SenseiOnline presents 8th Benkyoukai (Study Forum)
David Ashworth "Interinstitutional Collaborative Learning on the Web. Projects and Ideas"

Presentation Outline

I. Background

A. David Ashworth
-Worked on hypermedia development in early 90's on Mac ("Kanji City") for Japanese and Korean
-Since 1997, have been involved in the Interinstitutional Project described below that integrates various technologies to facilitate interactions among learners and native speakers of Japanese.
- Co-developed an online course in translation between English and Japanese/Mandarin, that emphasized collaboration among participants of all languages.
- Just finished piloting a basically synchronous course in "teletranslation,"i.e. translation over the Internet, that used voice communication for most of the course delivery.
- Currently experimenting with use of voice communication together with asynchronous in a course in intermediate Korean that has a research design included (studying feedback, also transfer between Korean and Japanese, as participating students are NNS of Japanese who are also studying Korean).

II. The Project

This project, begun in 1997, has involved several institutions and colleagues: Haverford College (Yoko Koike), Vanderbilt University (Hideko Shimizu),University of Hawaii (myself and Tomoko Iwai, Claire Hitosugi),Seiryou Commercial High School, Nagoya (Makoto Kageto) and Chubu University (Saeko Komori).Basically the project involves creating teams of students to design some kind of establishment, such as a resort, an ideal school, a restaurant, and the like. For this purpose, teams are created (by the management team) that include members from each school, so that they must first get to know each other, then discuss plans and develop the establishment of their choosing.(most recent projects have focused on creating schools). Such a project fosters various kinds of communication among students, as well as with faculty/management (I remained as manager while other colleagues from U of Hawaii functioned as teacher-managers). They must get acquainted, discuss plans, make suggestions, brainstorm, make proposals, discuss their pros and cons, i.e. their language covers a wide range of types of discourse and is created both in realtime and asynchronous communication.

A. Management
The management team ("Kanri")consists of myself plus the teachers at the several institutions. It meets regularly starting in mid-summer over the Internet using a chatroom for realtime communication and an e-mail list for other communications.When videoconferencing is planned, a CuSeeMe videoconference is scheduled for Kanri members.(We have not used videoconferencing for quite some time). 1. Planning and Implementation Kanri meetings are used to discuss the various agenda concerning plans, upcoming synchronous sessions among the students,and to generate new ideas, which we try out by simulating student sessions (see "Simulations" below).

1. Planning and Implementation
   Kanri meetings are used to discuss the various agenda concerning plans, upcoming synchronous sessions among the students,and to generate new ideas, which we try out by simulating student sessions (see "Simulations" below).

   a. Technical Issues
   

   (1) Scheduling
   Because we try to have real-time meetings at least once every ten days, we have to coordinate the time. Hawaii is five hours later (and one day earlier) than Japan, and five/six hours earlier than the East Coast.In Japan, most students attend the sessions from a computer laboratory, while on the East Coast, the students access the Internet from their dorms.Of course, the time-differences can create problems with scheduling and conflicts (especially on the East Coast). The difference in semester scheduling also means that the fall semesters are best for doing projects, since Japanese students are not available from January through the end of March, and US colleges usually stop instruction in early May.

   (2) Communications
   Please note that the communications are cross-platform, Mac and Windows. This creates some compatibility problems with hardware (no audio conferencing that is common to both) and with fonts (see "Language" below).

   1. Video
      We have used CuSeeMe video conferencing. It is perhaps the best way to socialize at the beginning stage of a project, and for a final "party" at the conclusion.One requirement: it is essential to have technical support on hand to deal with communication problems, and to test the communications setup at least once a week and a day before the scheduled meeting.We found, for example,some incompatibility between T-1 (U.S.) and ISDN (Japan) connections, which can be very discouraging when trying to meet across cyberspace for the first time and see what your project-mates look like.
   2. e-mail
      We create the following mailing lists:
      - a Kanri list for management team discussions
      - a general list to all students for general announcements
      - team mailing lists for each team, so that members can discuss among themselves their project and plans.
      All members of kanri are also included in the other lists so that they receive the mail traffic of each team.
      
   3. Bulletin board
      We have been using Web Crossing as a medium for posting team discussions (including transcripts of team chat sessions), student essays on topics assigned in relation to their project work (such as essays on educational issues in US and Japan). Fortunately, Web Crossing supports double-byte encoding in its bulletin boards. Unfortunately, it does not have a chatroom function that will allow input or viewing of Japanese (Chinese, or Korean).

   b. Syllabus
   Although this is an inter-institutional project, the students and faculty at each institution consider the project as only one part of their work. Projects normally run for six weeks, i.e. only part of a semester.Motivations for participating may also differ. In the case of Seiryou Commercial High School, participation is a form of becoming internationalized through interaction with people overseas. The students at Chubu University are studying methods of teaching Japanese as a second language, so their motivation is partly to gain experience of possible value in their later work. Hence, only a portion of the syllabi is common to all project members. The remaining portions are specific to the each institution.

Simulations
Members of Kanri occasionally brainstorm ideas during the summer and try them out among themselves (simulate them) before deciding whether or not to include them in the upcoming project.

Monitoring
Kanri members can monitor the projects in three ways: (1) by studying the e-mail exchanges between team members,(2) by accessing the discussions on the Web Crossing Bulletin Board, and (3) by observing the chat sessions and studying the transcripts of them later. The chat rooms were developed at Haverford College in a rather innovative way: There are two kinds of chat room: the rooms for each team and a teachers' room that students can visit to ask questions. The chat room (with navigational buttons to the other rooms) is on the right side of the screen, while the left side allows for the display of a web page, which may, for example, be a Web Crossing page containing a meeting agenda.This particular configuration is valuable for many kinds of activities -- if you care to ask about them :-)

Clinic (new)
This fall we planned a new feature, a language clinic, which allows students to consult with mentors (graduate students in Japanese second language acquisition who are interested in network-based language learning). More work is needed in this area to make it function as originally intended. We realized after beginning the mentor system, that more interaction is neeed between mentors, students, and their teachers in order for everyone to feel comfortable with the system (which did not work very well this first time). Towards the end of the project Yoko Koike at Haverford created a "chat back room," for her students to drop in and ask questions while they were chatting. We expect the next project will include such a chat (and bulletin board) facility, where the instructors from each institution will meet with mentors and students as a means of familiarization, so that all three will be able to communicate more openly and smoothly.

Language Issues
"CJK" (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) are notoriously problematic. Even though the Web is designed to accomodate Unicode, the support is spotty in places, especially Java applets such as Java chats. Chatrooms on the Internet but not on the Web, e.g. MS Chat, AlphaWorld, etc.may or may not support CJK. Usually, if all participants are using native operating systems, i.e.NOT English Windows plus language packs, CJK may work. The chatrooms developed at Haverford work beautifully across platforms and operating systems.

B. New/Other Projects and their Implications

1. Audio chat
   

   I used audio chat in the Global Virtual University (GVU)course on teletranslation mentioned above. We used HearMe, which is fine, but the text chat feature is definitely not useful to language instruction even in European languages. I also experimented with FireTalk and PalTalk, which both have good text chat features in addition. FireTalk allows the participants to speak in full-duplex, while the other two require one to hold down the Control key when speaking.None of these work on the Macintosh, and I have been unable to find any that do, especially (and crucially) cross-platform ones.PalTalk also allows for webcam video, but we have not explored this yet. All these programs allow for multiple participants. We did not consider using Net Meeting, since not all participants have fixed IP addresses and we did not have time to consider how to train them to use it.

   In the teletranslation course, we had the usual spottiness of voice, people complaining that they could not hear, and my frustration of answering a question creatively only to discover nobody could hear it! In the final analysis, however, despite the low bandwidth, it was enjoyable and we developed a good sense of community by using various procedures to encourage open expression of ideas, of ignorance (MOST important!) and camaraderie.We also used a mailing list and bulletin board to provide redundancy and supplemental materials.

   These programs have several appealing features: one can use them while viewing a web page, conduct audio tours of Websites, practice sight-translation of the latter,and could easily adapt them to simulating such activities as shopping, having a party at a restaurant, practicing applying for a job, etc. where the web pages would provide visual support for the audio. These could be either authentic pages or pages created especially for use in a course.

2. Community building
   

   The online course in translation (asynchronous) offered by the University of Hawaii involved students from various places ranging from Scotland to California to Australia, Japan, and HongKong.Half of the students were learning translation between English and Mandarin and the other half between Japanese and English. From the beginning, we encouraged interaction among all the students (in English) and used common English source texts for translation into the other two languages. This enabled all participants to discuss the English source text together and to see what kinds of problems occur when translating into different languages. This discussion made it possible for all participants to get to know each other and to discuss common problems.

3. Data, data, data
   

   We are currently exploring ways of recording the voice chats in the Korean experiment. We would like to create archives of the chats plus their transcripts. At this time, we are especially interested in the nature of the feedback the students get from the native speaker students.(implicit feedback) in all modalities (text chat, email and voice interaction). All of the projects make it easy to collect data on student activity for use in research as long as the ethical procedures are followed.

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