Instructional technology

I am dedicated to the thoughtful use of technology in linguistics (and language) education.

Rezonator

Since I joined UCSB in 2019, I have been closely involved in Prof John W DuBois’ Rezonator program, a computational program for creating and visualisation annotations in naturally occurring discourse data. While I am not a developer, I have been one of the biggest testers of Rezonator, and have suggested many features and reported many bugs over the years. I also developed, and continue to maintain, rezonateR, an R package for handing Rezonator output. Much of my current research uses a Rezonator + rezonateR workflow.

Because of Rezonator’s visual nature, it is a blessing for teaching discourse and conversation analysis. The explicit graphical representations in Rezonator allows students and instructors to see analyses in a more exact way than is possible with traditional static transcripts. This improves clarity for the learner and also reduces the burden on the grader to decode students’ descriptions of the phenomena in question.

In 2023, I TA’d two courses and taught one as instructor using Rezonator to analyse naturally-occurring discourse. I have improved upon one of the group projects in the latter course, resulting in a paper published in late 2023. I plan to release all the materials that I created for these courses on LingBites soon

ipykarel

Coming soon!

H5Ps

In 2024, I discovered H5Ps, an invaluable resource for creating digital classroom activities, especially with Kahoot becoming increasingly paywalled. It includes a range of individual interactive exercise types for free, as well as polling and competition modes for those who subscribe to the LMS plugins. Fortunately, my institution subscribes to H5P’s Canvas plugin, and I was able to craft a range of exercises for students to work with in class.

H5Ps were a blessing in class – although they took time to create, they helped me gauge student performance much more quickly while walking around in class (as H5P automatically grades their work for me – and for them), and students would successively work at their answers until they got everything right, instead of waiting for me to give the answers to check them.

The biggest challenge with using H5Ps is that it seems to discourage discussion further. I have not found a perfect solution to this, but I have found it very useful to put students in groups in The Chase exercises, and having them discuss questions as a group to win – this has led to the most interactive moments in class. I plan to expand this in the future, though technical limitations forbid all exercises from being created this way.

As I found that there does not seem as yet to be a way to share H5Ps across institutions, I have created the LingBites.com website to host H5P and other educational content about linguistics that I made. If you know of a place where linguists can freely share and remix H5Ps now, please let me know and I’ll be excited to participate!

I am also actively developing teaching materials for language maintenance in the P’urhépecha context. Stay tuned for more details to come!