To sum it up, Chinswing is a short of audio-based discussion board: it’s a place where you can post your question or thought to create a conversation (or to answer an existing one) and wait for others to reply in the same fashion. Besides, it gives you the option of keeping a watchlist and get updates via RSS subscription. Conversations can be downloaded as podcasts. Every piece of discussion is searchable by categories or tags (what they call ‘keywords’).

Image 1 from Chinswing FAQ:

Image 2 from Chinswing FAQ:

This a tool with a lot of potential benefits for the foreign language learning environment:

• Learners can trigger their own discussions in an authentic environment.
• They can engage with the speakers of the target language.
• It can turn podcasts into a more interactive activity.

There are many applications, that’ll depend on our imagination (taking into account learners’ level and their language needs):

• Storytelling: chain of events, follow this story (unguided or guided).
• Storytelling: reverse storytelling.
• Agreement/disagreement: practicing agreement/disagreement expressions over hot issues.
• Literature classes: guess the work, a learner triggers the chain by reciting or reading some poetry or prose from a famous literary work, the rest of the students have to first guess where that comes from and continue.
• Independent, autonomous learner: give it a try on your own, find a category or channel you like and take a plunge! (you have to be a risk-taker, languages are not  -only- a dead set of grammatical rules, it’s about speaking and understanding).

What I miss or dislike from the technological point of view:

• Embedding: that we could embed that box in our spaces (WP, Facebook, etc.)
• You can’t share it with other social media sites.
• No private threads.
• Can conversations/replies/comments be deleted?
• There’s no option for text answers, or notes. This would be a useful option for those at work, for instance.
• APIs: Chinswing could be integrated in free/open content or learning management systems in order to substitute textual forums. That’d probably give this app a boost.
• Terms of agreement: why can’t I be the owner of my own content? why can’t we choose from a set of Creative Commons licenses?

Final thoughts:

Despite I do recommend using this tool from the FL perspective, from a general one (i.e. not educational), I wonder if Chinswing has gained ground when people are using Twitter to raise questions, carry out polls, etc. Of course, Chinswing offers that added value of going beyond the textual world, but that can be its own setback. On the one hand, we can  use Twitter at work, home, etc. However, not everyone can record messages from their workplace.  On the other,  text works as a shield for shy folks, whereas voice doesn’t. Voice is identifiable and definitely less neutral than text. And last but not least, time crunch. If we seem not to have time to leave comments anymore, or to keep up with our social media connections…if we are definitely backing up that (in)famous 1% rule (are we really engaged or just nuggetized?), will we have time to record our own questions or will we just twit them? In order to answer that question, it might be interesting to know that Chinswing was launched 2 years ago and it hasn’t reached critical mass…

*Cruel* network effect is the darwinian filter of current flurry of 2.0 technologies.

Or isn’t it?

(Chinswing via Twine “Conversations, Learning and Change“, item added by Levy Rivers on 10/25/08)

Tags: audio, Chinswing, EFL, ELE, podcast, social conversation, speak, Twitter, web 2.0

Catching up with Twines, I get to a blog called This Is Indexed, where I find this simple but yet effective definition of what web 2.0 means (to Jessica, the author, and many more). I revamped it with Gimp (I’m useless at drawing), and added a 3rd axis. We could add a 4th one: value (i.e. whether more quantity means more quality or more quality comes from selective aggregation…”if the more users, the better the app gets”…can we say the same thing about the social networks we belong to? my own list of contacts?). More axes?

Tags: community, infoxication, redes sociales, social network, web 2.0

The PhD thesis is writing me (no sic, intended), I hope that excuses my [forced - painful] blog silence.

A year ago I published a post on comic strip generators with ideas for the foreign language classroom. Today, I’m going to post about YACG…or yet another comic generator: Pixton (via L’Atelier).

Pixton is a comic generator application aimed at young audiences (kids and teens). Pixton provides us with 3 different types of application:

Pixton for Fun: for everyone. You need to register for an account (that requires parents’ email and phone). What I like about Piston is their focus on the community since they allow you to share, and more important, remix other people’s creations.

Pixton for Schools: Pixton gives you the option of setting up a sort of walled VLE for your own school groups and classes plus access to a bank of resources, but this isn’t free. A yearly subscription is around 250$.

Collaborative Pixton: More or less the same, a private web-based environment for teamworking. You have to contact the company if interested in this option.

So for the common end user interested in free 2.0 tools, there’s only one option: Pixton for Fun. However, despite that feature I like (i.e.remixing), I’d recommend you to choose another comic generator application. Why? First of all, the option for schools is not free, so you’d have to use the general one, Pixton for Fun, whose drag-and-drop interface is as easy as others, but whose graphics are poorer than the applications I reviewed a year ago. But, most importantly, I read their Terms of Agreement (yes, that small print almost no one reads) and this is what I got:

UPDATED 19/NOV/08: Pixton changed their Terms and removed this clause. Now you can read the following:

1. Remixes

   Whenever you publish a comic on the Website, you are given the option of making it remixable. In choosing this option, you grant other Pixton™ users the right to edit, adapt, translate, modify, or otherwise change your comic in any way, using only the Pixton™ editor to do so, and subject to these Terms.

I guess most of the sites I’ve registered to have the same clause but a couple of months ago I decided to lead by example and started to read the terms of agreement. What if you decide to include those comic strips in a textbook or your students decide to sell printed merchandise with them?

Comics can be a great way of practicing storytelling techniques and constructive creation (by remixing existing comic strips) and might empower learners developing their sense of agency and autonomy. But before you consider using this or that application, go through the Terms of Agreement, and work through the interface options. You never know which devil you’re selling your soul to, ;).

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Tags: Comic strip, comics, EFL, web 2.0

I never asked you for anything.

Warning, unprecedented begging mode (and it’s not self-promoting mode by any means):

I don’t feel comfortable with contests, best blogs and stuff like that. But Cristopher and the rest of the team at Lexiophiles have included my blog in their complete list of 250 top language, education and learning blogs. And then, they came up with their TOP 100 LANGUAGE BLOGS and my blog is -quite unbelievably- their number 4. If you think they made a mistake and mine should be number 150, it’s ok, don’t do anything (and please leave you name below so that I can see you a nice postcard :)) but if you like my ramblings and completely unscientific posts here and you think they deserve that place or a better one, I’d appreciate if you give this blog a vote.

/end of begging mode.

Thank you very much and stay tuned.

I came across this yet another tool for our Personal Learning Environment (PLE): Cohere, a free tool from the Open University (via this Martin Weller’s food-for-thought post on FLOSS and eLearning).

It’s basically a tool for sense-making (one of the first things we do when we learn, formally or informally, any sort of subject: we negotiate the meaning of our own inputs).

What’s Cohere?

Or quote from their site:

About Cohere

We experience the information ocean as streams of media fragments, flowing past us in every modality.

To make sense of these, learners, researchers and analysts must organise them into coherent patterns.

Cohere is an idea management tool for you to annotate URLs with ideas, and weave meaningful connections between ideas for personal, team or social use.

Key Features

• Annotate a URL with any number of Ideas, or vice-versa.
• Visualize your network as it grows
• Make connections between your Ideas, or Ideas that anyone else has made public or shared with you via a common Group
• Use Groups to organise your Ideas and Connections by project, and to manage access-rights
• Import your data as RSS feeds (eg. bookmarks or blog posts), to convert them to Ideas, ready for connecting
• Use the RESTful API services to query, edit and mashup data from other tools.

Cohere is a visual tool that helps you create, connect and share ideas. It’s a KM mapping tool that runs on the web (=webOS), designed to help answer critical questions such as : “Who supports this idea?”, “Show me examples of that phenomenon”, “What are the limitations of this methodology?”.

There’s a Firefox add-on to make connections with Cohere -which I’ve already installed-. Firstly, sign up at Cohere and then download the FF add-on. Finally, I recommend you to read their Quickstart guide.

Tags: Cohere, mapping, Open University, Personal Learning Environment, PLE, web 2.0

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the
fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. (Mark Weiser, 1991).

That’d be the real paradigm shift.

Tags: non-disruptive, social web, ubiquitous, utopia, web 2.0, Web 3.0

It’s a great day. It feels great. Something in the air.

Feel like participating in the post? or just reading?

I provide the soundtrack, this superb piece of music called Yes, We Can Can by The Pointer Sisters (lyrics here). Feel the music and add something to this empty video waiting to be filled up with your stuff, it can be a picture, a video, a jpg. powerpoint slide…yours or CC licensed.

C’mon and participate…they say web is full of lurkers. Let’s give Kaltura a try, let’s see if it works properly (please report any problem here). Just click on “upload” or “remix” and choose “video” “audio” or “photo”, easy as pie. You can also leave your name below, as a comment. This is the sort of risky post, where the author ends up all alone…

Vamos y participa…dicen que la web está llena de mirones. Usaremos Kaltura, vamos a probarla a ver qué tal funciona (cualquier fallo que encuentres compártelo). Simplemente cliquea en “upload”  o en “remix” y elige qué tipo de medio vas a añadir. Es muy fácil, no necesitas saber nada. Sube al menos una! Puedes dejar tu nombre y comentar qué subiste si quieres (en comentarios). El típico post arriesgado donde el autor termina solo…

YES WE CAN, CAN by The Pointer Sisters.

Let’s create it together (I’ve added some pics already, plus the song):

free video player & video platform - interactive video, online video solution: video player, video editor - kaltura
wordpress video - wordpress plugin for integrated video on video blogs, and video tools

Tags: collaborative video, Kaltura, web 2.0

I’ve recently installed the following plugins (better late than never):

1. OPENID: I’m still checking if it’s worth a try. I hope it doesn’t bring me problems (i.e. trolls ;))  Now, you can leave comments with your OpenID.

2. Notify of followup comments: When you leave a comment and want to be notified when someone else replies to yours. (You can also subscribe to the blog’s general RSS Comments -check the sidebar-).

3. Going semantic: Dolors Reig from El Caparazón recommended me to install the Wordpress SIOC Exporter (plus the Semantic Radar add-on for Firefox). Next plan is to install a FOAF plugin.

4. Clear posts archive: Here, on the right, you can find the “All posts | Archive”  link, where you can browse all the posts published here (as I already explained here, the previous entries link at the bottom of the main page won’t work, due to some sort of incompatibility between Wordpress and servers running on Windows or something like that. It’s a bug affecting many WP users after WP 2.5 upgrade but WP won’t listen to us -probably because they don’t know how to solve it and the solutions they provided didn’t work-).

Thanks for staying tuned!

Great post | rant by D’Arcy Norman: Defining PLE. I couldn’t agree more.

More from D’Arcy Norman on PLEing.

I encourage/invite you to create your graph showing your PLE, and more specifically your PLEing for learning English.

Tags: EFL, PLE, web 2.0

After testing Twine for several months, and probably due to this inner maverick -not cranky- surge, I’ve come to conclude Twine isn’t so web 3.0, whatever web 3.0 is. And yet, whatever web 3.0 is, I think web 3.0 should be about getting rid of infoxication 2.0, about helping us find and isolate individual items rather than compile (our search hits), about deleting duplicated items…

I’m following dozens of Twines, I’ve created quite a few too, and I’m starting to feel dizzy: Twine won’t let me adjust and filter the twines, I’m getting duplicated content (because we can add the same piece of content to different twines), the system is not as intelligent to do that filtering for me. If you post a bookmark that is already in Twine you get duplicated items, even if you post to the same Twine.

[<apologies> and if Twine allows me to solve that, show me how and where exactly because I might be too dumb to find that option </apologies>]

I’d like to have, for instance, all that related to tag “education + cloud computing” in a single twine, feeding automatically and without my intervention from other twines and connections posting stuff on “education + cloud computing”, getting rid of duplicated content…just like I can do with Yahoo! Pipes...wouldn’t it be great to come up with an application like Yahoo! Pipes + social Twine (but more user-friendly)? That would be closer to web 3.0 or you name it.

How come is all semantic and searchable and stuff when I’m swamped by duplicated content in every single Twine digest/feed I get?

The web is unstructured data (and as Tim Berners-Lee said at Web 3.0 Conference, most of those unstructured data are people’s assertions and opinions)…and semantic web should be able to discover meaning from that unstructured data. Twine is not doing that either. Twine works well when the url you’re adding, for example, has a structured data behind (proper summary, relevant tags, etc) but when the url doesn’t have that, Twine won’t make it for you.

Not to mention Twine’s site and how odd the process of deleting twines is, among other usability shortcomings.

And yet, human nature is optimistic -at least mine-, could Twine’s search and relational database technology wind up as a real 3.0 semantic FINDER?

UPDATE: “For ‘Web 3.0′ to be meaningful we’ll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology … I find myself particularly irritated by definitions of ‘Web 3.0′ that are basically descriptions of Web 2.0″ (O’Reilly)

To me: I don’t care about the number, the only thing I know as an end-user is that to be acclaimed as a new paradigm of web technology it has to improve previous ones and differ and evolve from them in different ways.

So far, Twine is a social content compiler. Nice, but when it comes to grasping dozens of Twines, I’m afraid you need something else. I’ll keep on using Twine to see if my wish comes true or till I get too much disappointed or pessimistic (or just swept away).

• Filtering twines feeds.
• Eliminating duplicated content -automatically-.
• When you start a twine on a given topic the system should tell you about other existing twines on the topic.
• Piping and merging twines.

Twine: a little less text, a little more visualization:

• Visualization of related twines network.
• Visualization of twine members’ connections.
• You get to a twine: sleek and clean visual organization of stuff: a globe for urls, a piece of paper for files, a screen for videos, and so on so forth.

Si no sabes lo que es Twine, un excelente post del Caparazón.

More:

-Semantic or contextual web?

Or maybe it’s time for vertical | specialized search engines such as Truevert…? (so every single cycle is repeated again and again: advent of horizontal and eclectic apps>early adoption>disappointment and/or infoxication>advent of vertical and specialized apps, just like happened to social networks).

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Tags: infoxication, Relational database, Semantic Web, Twine, web 2.0, Web 3.0, Yahoo Pipes