LdL has recently attracted attention again. Yesterday, Christian Spannagel gave an internet-mediated talk on wikis, weblogs and Twitter at the GAL conference (German association of applied linguists). LdL was a central element in his talk. Here is the recording: http://tinyurl.com/gal09recording
Already some weeks ago, Jean-Pol Martin was visited by a journalist from the renowned magazine GEO Wissen. (Two weeks ago, a few of us LdLians were photographed for this article which is to come out in the November issue).
A new LdL book has come out this week: LdL – Lernen durch Lehren goes global. It was edited by Guido Oebel, who started to make LdL known in Japan. The book unites contributors from Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Austria and Germany–including articles by Jean-Pol Martin and myself. Here is a brief summary of the contents (in German).
Last Saturday, Jean-Pol Martin and I were invited to give the two keynote speeches on LdL at a conference that Christian Spannagel and his team had organized. Materials, reports and videos (including my own speech) are available on Christian Spannagel’s LdL site.
In addition, Lutz Berger has published a teaser for my speech on YouTube:
Last week, Christian Spannagel, Professor for Teaching Computer Science at the College of Education (Pädagogische Hochschule) in Ludwigsburg, and some of his students as well as Lutz Berger, an expert in shooting “edutaining” documentaries, visited Jean-Pol Martin’s class in Eichstätt. I also showed up and it is always enjoying to see how well Martin manages to communicate with his teenagers in such a casual and yet supportive and empathetic style.
Christian Spannagel has already written of the impressions of his visit on his blog. Lutz Berger will produce a video of that visit.
Jean-Pol Martin has all his lessons take place in his school’s computer lab in order to be able to constantly get access to resources (Wikipedia) to answer questions. See his blog entry here.
Felix Schaumburg has commented on this blog entry that it’s also possible to access Wikipedia in a normal classroom if students use all potentials of their mobiles; with a 2 GB memory card you can easily store Wikipedia on your mobile. Here is his blog entry. Joachim Grzega
Jean-Pol Martin has recently told me that he is currently teaching a very heterogeneous group. In my view, one of the most central problems to solve in classes at German schools and universities is differentiation. How do you manage that everyone will leave a lesson saying “I’ve learned something new that will help me.” For my BGE primary school course I developed materials that will allow learners to decide themselves whether they want to learn by themselves or in pairs, whether they want to deal with the language actively or passively, whether they want to deal with simple or more sophisticated tasks. At university, I try to meet differentiation by having the students choose topics for their seminar papers themselves (according to their interests and needs). This can be a simple or a complex task (my task will be to find out together with the student if the task can be completed in a reasonable span of time). Nevertheless, when presenting the topic in class, everyone has to make this topic as interesting as possible for the others. LdL at its pure form. And this is also what JPM has experienced as effective.
Sometimes, though, the course contents are neatly defined by official regulations. Here, I have to find a way that everybody reaches the minimum level required in an effective and very efficient way, and I have to see that those who acquire the level earlier can advance even further. One of the things that I use is to present students two baskets of exercises—easier ones and more difficult ones. This way all everyone can decide for himself or herself from which level s/he wants to draw a slip of paper (with an exercise) be tested. Even the simple exercises, however, will seek that the learner (and everyone else in class) can check how well s/he has acquired the minimum level.
A few weeks ago, Jean-Pol Martin and I were interviewed by a journalist working for the Goethe Institute. His article has now appeared in English on the Goethe Institute website here.
Yesterday Jean-Pol Martin and I were interviewed on LdL by someone from the Goethe-Institut in Frankfurt. He wants to write an article on LdL for the Goethe-Institut’s website.
One of the questions was whether LdL wouldn’t only help the student-experts (or “mini-teacher”, as I call them in elementary school), but not the rest of the class, who would more profit from an interactive model with the teacher in the center. Actually, I did a little experiment on exactly this question in my 2 International Business English classes last year. The results haven’t been published yet, but the essence is that the performances of “LdL classes” in spontaneous, unannounced written tests is not lower than those of other “interactive classes”. (And we always have to keep in mind that many of the target competences of LdL lessons cannot be checked with written tests).
