Our Procedure – What do we do? And How?

The instructors begin by making contact and establishing a cooperative partnership either with a teacher or director of a language class or school in the PRC. The students then write an essay or a report about their lives on campus at Columbia University as a self-introduction for their Chinese counterparts. It acts both as a writing and learning assignment, it goes through the first manuscript 原稿, then the following necessary editing 編輯稿 and revision processes 修訂稿 . When done, the final drafts were sent with a photo through VoiceThreat in two formats: written and audio. Students were then able to freely and actively have a conversation back and forth.

This is significant because it has never been established as an official classroom activity. Some student may have taken the initiative and found themselves individual pen pals but this allows for the pen pal to be taken to another level. It is the first time that this technology has been used to connect students across the Pacific from the comforts of the classroom. While Director Liu, visiting instructors from Beijing, and I have together had an extensive collective experience in this field, we nonetheless reached out to many other campuses in the PRC and Australia. Of course, none of this was possible before the internet. We wanted to ensure that our teaching methods mirrored, adapted, and took advantage of the technological world around us. Luckily for us, education technician Michael Cennamo did  help us implement the software in our classrooms and now heads the courses on-line. Nevertheless, they helped us to institute the software’s free accounts. As you can see in the Panel of Discussion talk by Beeby and Cennamp, Voicethread was used in the CNMTL presentations at the 525 Conference.

Spring Semester of 2012:    At the beginning of the spring semester of 2012, a special writing assignment on “Our Campus Lives” was given to Intermediate Chinese (C1222y) students. This assignment was designed to not only teach the practical aspects of writing, but also communicate with others beyond our campus.  These letters were sent to counterparts in China to measure the level of comprehension and compatibility between the students. 

March 2012:  By early March, a collection of writings in response to this special assignment were compiled from all members of the OCLWorkshop course and sent to our Chinese peers.  

April 2012: The responses from China came in early April. 

That was the first round of Exchanges that began the dialogue between language students across the Pacific.

The OCLWorkshop, individually as a group, decided to continue using VoiceThread to send their response back to China. 

CABLLE: Introduction
CABLLE: Testimonials
CABLLE: Advantages & Challenges