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Languagelab.com
The State of the Industry. A discussion of this weeks ESL news and events including Pearson & Ning, Babbel & Livemocha, India & the $35 USD laptop, eduFire & Camelback Education and asynchronous content, live lessons and social games in education.
For all the videos and analysis visit Kristen Winkler’s Blog
Eye of Providence
In our quest to provide students with ever more real content we will be holding anart exhibition this month.
Professional photographer Dušan Kochol, who is currently exhibiting his work in Oxford and Warsaw, will be displaying his “Eye of Providence” Series (sample above, details below) in the English City museum.
Opportunities for language exchange for students will include the chance to meet the artist, gallery owners, art buyers and art critiques from around the world.
In the Eye of Providence series, photographer Dusan Kochol illuminates how we lead our lives sightlessly under the scrutiny of the Eye of Providence. He asks: Do we follow because we cannot see or does the blind Eye of Providence lead? The Eye of Providence in this work is not only a symbol of religion but also the embodiment of personal beliefs and feelings as well as goals and aspirations. We seek leadership in our groups, states or societies. The contrasting inquiry is a reflection on whether it is truly beneficial for humans to see, or if life under the direction of the Eye of Providence is easier. Will the individual that pulls down the blindfold be identified as a fool, as in Plato‘s allegory of shadows on the cave wall?
Update 8th July 2010
My Appearence on Review:ED with Kirsten Winkler
We talked about
Bring on the learning revolution! (Ken Robinson’s new TED talk)
Another great video from Sir Ken Robinson. He outlines 3 things that represent the old industrial model of education (that we currently use):
Sir Ken makes the point that human flourishing is not a mechanical process but a human one. Education needs to move to a model where people can develop their own solutions, with external support, based on a personalised curriculum.
This is very relevant to the ELT industry. Everything in the traditional ELT world is linear, from courses to course books and even online materials. They all seem to be based on the idea that there is one single path to achieve your objective and that this path is best for everyone.
Linearity was abandoned long ago at Languagelab, we don’t do courses or fixed timetables or insist you go though materials in any specific order. As soon as we did results improved dramatically.
The same applies for conformity and batching people. We allow people to choose the classes, times and sequence that best suits them rather than insisting they move at the pace of a group. It allows students to customise their learning to their needs, it is personalising education to the people you are teaching.
The testing we have done tells us this new model easily outperforms the old. If more people tried it I expect they would find the same were true.
One of our most successful and least explained methodologies is Character driven learning. Here is a short video of me explaining this technique and some of it’s results for the virtual round table 2010.
Video: Me talking about Task Based Learning in Virtual Worlds @ IATEFL
Tweet Stream (Thanks all):
