English has gone global - Understanding Language - week 4 reflection/course conclusion #FLlanguage #MOOC

Global English is a major component of the MA in English Language Teaching that the University of Southampton offers in partnership with the British Council; the same MA that this MOOC has served as a brief introduction/teaser for and was very much being crammed down my throat in this final week!

The focus of week 4 of the Understanding Language MOOC was on english as a lingua franca - a language that is utilised for communication between two or more individuals who do not share a native language - and a consideration of the emergence of the controversial new Global English. 

As with weeks 2&3, I did not gain much from this fourth and final week of the MOOC. Ultimately, while it has provided some new insights, I have largely found the Understanding Language MOOC to be a huge disappointment. 

Week 4 notes, there were not many.

The week  dealt with the historical spread of the english language across the globe while considering whether this was necessarily a good thing and then used this foundation to consider the global presence of the english language today. 

In particular, it's role as a lingua franca a.k.a. a go-between language in international fields, such as academic, the UN, etc., was discussed; as was the emergence of english language variants which exist and vary precisely because english has been absorbed by so many different cultures and has been adapted accordingly. 

This area of teaching and research that is focused on english language variants has become known as Global English and it is quite controversial. Ultimately, Global English is a major component of the MA in English Language Teaching that the University of Southampton offers in partnership with the British Council; the same MA that this MOOC has served as a brief introduction/teaser for and was very much being crammed down my throat in this final week! 

Kill the tuition fee and no problem.

One of the incentives for universities to create MOOCs is so that they can advertise their institution's expertise and course catalogue in the hope that you might be persuaded to sign up for something - I have no problem with MOOCs doing this. However, if the MOOC offers you next to nothing while it is trying to win you over - as I have found to be the case with the Understanding Language MOOC - I am going to be very annoyed!

Yeah, I was not very enthralled by this final week or the way in which it did not really tie together the weeks that came before it! 

Overall, the Understanding Language MOOC has just felt too much like the University of Southampton was trying to sell me the MA in English Language Teaching, opposed to actually teaching me something new. 

I was very surprised because the University of Southampton also produced the Web Science MOOC I am quite big on and, while that was also advertising a new degree they have started at their institution, the MOOC itself offers you an awful lot on its own!

However, not long after the Understanding Language MOOC concluded, FutureLearn announced a new batch of courses and the one created by the University of Bristol caught my eye: Cultural Studies and Modern Language: An Introduction. 

I have already signed up, it sounds very promising...

"By the end of the course, you will have heard twelve examples about how language and artifacts contribute to culturation and development; collectively these examples will introduce you to a methodology on how to understand other cultures."

While the Understanding Language MOOC has been a bit of a let down, it has at least started to introduce me to the conceptual foundations of language learning, so with any luck the Cultural Studies and Modern Languages MOOC will build on those conceptual foundations and fully set me on my way to start learning another language somewhere down the line.

You can read my other posts on the Understanding Language MOOC below:

• Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching MOOC - Commencement
• Do you take my meaning? Understanding Language - Week 1 Reflection
• Classrooms and Technology - Understanding Language - Weeks 2&3 reflection

Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business - specialisation is a go

One of the primary focuses for all of the studying I have been doing over the past year has been to demystify the many intimidating intricacies of entrepreneurship. 

However, in order to now consolidate all of the disparate pieces of that learning, in addition to bridging any gaps that still remain in my knowledge, I have enrolled myself on the Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business specialisation as offered by the University of Maryland on Coursera.

A brief overview of the specialisation.

Being a specialisation this is a little different to the MOOCs I have taken in the past, mainly because it is made up of three separate MOOCs; with a final capstone project in which I will have to produce a portfolio demonstrating my learning from the three MOOCs. 

I am also paying for this one.

However, at the successful completion of the full cycle of the specialisation I will have gained a verified specialisation certificate and, hopefully, I will finally possess a thorough and working knowledge of the entrepreneurial process.

Specilisations (combining MOOCs) are a new offering my coursera, no doubt other platforms with follow.

The specialisation is broken down into the following subject areas and timespans: 

1. Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship, 01/12/2014 - 01/01/2015
2. Innovation for Entrepreneurs: From Idea to Marketplace, 05/01/2015 - 05/02/2015
3. New Venture Finance: Startup Funding for Entrepreneurs, 09/02/2015 - 09/03/2015
4. Entrepreneurship Capstone, 02/03/2015 - 20/04/2015

I am already three weeks into the first MOOC and I am already finding the workload to be pretty intensive, but hugely rewarding! 

I have spent a good while looking/waiting for an adequate online entrepreneurship course to undertake and this specialisation looks and feels like it really does fit the bill. 

I have already undertaken a few others on FutureLearn - Innovation and Enterprise, Starting a Business: Realise Your Vision,  Innovation: The Key to Business Success - and while these did provide many useful insights (which will be invaluable here), overall they just felt a little too loose and in many ways they lacked the no-nonsense cohesive approach of this specialisation. 

#3 Overall Business Course on Coursera.

The first MOOC of the specialisation was named the #1 entrepreneurship course on coursera and the University of Maryland's Master of Technology Entrepreneurship, which this specialisation is sourced from, also looks very promising, so I feel like I am in safe hands with this specialisation. 

I will not be posting a reflection for each week of the specialisation, as that will not be manageable in terms of time or the amount of content I would have to cover. Instead I will be posting a learning reflection at the end of each of the three MOOCs, with maybe a few additional relevant posts here or there. 

And the capstone? 

Well, no idea. I will deal with that one when I get there. 

If I get there that is... 

Classrooms and Technology - Understanding Language - weeks 2&3 reflection #FLlanguage #MOOC

I believe that the current expansion into online learning is starting to change this and all these online MOOCs offer additional study resources for students and educators to exploit. I believe there now needs to be a greater cohesion between face-to-face learning and online learning programs, as both offer merits that supports the other. Knowledge is great, but the human being evolved as a result of being a social animal.

I have bundled weeks 2 and 3 of the Understanding Language MOOC together because they are really two sides of the same coin. 

Week 2: Language Teaching in the Classroom deals with traditional classroom based methods of teaching language

and

Week 3: Technology in Language Learning and Teaching deals with progressive forms of language acquisition and it's tutelage in today's digital focused world.

This reflection will be a short one mainly because I drew far less from weeks 2 and 3. The content of weeks 2 and 3 was not a poor quality, but rather it was mostly material that I had covered previous and from my point of view is pretty common sense.

 Week 2: Language Teaching in the Classroom 

The main emphasis of week 2 is on the classroom, the 'community' therein and how the construction of this collaborative community and the relationship between educators and students is intricately important in the acquisition of new languages.

A key point that is made is the difference between naturalist and classroom teaching which is to say that there exists a huge difference between learning a language in a classroom setting opposed to acquiring it by immersing yourself in the everyday culture for which the language you are learning is utilised. 

A classroom is a community of practice.

In addition to using the classroom setting to break down a language to it's conceptual foundations, the real challenge for language educators is to structure their programs of study in such a way as to also stimulate naturalists/spontaneous language exchange within in the classroom and its culture of students: 

"in the 1970s and '80s, we went through a phase of thinking that classrooms should really imitate naturalistic language learning, and classrooms should be imitating first language learning. I think research in recent decades has told us that that's too simple a story, that classroom learning is a more complex business than that. Yes indeed, classrooms need to provide input, and need to provide a focus on meaning, and on learners making their own meanings, but classrooms also need to provide other things. First of all, it's been shown clearly that classrooms can help learners by actually developing their conceptual understanding of language, giving them key ideas that will help them make sense of the structure of the new language."  

- Professor Rosamund Mitchell, Understanding Language educator

Unfortunately, I am not really interested in teaching language learning, only in learning a language and most of week 2's content was aimed at language educators. 

The above point about the different between naturalist and classroom was not the only main point of the second week, but it is the only thing I have really taken from it - knowledge and experiential acquisition is not all done within the classroom, BUT the classroom can still help a great deal.

As ever, it's case of the best learning is done as a 50/50 split between practical and theoretical practice - something I learned while undertaking my undergraduate degree and presented as a welcome reminder here!

Certainly, I will be bearing this in mind when I do learn a language, whatever that language ends up being...

 Week 3: Technology in Language Learning and Teaching 

Week 3 of the Understanding Language MOOC was centered around the conceptual explorations of language learning in the digital classroom. A great deal of consideration was directed towards the differences between face to face learning and online learning and what makes an effective online educator. 

The basic success requirements of online learning.

As this blog will testify, I am big on digital and online learning, as I have already gained a great deal from it and I can see that it has ongoing potential that has yet to be fully tapped into, as I said in the comments section of week 3:

"This is my 36th online course and I have used various different online learning platforms. Overall, I have found it be a vastly more rewarding experience compared to face-to-face learning. The flexibility and choice online learning offers you means that you can tailor your learning to meet the requirements of your own personal development criteria. 

When I was at university, while I did adhere to the taught program of study, I found myself branching off to seek out other areas of learning that my degree program was not fulfilling, such as basic life and career skills that would enable me to actually utilise my degree when I graduated! This is a common complaint among students and academia seems to think it is okay to exist in a bubble that is far removed from reality. 

I believe that the current expansion into online learning is starting to change this and all these online MOOCs offer additional study resources for students and educators to exploit. I believe there now needs to be a greater cohesion between face-to-face learning and online learning programs, as both offer merits that supports the other. 

Knowledge is great, but the human being evolved as a result of being a social animal." 

This social aspect was touched on briefly at the end of week 3 in the MOOC's consideration of connectivist learning.

Connectivist learning - I'm doing it with this blog!

Connectivist learning  basically refers to the sharing of informative resources and discussions via discussion forums, social networks, etc., and certainly with something like language acquisition, conducting in this connectivist on an international cyberspace, the usefulness of connectivist interactions in language learning should be plain.

However, as with the second week, the third week was mainly geared towards the students who aim to go and teach language, either in the classroom or online. OR, as I pointed out, to teach language vastly more effectively by utilising a combination of classroom and online teaching.  

Ultimately, what these two weeks taught me is that if I do eventually learn a new language, then the process of learning I should employ is the process of learning I am already utilising. 

Up next...

English has gone global - Understanding Language - week 4 reflection/course conclusion

A little ill, a lot slower and all because of STRESS - a warning to any individual who actually wants to get somewhere

This post is as much of a reminder to me, as it is a warning for others... enduring high levels of ongoing stress is just not worth the cost to your general wellbeing... The quickest ways to kill someone of natural causes is to put them in a pressure-centric situation for a prolonged period. The most terrifying part of this proposal is that it's not a proposal, we have a society that is built around these situations - we commonly call them 9-5 careers.

First I got a cold, then I got a really bad sinus infection, then they both cleared up and now I have a chest infection - all within the space of 3 weeks!

The irony is that I am a ridiculously health conscious freak and I have no underlying health conditions.

So why have I suffered so many ailments in such a short period of time?

 Stress. 

For over 5 weeks now, I have been working myself way too hard. 

I have been doing a lot of overtime for my (usually part-time) t-shirt folding job and I have effectively been working full-time for the past 5 weeks in order to bring in a little extra cash (I have hated every second of it).

I have been quite uncompromising because even though I have temporarily been working full-time, I have not wanted to fall behind with my studying and creative project - the focuses that actually matter and will get me somewhere - so I have been using every waking second to work.

It has been very stressful.

It has literally been a pattern of working a shift, studying, exercising, sleeping, working a shift, studying, exercising, sleeping, working a shift, studying, exercising, sleep and absolutely zero downtime for the past 5 weeks!

Except for my birthday, when I went to London to see Interstellar in IMAX - ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING - it was also a set of three days when my cold and sinuses cleared up and I felt fine, odd that. 

I only have a minor chest infection, but I'm still ill and I hate being ill, it just slows you down and makes you feel rotten.

A chest infection is the final straw, I am cutting way back so that this infection will clear up without any complications and when I am back to normal, which will probably coincide with the New Year, I am going to be instigating quite a few radical lifestyle changes, more on these later...

 The truth about stress and why you should do your absolute best to avoid it 

Stress, which is almost always associated with someone's job, is one of the primary reasons I am very anti-traditional-work-patterns and by that I mean the jobs that make you work 9-5, five days a week with constant stress and pressure - absolutely ridiculous!

And the last 5 weeks only go to show just how right I am.

Do not compromise until you are earning a living doing something you feel absolutely passionate about, because if you are working a stress-filled job that you absolutely despise, that stress-filled, 5-9, 5 days a week job will take over your life and will damage your wellbeing according.

Put a very high value on your time and an even higher one on your wellbeing.

There are no excuses when it comes to maintaining a high level of wellbeing, nothing is more important, not even money. 

Although, you would be pretty stupid to think that was the case and yet so many people do!

I hear it all the time - "It's a really stressful job, but it's worth it and I handle stress really well."

Bullshit.

It is not physiologically possible to endured long and persistent bouts of stress.

Human beings evolved to handle stress in very short doses, when our ancestors were out hunting and gathering, if they encountered a predator then their continued survival would depend on their ability to act fast in the best possible way in order to successfully navigate such a life endangering situation.

Therefore, in such situations, an endangered human body would get a superfast hit of a hormone called cortisol a.k.a. the stress hormone, which, as this article on stress and cortisol states, gives the endangered human:

• A quick burst of energy for survival reasons
• Heightened memory functions
• A burst of increased immunity
• Lower sensitivity to pain
• Helps maintain homeostasis in the body

And we still possess this hormonal response today, it's what you feel when someone sneaks up on you and you jump out of your skin.

but our bodies can only handle these cortisol induced hyper-states in short bursts, because the cortisol hormone response demands an awful lot from the human body and after a while, if you are finding yourself in continual stressful situations, the cortisol hormone will just wear down your body.

You can never fully eliminate stress from you life, but you can put it in its place.

The quickest ways to kill someone of natural causes is to put them in a pressure-centric situation for a prolonged period. The most terrifying part of this proposal is that  it's not a proposal, we have a society that is built around these situations - we commonly call it the 9-5 career. 

I have no data to back this up but if you were to go back through history and looked at all of the physical and mental health problems that have plagued human kind you would see a definite correlation between the exercise of the idiotic 9-5 work pattern and general human suffering.

Yeah, my chest infection has put me into a bit of a festering mood!

Stress is one of the biggest killers on this planet.

The cortisol hormone is deviously good at severely weakening your immune system when produced in large quantities over a prolonged period of time - hence why I now have an agonising chest infection!

 A warning and a reminder 

For many years I have known of the health problems that stress can cause mainly because I have suffered so many in the past; in fact every single health problem I have had in the past has always started from an over-worked and overstressed state of not-very-wellbeing.

I have really let myself down here and I should have known better, because I do know better!

So now I have killed all of the dreaded overtime and will be focusing back more towards my studies, which are rarely ever too stressful, because I am in control of my studies and, therefore, I am in control of how much stress those studies induce.

Ultimately, this post is as much of a reminder to me, as it is a warning for others.

Heed my warning.

Enduring high levels of ongoing stress is just not worth the cost to your general wellbeing.

If you are overworked, then something has got to give, because at the end of the day, If you're dead, it's game over.

The web is not an exact science - Web Science - week 1 reflection #FLwebsci #MOOC

Web Science is inherently transdisciplinary as it is employs many analytical techniques and knowledge bases from other subjects, such as economics, law, psychology, sociology, computer science, etc., hence why I am drawn so much to this subject. The aim is for Web Science to operate very much outside of the box in order to consider the thing we have come to call the web - a thing that keeps growing, that keeps changing and that is anything but an exact science!

Back in February I started the Web Science MOOC as presented by the University of Southampton on FutureLearn, but I struggled to find a way into sticking with the essential focus of its topic. 

What is Web Science?

The main problem was that I lacked a technological foundational understanding in how the web actually works on a software and hardware basis. Therefore, after completing the first-and-a-half weeks, I decided that I would come back to the MOOC at a later date, once I possessed a better foundational understanding.

One of the great things about many MOOC platforms is that they let you retain access to the course materials long after the course has completed.

However, now that I have dabbled a little with coding and have (nearly) finished the Internet History, Technology and Security MOOC, I now possess a basic understanding of the operational processes behind the internet. 

Additionally, while I was undertaking the Internet History, etc. MOOC and also its kindred Introduction to Cyber Security MOOC, I noticed that my attention kept shifting back to this Web Science MOOC.

As I was coming to understand the workings of the internet, I noticed that I started to look at my daily usage of the internet in a very different way: a very analytical manner not too dissimilar to the perspective the Web Science MOOC had started to nurture in me...

Web Science - an introduction to a bold new academic discipline.

Web Science is inherently transdisciplinary as it is employs many analytical techniques and knowledge bases from other subjects, such as economics, law, psychology, sociology, computer science, etc., hence why I am drawn so much to this subject. The aim is for Web Science to operate very much outside of the box in order to consider the thing we have come to call the web - a thing that keeps growing, that keeps changing and that is anything but an exact science!

The tangled pre-history of the web.

Week 1 of the MOOC provides a brief pre-history and and recent history of the web and this is something that Internet History, etc. has gone into vastly more detail and is accordingly vastly more enlightening. 

Tim Berners-Lee is where the 'web' begins, he is not where the 'internet' begins.

I believe this lack of in-depth consideration of the various phases of the webs history is where I felt really let down and unclear about when I first undertook the MOOC back in February. 

However, I can not really blame the course as it is called 'web science', not 'internet science' and, therefore, is not concerned with the web's precursor before Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 (also the year I was born). Obviously you will need to possess some historical background context for this subject, but for a short course offering, such as this MOOC, you can only expect it to cover so much.

Ultimately, the aim of this short course MOOC is to supply you with the basic tools in order to encourage you to proactively think much more analytically about the web, how it is changing the world and what role you have to play in this new technology. 

One of the best ways in which the MOOC achieves this in week 1 is in its consideration of technological determinism and in questioning its position that technology is shaped by society in social construction.

Does technology shape society or does society shape technology?

The argument for and against technological determinism was something that was heavily touched upon in the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC I undertook previously. While the concept of technological determinism was introduced to me I did not really grapple with its larger implications.

E-Learning and Digital Cultures was not a MOOC with which I really thoroughly stuck.

Additionally, technological determinism is not something that was really dealt with in my Film and Screen Studies BA (Hons) either, as technological determinism is something that is more integral in Media Communications concerns. 

However, while it was never the primary agenda, technological determinism can be seen to have a part to play in my theoretical dissertation Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle; essentially that the new technologies of cinema were arising out of a consumer demand for bigger film experience immersion. 

Therefore, my view is very much in favour of social construction, not technological determinism, and this is the same view that the Web Science MOOC adopts.

Why is a discipline such as Web Science is so integral?

"There are some bits of technological determinism that work. Certainly, the kind of technology in the Web, its openness, its democratic features, those things shape how the Web is. But there are other things which are very much part how we, as human actors and agents and societies, take that technology and do all sorts of different things with it, things that Tim Berners-Lee couldn't even have imagined, so Facebook or Twitter, for example" 

- Catherine Pope, Web Science educator.

Technology does not just change us, it is much more about us influencing technology - the web is a major and direct example of this. 

Social shaping vs. technological determinism - which do you support?

On the whole, social shaping has become the dominant view and the web in particular is a primary example of how society shapes new technologies to fit the needs of society:

"The state of the market, or better, of society is the crucial factor in enabling the development and diffusion of any communications technology or in hindering it. That is as true of the computer chip and the Internet as it was of the telegraph and the telephone. Thus, innovations are the creatures of society in a general sense." 

- Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing, 1996:3.

This is why the further development of a discipline like Web Science is so strongly advocated and needed. 

Certainly, in terms of Film and Media disciplines, this is what I was getting at in Ways of Being: 

"In short, there is too much indifference in Film Studies.The discipline is too focused on cave-like thinking and film theory of the past; a pantheon of knowledge that is becoming continuously outdated and finding itself at odds with new advancements and diversifications, such as the digital re-birth and large format hypercinema. Film scholars have always sought to understand the spectator’s and spectacle’s mutual pursuit of enlightenment; while they have uncovered aspects of it, there still does not exist a single unifying explanation of the profound processes of that relationship" 

- Ways of Being, 2013:105.

However, while my focus may have been towards Film and Media disciplines, by not considering the networking-and-interactions of these technologies and processes is insane and this is very much the incentive behind creating Ways 2 Interface.

Some notes I made while planning out Ways 2 Interface.

I have created Ways 2 Interface as a web blog precisely because it is considering the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle in film and media as connected globally in the thing we have called the web - it is analysing the the very thing of which it is a part. 

"Everything that has been presented throughout this paper is representative of the shift in thinking that is slowly taking place alongside the digitalisation of cinema and needs to continue to take place! In moving away from the cave, we have stopped viewing spectacle content on a screen, and we now experience and interact with it via an interface. If there is a great deal of neurobiological participation happening on the spectator’s part, then perhaps this offers a more accurate way to talk about the process by which the spectator interfaces with any type of film spectacle. While this section can not hope to provide many answers to the questions it has raised, one obvious conclusion should be apparent - all these diverging means of experiencing the world will continue to have huge implications on our ways of being in the world"

- Ways of Being, 2013:151.

Ultimately, the web has adopted cinema into its paradigm and this is the reason for why I am so fascinated by the web - it's a direct and vastly intricate expression of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle like we have never seen before!

Certainly, Web Science will be huge help and an additional component of this transdisciplinary consideration I have taken up.

Is the web guaranteed to exists indefinitely? 

I am currently undertaking quite a few MOOCs (as always) and while I do plan to finally work my through and finish the Web Science MOOC, it may not be any time soon, I will be engaging with the MOOC materials whenever I can make the time for them.

However, I do not think that making time will be a problem as it is clear that the knowledge this MOOC will nurture in me will have a clear and primary role to play in my further studies and research interests.

The web a.k.a. unlimited potential. We have barely scratched the surface. 

The web is for everyone and for everything, but it is not an exact science, it is something that we have to keep working at in regards to how we further develop it and how we continue to analyse it.

That's Web Science.