Excuse this cross posting (delete one if duplicated) ...

Greetings all, and welcome to this TESOL Certificate Program course,
PP 107: Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. The
course starts today, September 13, and lasts until October 10.

This should be the second email you have received from me. The first
was a note I included in your invitation to join the Yahoo Group for
this course. By now, on the first day of our session, 10 out of 18
registered participants in this course have joined the group, which
is not all that bad a start. The Yahoo Group is necessary for several
reasons: Primarily it gives us a means apart from our discussion
forum (at Desire to Learn) to communicate with each other many-to-
many.

We have our one-to-many forum for threaded discussions,
I can email the group through D2L (me-to-many)
but if YOU want to communicate with group members through email the
Yahoo Group will be your only means of doing that (many-to-many)
(This is to my knowledge ... I should say here that I am a novice D2L
user and there are liable to be features that I have missed up to now
which you can show me or that we can learn about together).

The YGroup gives you this ability while retaining privacy of
individual email addresses. It also gives us file storage capacity
(and a special area for photographs, of you, which I request that you
submit). It also allows group members to input links to their blogs
and websites (which I'd like you to do, because that way YOU maintain
the integrity of those links). It has a database which can serve as a
kind of Wiki, and last but not least it provides us with the
potential of staying in touch after the course has finished (in
keeping with the ideal of lifelong learning). In practice that does
not often happen with groups such as this, although you might want to
get involved with other YGroups that have formed such ongoing
communities, such as Webheads in Action http://www.webheads.info and
Real English Online
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Real_English_Online.

Now, in order to avail yourself of some or all of these features, you
need to either:

- have a Yahoo ID and password, which you can get from
http://www.yahoo.com. In this case you can join the group by visiting
its portal page, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit. Just click
on JOIN to sign up.
- participate in just the email without registering with Yahoo. You
won't have access to the other features, but you can at least benefit
from the listserv capability. In this case, send blank email FROM the
address you want to subsribe TO multilit-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

All this is mentioned at the portal page I've created for this
course:
http://sites.hsprofessional.com/vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/p
ortal2004.htm. This is an alternative portal to the one I will
maintain at Desire to Learn, which you can access at
http://uwec.courses.wisconsin.edu (after inputing the ID and password
you received on enrollment in this course).

There are several reasons I have chosen to create this alternative
portal. First of all, I felt it was easier for you and me to see the
big picture overview of the course when it is set out in this flat
space. I was having trouble myself with the big picture until I
developed it in this manner, and from this workspace the pieces can
then be more easily slotted into the D2L interface and developed
there. Another reason I have chosen to sketch the course in broad
strokes and place this much on public access is so that others in the
community of educators I've been working with online for the past
several years can see it and become involved. I am a firm believer in
enhancing the power of the zone of proximal development by ensuring
that there are knowledgeable people populating it, and if you've
looked at our schedule over the next four weeks you will note that we
have encorporated many opportunities for interacting with that wider
community. Not only can 'they' become involved with 'us' but there
are several conferences, workshops, and presentations which we can
attend in the same spirit of sharing that we extend to others.
Several of these are noted in both portals.

I think the community will benefit as we (participants in this
course) will benefit from involvement with the knowledgeable others
in the community. I don't see this as violating the integrity of
participation of this course any more than MIT's placing its course
content on public access compromises the validity of its degree
programs. It has been widely noted in that case that simply putting
content online does not at all replicate the experience of attending
MIT. Similarly, only participants in this course will have access to
its forums and other features particular to the D2L environment, to
the close involvement and interaction which this instructor intends
to provide enrolled participants in this course, or of course, to
certification. (And incidentally, there is yet another precedent of
an online training site http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp which
puts its content online for anyone to access for free, but which
makes its money by charging for certification of having worked
through the material).

At the moment, what is on public access is pretty much replicated at
the D2L site, but this is only the starting point of both endeavors.
I expect as the session progresses, and as we interact and record
that interaction, and alter our course accordingly, that the D2L site
will become enriched in ways the public offerings will lack.
Accordingly, I expect that the D2L course will evolve in different
directions from the public view as the Multiliteracies for
Collaborative Learning Environments course plays itself out.

Speaking of the course itself, I hope that I have placed instructions
online (in both places mentioned) clearly enough that we can get
started. Therefore if you visit the portals mentioned above you
should be able to get going on the first week's materials, what I
call the first of 8 event cycles (2 event cycles each week, for 4
weeks).

Each cycle lasts three days, as follows:

- Day 1 (each Monday and Thursday for the next four weeks) is when
you read or carry out the assignment
- Day 2 (the following day, each Tue and Fri) is when you reflect
and compose your response, and a day of head start for those who are
ready start the discussion.
- Day 3 is one where we all pay particular attention to the forums,
as there should be a flurry of writing there (each Wed and Sat).
- Sunday is a day of rest, sort of, where those of us who are awake
and functional at 13:00 GMT can meet together online for synchronous
chat. The place we will meet it http://www.tappedin.org. By 'meet' I
mean we start out there. It is possible to be there and in other
virtual web spaces besides (such as voice and web cam chat areas) so
Tapped In will serve as a point of departure for us, a base for
exploration. I have chosen this time not only because it is early
Sunday morning for people in North and South America (and early
afternoon in Europe and the Middle East, evening in Asia, midnight in
Australia), but it is also at a time when the Webheads community
comes together each week. Therefore, there will be a lot of
knowledgeable others around in case of need or convenience. We can
move to a breakout room (my office at Tapped In) but I intend to
encourage anyone who wants to, to join us.

The 3 day cycles are intended to help us keep up with our work by
imposing a bit of routine, but of course cycles can last longer than
three days and cycles can overlap, with multiple threads taking place
at once, as the situation warrants.

There is a lot more at the web portals about the particulars of the
first week and the general organization of the course. Roughly
speaking, there is a book we can all read (though I consider this
optional): Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age.
Selber's book is current and seems to be referred to a lot, so I
settled on his breakdown of computer literacy into functional,
critical, and rhetorical parameters. To give you time to obtain and
read the book (if you wish) we'll look more closely at this a couple
of weeks (4 event cycles) from now.

Here are the specific instructions for the first week:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-
vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2004.htm#wk1

The first event cycle is an organizational one (enroll with
YahooGroups today, reflection and hearing from you tomorrow with your
first postings, and starting or pointing us to your blogs on
Wednesday, with a discussion of What is Multiliteracy Anyway?
starting up around that time.

That is a difficult question. Like the term blended learning, it
seems to mean different things to different people. As we examine the
term and pick it apart and put it back together again for application
to our own situations, I'd like each of you to start (or dedicate
existing) blogs and web spaces in addition to our interactions

- at our forum (for weighty matters)
- at our Yahoo Group (probably for more procedural issues)
- and synchronously online (turns out to be largely phatic with the
occasional dollop of really solid information and insight coming in
over the lowered affective filters).

Through it all we'll learn to get better at using technology as well
as to articulate what we're doing and why by couching our discourse
in the language of the frameworks we'll be discussing. Meanwhile I
look forward to hearing from you on the many and various channels,
and of course to getting to know you better through working with you
intensively over the next four weeks.

Please let me know if you have questions, suggestions, or comments
about the course.

Thank you,
Vance