PATHETIC

feeling so pathetic and dont know what i would be like if without you

it is u that i want to teach in US
even tho i know i'm far from qualified
just like a fool working hard (but far from enough) without any direction
trying so hard to catch up with u

and without realizing it
just dont know who i am and what i want

maybe 7 yrs is good enough for me
maybe i dont want to teach Mandarin at all
maybe i dont want to keep running after u all the time
it just takes me too much
not the time or money but my dignity

maybe it's time

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For Future Memory (1)

as an incurable procrastinator, i seldom write about life here in Canada, more specifically, Vancouver, even though i've lived here fore more than 2 years. no matter they are some kind of trips, adventures, hang-out, or dining-together, i seldom keep track of them, which i think, of course, is a great pity. without those records, i assume my 2 year-ish life in Canada, when retrospected in the future, would seem blank completely. Alas.

So i guess now it's time to compose some records so that in the future i can prove my Canadian existence.

tho still kinda in a total chaos and not knowing how to organize and what to write, yet i was trying to be led by my instinct and mind and thought, flowing wherever they are led. i suppose sometimes records can be very casual, right?!

maybe i can have it chronologically, or, the other way round. whatever. you will know, at last, hehe.

eFront: TOP eLearning and Workplace Learning Blogs

eFront: TOP eLearning and Workplace Learning Blogs: "During the last 5 years I was able to exchange ideas, share thoughts, and learn from an eLearning community of practice that exists in the b..."

Reflection on Orientation Video

Some training video / animation / simulation I watched earlier tonight reminded me of Mayer's Cognitive Multimedia Learning Principles that I had learned in summer 2009. Specifically, the Modality Principle.

The training video I watched has both audio and visual elements. It has a narrator reading the on-screen texts that convey some learning information. For sure the narrator speaks English and the on-screen texts are written in English as well. The whole thing of this, based on Modality Principle, seems contradictory to what the principle entails.

Yet I found it useful to me, an English as a second language learner. If it is merely on-screen texts and narration of some kind of general ideas, I would have been feeling frustrated and confusing, as the audio and visual inputs are somewhat different, and surely I guess I'll need more attention to decode and comprehend both inputs.

I think the principles are simply guidelines and could be applied to general situations. However, as learning contexts and learners vary, the degree of the utilization of the principles may differ, some may even need to undergo transformations of various levels.

I guess we also talked about this concern and some exceptions in that class. It's more than inspiring and rewarding when I truly feel some reflections occur and connect to what I had learned before.

Here I would like to draw some bold conclusion for the Modality Principle. If the instructional designer is asked to take into account the majority's comprehension level, to have both on-screen texts and have them read completely by the narrator probably is the safest way to cover the majority's needs. No wonder to identify who your target learners are is one of the most important things for instructional designers when they start their ADDIE process.

Community of Practice...

A concept that I learned during my graduate study and an action that I took way before I learned the concept.

That I initiated a English learning community and had maintained it for 2 years, which happened before I started my graduate study, gave me the illusion that I was someone with some sort of vision, initiative, and action.

Early last year I formed a virtual learning community again, for I really like the idea of community of practice, a group of people sharing the knowledge they co-construct through whatever the practice is. All the way again I encountered problems I used to be faced with so often when I managed the English learning community years ago: how to maintain the participation.

It's not my participation but all the other participants', because as a founder, I had been always participating. Plus, that's why I started it, I liked it. But not all participants shared the same passion with me. At least, not as strong as mine.

(Reviewing Alyssa's course slides.) The concept of community of practice tells us there are three elements in this concept:

1. shared domain of interest / competence / commitment
2. community, web of relationships and interactions
3. shared practice, a repertoire of experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems

As long as the three elements are maintained, the group can be thought of as a productive CoP.

So I guess somewhere among the three elements must go wrong in the learning communities I created, though some of the logics in CoP seems no-brainer, such as...

1. participation in CoP is voluntary rather than obligatory.
2. everyone has their own priority, and you cannot force everyone to have same priority as you do.
3. once participants leave out of some personal priority thing, the one and only solution, if not terminating the community, is to recruit members.
4. so you'll see communities are in constant recruitment, every couple of months, with sometimes larger interval.

That's what always happens in my learning communities. The above logics is valid and straightforward, only if what you maintain is not a real productive CoP.

Another question that recently occurred to me is where CoP will go ultimately. From a macro-scope, a no-brainer answer is CoP either goes flourishing to its maximum or extinguishing to nothing. Such extreme dualism is discouraging, yet (it is) so true to some point. So I am trying to search for answers other than this one, or some other deeper meaning for CoP.

I don't have answers to any of the situations / problems I mentioned here, yet I hope one day everything would be clear to me.

Sooner or later, right?!

[video]Learn Chinese Phonetics