Before and After Webheads

Dear Webheads,

Some members have joined Webheads with a little bit of experience or at least previous knowledge about CMC tools, teaching and, or, learning online. Webheads has meant opportunities for putting that knowledge into practice and enhace it with new explorations and findings. For others, like me, it has meant starting from scratch.

As a recognition, of what I have learned and keep learning with Webheads, I have put up a page, where you can see what my progress has been: Below is the entrance page, and you have 2 roads, one is the link to "before joining Webheads" and the the link to my home page, everything that is there is due to my joining WIA, starting with the creation of web pages.

http://dafnegon.tripod.com/myjourneywithwebheads/

If you want to go straight to the "before" page this is the url:

http://dafnegon.tripod.com/myjourneywithwebheads/id2.html

Once you go to the "before" page, go to my home page, and scroll down the page, you will see that it was created in February last year. On February 23, it will be a year that I showed it to Vance for the first time.

Have you created web pages since you joined WIA?

Have you enhanced your "before Webheads"-pages content after your joining WIA?

Have you used what you have learned here with your students and/or colleagues?

How?  In conferences?, in your classes?

I am very curious about this, in fact, I have been talking about this issues with some other Weheads. What happens with what we learn here?  We have already heard some of us talking about the recognition from  our institutions, but what about what it implies to colleagues and students.

I am eager to hear some comments about this.

yours,

Daf

::::::::::::::::::::::

Hi all,
I promised Dafne to tell you one of my last experiences with collaboration, and here I am.
Last week I was invited to substitute two teachers provided by a publisher to give a three hours workshop on the use of ICT in an EFL classroom. The problem was that I am a teacher of English, and 95% of the material that I had was related with English. The organizers asked me the favour to try to hold both languages: English and French.
The week before I had done something similar, but more in the trend not so interactive like it was supposed to be this one. When I went ther, the first obstacle, -apart from the language- had to adapt everything to teachers of both languages), that I found was the indifference this group had towards telecollaboration and the use of ICT in general. Half of the audience were there just to get merits for the famous "trienniums" and they did not show much enthusiasm for being there and of course and most of them had never thought about using the net for preparing their own classes. The other half were those traditional teachers for who "reflection" was a rather unknown word.

So, as you can see… the context was not very suitable… They were about sixty, which I decided to divide into "heterogeneous" groups of twenties, including in each group teachers of French and some member with a slight idea with knowledge on Internet.
Then I gave them a schema in English
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/files/cirkelfigu
for them to study and make conclusions divided into three different parts:
Collaboration,
new learning environments,
and the role of ICT within learning.
Each group was assigned one of these topics in order to get conclusions in relation to their actual teaching context.
At the beginning they complained because they didn't know what to do. For them all of those statements were out of context, and they did not meant anything. Also, the teachers of French complained because they couldn't understand anything. Even there were two teachers of English who said that they were not there to do things like that because they didn't know anything useful in that.
During the process I went along the groups to try to break the ice among them and explain something more about the given information> and in ten minutes I began to ask for results to the different groups.
There were opinions for all tastes. and I tried to show respect for everything thing that was being said there, though most of the times they were I met rather radical opinion like "Students have to learn in the traditional way: books, notes and list of words, and then, at the end of they course, If they want, they could go to internet and surf with the English or French they had learnt". So for people like this, obviously, CMC are… nothing…:(
The only product that I got from the audience creating debate, controversy… so that, I got what I meant; breaking the ice by creating some kind of feeling towards ITC and collaboration. This feeling was sometimes good and sometimes bad, but it meant something for each of the teachers sitting there
Once that each of them had a position towards the things that I wanted to talk about, I was able to give them theories about CoPs,the meaning of telecollaboration, and what is more important, the need of help and sharing from other colleges to self-learning, a rather difficult matter If you haven't experienced that before. It was also a way to explain different levels of collaboration (T-T, S-S, T-S), etc…
After that kind of introduction I introduced different CMC tools not only with screen shots from my power point presentation, but with logs taking things said here at Webheads conference (sorry If any of you doesn't like this, even though I quoted the abstract that I took).
Thanks to that imput, now much more motivating, since they were more open to "those crazy ideas" of chatting and video-conferencing, they were able to imagine new ideas to put into practice, and most of the people that at the beginning refused to discuss such matters began to give their opinion about things like that Many of them left their seats after signing up for checking attendance, but… do you remember those teachers of English who were reluctant to talk about those strange and far away matters like these…? They gave me at the end congratulations for the speech and thanks for being now more aware on ITC matters and collaboration in general.
Most of the things I said there were the result of reading all the messeges sent to Webheads forum during these 5 short weeks and that is why I would like to give you thanks. Ahhh! And thank indeed to Dafne, who had helped me even when she was very very busy.

Good night from Spain,

María

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Later on, Maria added some more thoughts to the previous message:

Hi Dafne, I was not completly new on CMC before knowing WIA, but I think it is the only way to reclycle yourself and think aloud all that things that you want to try with your students or even colleges, why not... and don't are not sure it they are going to go well, or even if they could be usefull for learning.
I have also learnt how a theory could come up from the more than one head thinking at the same time.
Of course now I have experienced a "before WIA" and after "WIA".

María

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.