalize it.

A fancy etiquette organization recently published guidlines for good manners on Facebook. Unfortunately, these aren’t too helpful here on English, baby!. Most of the tips presume that you know your online contacts in real life as well, which usually isn’t the case on a global network like ours.

So with a little help from Jewel, I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a short guide to proper behavior on Ebaby!. Stick to these rules and penpals will be yours in spades!

1. Show yourself! A lot of members post an image of a celebrity (or even a cartoon character) as the only image on their profile. Jewel writes: “I always wonder if they just like the celebrity or are trying to use the photo thinking people from other countries don’t know better.” Well, when we see a photo that obviously came from a magazine, we know! If you want to make friends around the world, show them who you are. It’s even better if you show something about where you live or what you do in the photo as well. For instance, when I had a photo of me playing the trombone, lots of people wrote me about music.

2. No one-liners! I can’t tell you how many messages I get to the effect of: “hi wil u help me lern english i am luv u!” And I just don’t know what to do with that. I suspect these folks send the same message to lots of different people. But think about it for a minute, how is anyone supposed to respond to that? Instead of sending tons of meaningless messages to everyone you come across, why not wait till you see something on someone’s profile that you find interesting and then send him or her a message about that? That’s how to start a conversation.

3. Don’t push your agenda. Ebaby! is about making friends, practicing English, and learning about other cultures. It’s not an appropriate place to try to convert people to your religion or put down people with other beliefs. Be tolerant. Be tactful.

4. Stay on topic, please. There are thousands of forum threads and lessons on English, baby!. Since our members are so eager to converse, most of the pages are really lively. If you want to talk about something, there’s probably a page about it, and if there isn’t, you can start one. But for crying out loud, don’t hijack a totally unrelated topic as your soap box. I don’t need to hear about how much you dislike gypsies in a lesson on country music, OK? Oh, and #2 applies here as well. Posts like “Sbdy talk 2 me!” on a forum about the election aren’t the best way to make friends.

5. Share! Since Ebaby! is all about cultural exchange, you’ll have more fun if you bring more to the table. Make sure your profile is full of information about you. People in Russia are interested in what life is like Mexico and vice versa, so tell them something about you and your life on your profile and get the conversation started! Give details and make yourself stand out.

So I have to report back on how well my new cellphone policy works. It is kind of amazing. I didn’t explicitly tell students that my policy changed, but I started encouraging them to use cellphones at different parts of class. After what happened in my last class, I am convinced that cellphones are an asset.

We have a big test coming up, but the students still have lives and jobs. So sometimes they have to miss class. Well, yesterday two of my most dedicated students missed class and I wanted to know what was going on and make sure they got the information. The solution came really quickly! A student took out his cellphone, texted the missing students, realized they were at work, and sent them pictures of the chalkboard. The missing students wrote back some questions about the things on the board. I was sold! Cellphones have the power to bring the classroom anywhere!

Now, imagine if I had a great classroom website. They could view that at work on their cellphones. But I am not there yet. Cellphones will have to do for now.

A couple of weeks ago John participated in a discussion about language and globalization on The New York Times Freakonomics blog.

We were really happy to be asked because a trend seems to be developing. A couple of weeks earlier, The Oregonian picked up our election stats and quoted several of our members in a story. Now John has been quoted as an expert on language and globalization. Not only is English, baby! a recourse for students of English, but it’s increasingly becoming a source of information about global issues for the English speaking world.

John was in very good company in this discussion, alongside a UN interpreter, a linguistics professor and published author. Plus John and I are Freakonomics fans, so it was extra cool to get to work with Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt and their team.

I have been really concerned about my students’ ability to meet my vocabulary course’s objective. I mean, I want to be sure that students have learned to use some new academic vocabulary words. Otherwise, the class is pointless. For me, this has meant designing meaningful activities, but also it has meant creating good assessments. At the beginning of the course, I used several different methods of assessment. I had them write sentences with only the vocabulary word as a prompt. I had them read a paragraph and answer multiple choice vocabulary questions. But, I had a hard time with both of these assessments. They didn’t seem to really test all of the aspects of knowing a word and the students wanted a consistent quiz format. Maybe you have the perfect quiz format…I was still searching.

But I found the answer! I decided to change the assessment so it tested both productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge. Productive knowledge is knowledge of how to use the word. Productive knowledge was assessed with “use in a sentence” questions. Full credit was given to students who demonstrated knowledge of the words’ meaning and grammar. And let me tell you, few people got perfect scores! So I also tested their receptive knowledge or their ability to understand the words in context. I gave them questions that required students to understand target words in order to complete some writing task. For example, “Describe a traditional holiday” or “Explain the process of buying a book.” For these questions, they were not required to use the new word in the answer, but they had to be able to accurately answer the question. Together, I feel these two groups of questions give me a sense of their total understanding of the new words. Now, I know whether students had trouble understanding the words or whether they have trouble using them.