Lexitronics

Today’s post is simply a message from Mark Davies, with links to, and information about, his very interesting looking corpus site:

This email is being sent to registered users of the corpora at
http://corpus.byu.edu , and its purpose is to let you know about some new
collaboration tools at this portal. These new tools allow you to:

1. Find and contact users of the corpora who are from the same country,
region, or city, or who have the same objectives as far as corpus use.

2. “Annotate” any of your searches (and their results), and then share
these with others, such as students or colleagues (and search the notes
from others).

3. Create short corpus-based “projects” for student use or to get feedback
from others, and search and use the projects that others have made.

4. Find published articles or conference presentations that are based on
the corpora

5. Find out some simple ways that you can volunteer to help others

6. Join a new Google group for corpus users, and share experiences and
insights with others

These features will allow interested users to “synergistically” work with
the more than 8000 registered users of the corpora. We invite you to spend
at least a few minutes at the new site and see what’s available.

Related to #4 above, many of you have used data from the corpora (COCA,
BNC, TIME, OED, or the Spanish and Portuguese corpora) as the basis for
published papers, conference presentations, theses, etc. If you haven’t
already entered references to these, would you *please* take a minute to
copy and paste that information now. You can do this via the ‘Publications’
link at the website. Thanks.

Finally, some of you may be interested to know that we recently received a
large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (www.neh.gov) to
create a 300 million word corpus of historical American English (c1800-
present). For news on this and other items, click on ‘History’ at the
corpus portal (http://corpus.byu.edu).

Again, thanks for your interest in the corpora. As mentioned, we’ve now
become a large community of users — more than 20,000 unique users per
month, and more than 8000 registered users. We hope that these new features
(and upcoming corpora) will help you in your research, teaching, and
learning.

—————————

P.S. If you want to contact us, please do so via the ‘Feedback’ link, and
not as a reply to this email. Please be aware that this week — as the new
portal is being introduced — it may be a few days before we can respond to
any questions. Finally, if you wish not to receive any more emails from BYU
(though we send less than one each year), log in at the portal, and then
select ‘Profile’ and then set ‘Receive emails from BYU’ to [NO].

Since it’s becoming so integral to our projects, here’s a link to a simple explanation of fast mapping by Prof. Bob McMurray.

For those too lazy too follow it, here are some soundbites:

• Between birth and adulthood children must learn about 60,000 words. That translates to 8-10 words per day! (ESL Practitioners take note!)
• “Fast Mapping” refers to children (and adults!) ability to quickly link a novel name to a novel object. (It seems likely that the more words you know, the more this process speeds up, hence the suggestion that for fast-mapping to take place with ESL learners, they need to have a solid grounding in the most common 1600 words or so., and the ESL practitioners therefore needs to provide them with the kick start.’
•  However, an subtler alternative is that they are learning something, but that learning is slow–it may ultimately take hundreds of exposures to really learn the name. (This is referring to an experiment with infants learning the name of an object – but compare this with the ESL notion that we need to have, depending on who you read, at least 6, 10 or 12 encounters with a word before we learn it. ) Could it be that even these are drastic underestimates? Food for serious thought!

Time to start archiving some of the oldie but goldie e-mails from over the last few years. The following link takes us back a few years into the review section of LLT, and compares three software packages that help identify lexical bundles. Worth noting, especially now we are more and more trying to move above and beyond the confines of the discrete learning item.

http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num1/review3/default.html

For the record, here is a scan of the Kibris article, with Nilgun taking on Lord Neil Kinnock over a range of issues…

Nilgun Hancioglu’s Write Like an Academic Thesis is now fully online:

Write Like an Academic – the Thesis

Thanks largely to the indefatigable efforts of our colleague Ayfer Sen, the best-selling North Cyprus newspaper – ‘Kibris’ publishes news of the ELTONS awards.

To view the story, click HERE!

Yes - with publicity like this we can’t fail. The notorious Cypriot oppositionist voice for all those who are opposed to, well, pretty much everything really, Afrika newspaper has found column space to report on Lexitronics’ recent ELTONS jaunt. Sorry about the quality of the scan – the original is not a great improvement.

Interesting looking conference here – The webheads at Lexitronics will be pondering a contribution shortly. Note also the rich variety of pertinent questions for possible follow up…

Webheads in Action Online unConvergence:
3rd bi-annual free global online conference for teachers and education
professionals

Call for Participation for WiAOC 2009, May 22-24: Lifelong Learning,
Connecting Facilitators, Transcending Borders

Webheads in Action http://webheads. info and http://webheadsinac tion.or, a
world-wide multi-cultural online community of ESL/EFL educators and other professionals, invites your participation in a unique international conference held entirely online. Participation is free and open to all who are interested.

Date & Location of Events:

May 22-24, 2009, on the Web, at a computer near you

For information and registration go to: http://webheadsinac tion.ning. com

Description of Event:

This year’s unConvergence will be a celebration of the work of educational
professionals from a variety of fields in a wide variety of formats.

Why the ‘un’ in unConvergence? The WiAOC 2009 committee provides a framework for the convergence; however, the participants/ presenters determine the focus and content of the convergence based on the identified tracks, so instead of submitting a proposal for review, we invite you to simply sign up for a time slot to present your ideas or research for discussion.

You can do so here: http://wiaoc09. pbwiki.com/ schedule (request to join the wiki if wishing to present)

Tracks

Ubiquitous and Lifelong Learning
How can we leverage the unprecedented anytime anywhere access to information, networks and expertise? What teaching-learning paradigms are best suited to these new realities? How do we harness distributed learning networks and communities of practice to foster ongoing intercultural understanding, collaboration and professional development?

Emerging and Future Educational Technology
http://wp.nmc. org/horizon2009/ ; e.g. use of future of teaching and learning given the trends predicted in publications such as the Horizon Report: What technology and tools do you fee most impact education? What is the mobile devices, cloud computing, geolocationary tools, the personal web, semantic aware applications, smart objects, virtual worlds, augmented reality, gaming, ubiquitous computing

Educational Technology Worldwide
What are the practical realities of worldwide digital divisions? How do we overcome societal, administrative, technical and financial constraints to create powerful learning experiences? What joys have we encountered in intercultural collaborations?

Technology Innovations for Teaching and Learning
What technology tools, open source or otherwise, have you used successfully to engage students in the learning process, create a sense of community, or promote collaborative peer-to-peer learning? What innovative practices with web 2.0 tools/features have resulted in deeper learning or enhancedproductivity? Sub topics: digital portfolios, digital storytelling, blogs, wikis, microblogging, podcasting, international collaborative projects, social networking applications, voice / VOIP tools

Virtual Worlds and Learning
To what extent is the potential future of the Internet and education being realized for teachers and learners worldwide? What locations, tools and networks are essential for broadening understanding and educational practices in virtual worlds? How are libraries, museums, universities and private organizations providing freely available educational opportunities?

Other
Feel free to offer sessions in other areas if you feel your area is pertinent to our theme.

Session Types

Proposals are invited for synchronous events, asynchronous events, or a
combination of the two. Session topics can be pedagogical or technical, and might include examples of practical work with students, training sessions, reports of research or research in progress, demonstrations of new media, or descriptions or explorations of how interaction takes place over the Internet-e.g. , how online communities form as a result of computer-mediated communication.

We encourage facilitators to incorporate an interactive component into the
session (e.g.: an information presentation plus 15 min. question/answer period, or asynchronous presentation materials posted beforehand and a synchronous session to discuss them; interacting with other participants in hands-on demo or workshop format, etc.).

Technical Requirements:

Synchronous events (including, but not limited to presentations, workshops,
demonstrations, panel / roundtable discussions, chats and conversations) can be held at any of our partners’ voice-enabled presentation portals, or one of your own choosing. Training and assistance will be available for presenters wishing to use our partners’ venues. Asynchronous events might include bulletin board discussions, online poster sessions, integration with content management systems, or other formats.

Scheduling Presentations:

To propose a session, simply join the wiki and fill in the information

http://wiaoc09. pbwiki.com/ schedule requested at In order that we can finalize arrangements for presenting, streaming,
recording and archiving, please sign up for a time slot by May 15, 2009.

Conference TAG:

Tagged artifacts will be aggregated during and around the time of this
conference. Please tag any artifacts you create wiaoc09.

Distributing the Call for Participation

Thank you for helping us to publicize this event by sharing this CfP with
all who might be interested in participating.

Find a copy of this CfP at our Ning and linked from the sidebar at
http://wiaoc09. pbwiki.com/

Hope to see you there!

Here’s an article about introducing Web 2.0 in higher educational settings – very relevant to our enterprises….

The full title is: Investigating faculty decisions to adopt Web 2.0 technologies: Theory and empirical tests

And the authors: Haya aijan and Richard Hartshorne.

Web 2.0 is often easier said than done.

Seems that when John started the new Write Like An Academic Site, and linked to Nilgun’s personal information in Lexitronics, he unwittingly created a pingback.

So what is a pingback? Steve, who naturally enough identified the pingback sent us the Wikipedia link. Here’s an excerpt:

A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as Movable Type, WordPress and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published.

See also

• Linkback, the suite of protocols that allows websites to manually and automatically link to one another.
• Refback, a similar protocol but easier than Pingbacks since the site originating the link doesn’t have to be capable of sending a Pingback request.