As a gamer myself for over 15 years (until recent shifting of priorities to work n family), I would definitely love to engage students in games and learning CL as they play the games. Have not seen ed. games like Neuromatrix in Chinese yet. When will such games materialise, next 10 yrs perhaps? And in the meantime, any chance of learning CL while engaging in non-CL games? *hmm*

the typical Singapore system:
Preschool 3-4 yrs old
Kindergarten (5-6 yrs old, equiv. Grade K-1)
Primary school (7-12 yrs old, equiv Grade 2-7)
Secondary school (13-16 yrs old, equiv Grade 8-11)
Junior college (17-18 yrs old, equiv Grade 12-13)

the China system:
Preschool 3-4 yrs old
Kindergarten (5-6 yrs old, equiv. Grade K-1)
Elementary school (7-12 yrs old, equiv Grade 2-7)
Middle school (13-15 yrs old, equiv Grade 8-10)
High school (16-18 yrs old, equiv Grade 11-13)
(Note: to be confirmed :P)

besides sharing the joy, here's my research for sharing:

Title:

An Exploratory Study on a Metacognitive Approach to Teaching and Learning of Spontaneous Speaking in Chinese Language with Audioblogs

Keywords:

chinese language, speaking, audioblog, metacognition, language learning, language teaching, educational technology, weblog, edublog, 华文, 口语教学,元认知,博客,信息科技,有声博客

Summary:

Language learning involves four areas, namely listening, speaking, reading
and writing. This study focuses on speaking, an area that is often neglected by
teachers for various reasons. In many Chinese Language classrooms, which are
teacher-centered by tradition, students have minimal opportunities to actively
participate in the negotiation of meaning during lesson. To develop students to
become independent learners of speaking in Chinese Language, a metacognitive
framework developed by Goh and Zhang (2002) was adopted in this study. Twenty-five
Secondary Two Express stream Chinese Language students, aged 13 to 14,
participated in this eight weeks study. Audioblogs was used as the mediating
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool through which the students
interacted as they developed their metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
awareness. Through the use of scaffolding questions, the students carried out self-appraisals to evaluate and monitor their oral performances and planned for their
future speaking tasks. The students were also tasked to provide comments for peers’
oral performances. Seven usable sets of data were analysed and based on inferential
statistics, the treatment may have led the students to improve significantly in their
pretest-posttest oral performance scores. Through peer commenting and self-appraisal
activities in the audioblogs, the students developed greater metacognitive
knowledge and metacognitive awareness.

and here's the thesis in PDF format. you may need to grab acrobat reader 8 or above to read the content.

and last but not least, i would like to thank the following friends once again, as without their help and encouragement, this research would not have been possible:
Dr Tan Seng Chee (my sup), Dr Christine Goh C.M., Mr. Lim Sing Gee, Mdm. Tan Hiok Keng, Mdm. Ho Fui Ling, Ms. Hoe Joe Hwee and Mr. Amos Goh Yoong Shin, Mr. Darren Anthonio Marino Nonis, Mr. John Ow Eu Gene, Ms. Jeanne Marie Ho Pau Yuen and Dr. Chua Guat Kheng. and last but not least yh2, yh3 and yh4 :)

The study reported in this paper examines students’ perception of the use of weblogs as learning tools; it also explores evidence of learning within blog postings. Two Ryerson University courses in Information Technology Management that require students to use weblogs are taken as examples. Twenty-two students from these two courses participated in an online survey concerning their blogging experience. The participants had very good computer knowledge—most of them had previous experience using blogs. Most of them thought that building and maintaining a blog was an easy task. However, the research shows that students’ perception concerning the use of blogs as educational tools was neutral—students also perceived the impact of using blogs on their ability to learn the course material as neutral. The study shows a lack of clear communication between instructors and students, which could have had a negative impact on students’ learning experience. Furthermore, the study indicates that most students perceived the content they posted in a somewhat negative way. A content analysis performed on 22 blogs demonstrates that that the objectives of each course played a significant impact on the evidences of learning apparent in students’ blogs. Students in group B demonstrated more evidences of learning then students in group A. Overall, the study shows that the use of blogs as learning tool in university classrooms is promising. Providing students with clear goals, objectives and expectations could help them to build and maintain their blogs in a way that could be more beneficial to their learning experience.

the full paper in doc format can be downloaded here.
APA reference:
Gagné, C. & Fels, D. (2007). Learning through Weblogs. In G. Richards (Ed.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2007 (pp. 2518-2526). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

oh yes, the NECC 2007 Research Papers can be found in this archive, and the NECC 2008 Papers here.

am regretted for not being able to contribute to new content much as we wished to as our current "full-time parents, part-time student" portfolio is unexpectedly overwhelming. however, i shall end this post with another great news for the future development of Culture Bridge, as on this very same day, Adobe has announced that it'll release codes needed to search engine developers to make Flash content indexable! yes, until now the Flash-based Bridge has remained a 'void' to the web spiders, so what better news can there be :)

iBreadCrumbs is...

A Social Network for Researchers
to Share Recorded URLs, Track Websites,
Review Notes Online, and Encourage
Online Collaborative Research.

to find out more, visit the site now!

2 things that came to my mind before i actually try out the tool:
1. the dynamicity of the www can lead to the fast outdating of our research. for how long would such a research 'history' be useful and how much would it benefit other fellow users?

2. organising makes info more mearningful but it takes effort and time as well if we were to review the list recorded by the tool and strike off sites that we deemed not useful. not sure if this would be too overwhleming.

will try it out soon :)

ok 言归正传, saw an article by Christopher D Sessums entitled "Internet Safety Discussion and Resources" and the topic would definitely be something of interest if i were back in school now (此 school 非彼 school). some words that came as a form of reminders: "online predators", "parental supervision", "youth victimization", "cyberbullying", and there's a link to a presentation on safety entitled "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do". interesting title? but Christ reassured readers that it's a presentation on safety, but the download's very slow at my end, only clocking abt 3000bytes per second? reminds me of downloads off my good old 56kbps dial-up.

so if you are reading this post and making some plans to tour shanghai in the near future (cant say for sure how LONG they will take to fix it, if anyone bothers to fix anything since they let it deteriorate in the first place), go there if you are really bored with nowhere to go and too much cash to spare.

have not had the time to dig out the reason behind this observation and a chance arises when we were required to do a mini assignment for the cultural linguistics module. hence i used the chance to dig out some materials from the internet to get some preliminary observations. here's the report (written in Chinese) that i handed up 2+ weeks ago.

if you are a 新加坡华人 reading this post, it may interest you, though be minded that the findings are very preliminary, and further research using sociolinguistics methods with large samples is needed to uncover more about the phenomenon.

great work keep it up and keep the voicethreads coming :)

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RETHINKING EDUCATION WITH ICT: New Directions for Effective Practices

Nicola Yelland, Greg A. Neal and Eva Dakich, Victoria University, Australia

This book brings together a number of academics who have conducted research and written about effective practices and pedagogies that incorporate the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). The book is intended for graduate and undergraduate students in Teacher Education programmes, as well as teachers and those who are interested in contemporary educational issues. The authors in this book have been engaged in rethinking education with ICT. Implicit in this, is the view that we need to reconceptualise our pedagogies and practices in order to make schools relevant to the lives of the young people who inhabit them. The chapters in this book are based on empirically grounded research work. The chapters illustrate the various dimensions of innovative practices with ICT that can extend teachers’ pedagogies and engage learners so that they are able to extend their potential for knowledge building in new and dynamic ways.

Preview URL

CRITICAL READINGS IN TEACHER EDUCATION: Provoking Absences
Anne Phelan, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and Jennifer Sumsion, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia(Eds.)

Like other fields of study, teacher education defines itself both by what it includes and by what it excludes. Teacher educators and researchers have spent a great deal of time seeking and attempting to eradicate the flaws in existing structures and practices, but significantly less time learning to perceive the absences. The premise of this book is that until we can identify and begin to address what is absent, teacher education will be constrained by a perennial recycling of concerns that have characterized so much of research, policy and practice to date. If teacher education is to have a different future, we need to ask different and difficult questions. This book, with contributions from theorists in Australia, Canada and the United States, addresses the challenges we face in establishing a more hopeful future for teacher education. The authors’ provocative contributions identify what is ‘missing’ in teacher education while providing critical counterpoints to existing frames of reference in the field. In writing ‘against the grain’ they open up new conceptual spaces and exciting trajectories for a different teacher education.

Preview URL

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《文化桥》的网站相信大家已经抄下了，即 CultureBridge.SG。早上所用的简报内容的PDF版本可在此下载。

早上占用了大家那么多的时间，在这里要再次向大家道个歉，我们下周课上再见吧。期盼见到你们的“Comments”或电邮。谢谢！