Further Reading

Katerina Zourou: Social Network for Language Education

Date: Dec. 12, 2019 – Thursday

Time: 13:00-16:00 P.M.

Venue: Room 334, Building 1, Songjiang Campus

Language: English


Part One: Citizen engagement in open science: what is there for language education?

Open Science, understood as a movement aiming to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) transparent and accessible to all, is gaining traction on the international level. In Europe, open science corresponds to the aim of “transforming science through ICT tools, networks and media, to make research more open, global, collaborative, creative and closer to society” (European Union, 2016).

One of the dimensions of Open Science is citizen science, corresponding to the contribution of volunteers in scholar work. Thus, the research process can be efficiently distributed among a large number of volunteers who contribute to the discovery process through particular research-related tasks, ranging from data gathering to the interpretation and annotation of datasets.

This presentation discusses citizen science from the perspective of languages: language use and language learning/teaching. By discussing achievements of citizen science in other sectors and by offering concrete examples in the language sector, this presentation will shed light to the potential of crowdsourced public participation for languages.

Part Two: A critical review of social networks for language learning beyond the classroom

Computerassisted language learning (CALL) scholars have become increasingly interested in social media for language education, be it for the appeal of these technologies to specific groups of learners, or for the sense of intellectual curiosity regarding the pedagogical affordances of artifacts not explicitly designed for learning. Independently of the motive to inquire into the field, it is undeniable that social media have been generating enthusiasm, skepticism, expectations, and even illusions since 2004, when the term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly and his colleagues (Musser et al. 2007).


The scope of this presentation is twofold. First, it offers a stateofthe art review of current scholarship pertaining to social media in language education and draws parallels with other digitally enhanced languagelearning fields, such as mobile assisted language learning (MALL) and gamebased learning (GBL) and situates them within second language (L2) research themes on agency and openness. Second, it conveys an exploratory view on future possibilities and promising directions that merit further investigation, such as open/citizen science and crowd learning for their potential in CALL.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Katerina Zourou is a researcher in the field of computer supported collaborative language learning and the owner-manager of Web2Learn, Greece. She is passionate about the role of open and social technologies in digital education. Katerina is a regular invited speaker at European institutions and is involved in more than 10 projects funded by the European Commission and the Council of Europe/European Centre for Modern Languages. Her full profile is accessible at: http://web2learn.eu/who_we_are/katerina-zourou/


Further Reading