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YELLing for collaborative learning in teacher education: Users’ voices in the social platform LearnWeb2.0 Maria Bortoluzzi* and Ivana Marenzi Maria Bortoluzzi Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of Udine Via Mantica, 3 - 33100 Udine - Italy E-mail: maria.bortoluzzi@uniud.it *Corresponding author Ivana Marenzi L3S Research Center Leibniz University of Hanover Appelstr. 9a - 30167 Hannover - Germany E-mail: marenzi@L3S.de Abstract: The community platform YELL/TELL (Young English Language Learners and Teen English Language Learners) was developed to respond to the needs of collaboration and sharing among trainee teachers, school teachers, teacher trainers and researchers in the field of language learning, for English as Second Language (L2) and English as Foreign Language (EFL). The social community YELL/TELL, supported by the LearnWeb2.0 platform, has the aim to encourage professional collaboration among trainees, teachers of different schools and teacher educators in pre-service and in-service training. Lifelong learning is promoted on the basis of sharing resources, commenting and reflecting on them in the spirit of open educational practices and free resources, offering support, ideas, and competences for teaching English as L2. Within the framework of reflective socio-constructivism and multiliteracies, the paper discusses the YELL case study as a peer-training and open professional community. Keywords: social platform; social community; YELL/TELL; LearnWeb2.0; social searching; resource sharing; peer-teacher education; Open Educational Resources (OER); co-constructed knowledge; teacher training; collaboration; multiliteracies; lifelong learning. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bortoluzzi, M. and Marenzi, I. ( ) ‘YELLing for collaborative learning in teacher education: Users’ voices in the social platform LearnWeb2.0’, Int. J. Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. , No. , pp. . Biographical notes: Maria Bortoluzzi is a lecturer of English language in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (University of Udine, Italy). Her research interests are in the areas of critical discourse studies and teacher training. Her latest research work and publications deal with multimodal analysis within a framework of critical discourse studies, the developments of verbal and non-verbal communication in digital discourses and the use of ICTs for teaching and learning languages. Ivana Marenzi has studied languages and e-learning; throughout her career she has specialised in the relationship between technology and communication. After her initial experiences as an ICT technician at the University of Pavia (Italy), Ivana Marenzi joined the L3S Research Center of the Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany (www.L3S.de), as part of her PhD program on the interplay between CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and Web 2.0. Her main area

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of research in Technology Enhanced Learning includes the support of collaborative and lifelong learning. 1 Introduction Communication and language interactions are co-constructed, context-related and in continuous flux and change. Teaching and learning a foreign language add an additional level of complexity due to, on the one hand, the developing quality of language competence in learners and, on the other hand, the language and teaching competence of teachers and teacher trainers. Thus teachers and trainers need linguistic, socio-cultural and professional competences to transform classroom contexts into environments conducive to learning and communication (Block, 2003; Pennycook, 2001; Riley, 2007). If teachers want to promote interactive and dialogic skills in their students, they need to enact and experience this kind of communication themselves, starting from teacher education and continuing throughout their professional life. The crux of the problem is thus teacher education which in Italy (the educational context of our project) is rather erratic, patchy and rarely organically organised. English is the only obligatory foreign language in Italy from first year primary to higher education. Primary school teachers are often recruited to teach English as a foreign language to children even when their own proficiency in the language is low and their training in foreign/second language teaching and learning is insufficient. As far as teacher training for secondary school is concerned, there does not seem to be at present a coherent and long-term policy for language teacher education in Italy. To address these issues and promote collaborative learning and teaching practices, a group of school teachers, trainers, and trainees decided to implement a peer-learning peer-teaching online community to share materials and reflect on their practice. The YELL/TELL (Young English Language Learners / Teen English Language Learners) online community is supported by the LearnWeb2.0 social platform (http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/new/). The present paper presents an overview of the ongoing YELL/TELL project and focuses on the YELL 2012-13 case study which qualitatively investigated how a small but representative group of trainee teachers perceived their participation in the e-community. The leading research questions for this work are: 1. How do trainee teachers react on becoming part of a professional e-community of teachers? 2. How easy do they find using the LearnWeb2.0 platform in order to become part of the e-community? After an outline of the theoretical framework and the literature review, the paper discusses research methodology, presents the data analysis and discusses its results. 2 Theoretical framework of the project 2.1 Socio-constructivist view of learning and teaching YELL/TELL is a lifelong teacher education project that brings together trainees, teachers, trainers and experts from different schools and backgrounds (nursery, primary, lower-secondary and higher secondary teachers, teacher trainers, university lecturers and computer developers). The overall aim is to promote collaborative peer-learning and peer-teaching professional improvement for teachers of English as a foreign language across school levels. The project is grounded within the socio-constructivist view of learning and teaching (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978; Williams and Burden, 1997) whereby co-construction of meaning is essential to understand issues and to further individual and group knowledge and competence. In the YELL/TELL e-community, participants learn to share ideas, resources, practices and construct meaning in collaboration with teachers from different backgrounds.

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Utilizing the affordances of digital technology and the flexibility of the LearnWeb2.0 platform (described in Section 3), the project uses a virtual environment to support and promote formal and informal teacher training, and implement the principles of meaningful interaction within a community of interest (Rheingold, 2012). Formal and informal knowledge-sharing contributes to promoting and improving the “collective intelligence” of the community through cooperation and collaboration (Rheingold, 2012). The participatory characteristic of an online social environment has the potentiality to enhance the principle of “knowledge as collective agreement” (Dede, 2008, p. 80) or, as Greenhow, Robelia and Hughes (2009) summarise, “decentralised, accessible and co-constructed [knowledge] by and among a broad base of users” (p. 247). YELL/TELL can be included in what Greenhow, Robelia and Hughes (2009, p. 249), following Scardamalia and Bereiter (2006), define as “knowledge building” environments, namely environments whose affordances are “interconnections, creative capabilities, and interactivity”. The general aim is an interactive approach to the teaching of integrated language competence, “wherein learning is understood as an organic process, fostered through cognitively challenging, meaningful use of language. Inevitably, engaging learners in online networking and publishing implies greater opportunities for communicatively-based language learning, thus facilitating learner-mediated dialogical use of the target language” (Dooly and O’Dowd, 2012, p.14-15). Learning networks are technology-supported communities through which learners share knowledge with one another and jointly develop new knowledge (Sloep and Berlanga, 2011) and their ultimate aim “is to contribute to both the quality of the teaching profession and the learning experience of students, by encouraging collaboration and knowledge exchange at both teacher and student level” (Vuorikari et al., 2012, p.7). 2.2 Reflection on action In order to implement and support the complexity of learning how to teach, it is crucial to complement reflection and action, thinking and doing (European Union, 2007). “Learning from others means: learning from more experienced teachers, applying it, theorizing and reflecting upon it and then take action improving one’s practice” (Edge, 2011, p. 19; see also Wallace, 1999). As Edge remarks, this continuous process of realignment is required for trainee teachers but also for experienced teachers and teacher educators (Bortoluzzi and Cauzzo De Luca, 2006). The overall process is challenging and it might become daunting and stressful. There is therefore the need for cooperation, collaboration and reflection in order to activate learning through participation and sharing. The present study investigates how trainee teachers reflect on their becoming part of a professional e-community. 2.3 Multiliteracy Yelland, Cope and Kalantzis (2008) emphasise the power of learning environments that “[o]ffer and encourage multimodal expressions of meaning” (p. 202). New literacies include multimodal awareness in text production and fruition; multiliteracy has become a focus of teacher education (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009a, 2009b; Jones and Hafner, 2012). The work of Duensing, Gallardo and Heiser (2013) demonstrates “the potential of social networking tools to develop teacher’s digital literacies” (p.7). The research questions aim at investigating the trainees’ perception of meaningful interaction with peers and trainers within a context (the professional virtual community) that emphasises multiliteracy. 3 LearnWeb2.0: the YELL/TELL platform and its e-community The YELL/TELL community is supported by LearnWeb2.0, a collaborative searching and sharing platform developed at the L3S Research Center, University of Hanover, Germany. LearnWeb2.0 is

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a learning and competence development environment, which allows users to share and collaboratively work on resources collected from the web or user-generated (Marenzi and Zerr, 2012). It provides users with a search interface for resource discovery and sharing across various Web 2.0 services such as YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare, including LearnWeb2.0 itself, and can offer a Personal Web 2.0 Learning Space. In order to support collaborative searching, LearnWeb2.0 provides automatic resource annotation. Resources in LearnWeb2.0 can be bookmarked, tagged, rated, and discussed by all users who are allowed to access them. Comments on particular learning resources can also be used to enrich the description. Users can create folders to bundle resources that belong to the same learning context. Hence, the LearnWeb2.0 community can collaboratively identify the best learning resources for specific learning domains. The discussion of the full potentialities and affordances of LearnWeb2.0 as a collaborative platform is beyond the scope of this paper and can be found in a series of studies published by the researchers who developed it (Marenzi, in press; Marenzi, 2013; Marenzi and Nejdl, 2012; Marenzi and Zerr, 2012). In the following sections a brief comparison with other existing related systems is given to justify the YELL/TELL choice of LearnWeb2.0 to support their activity.

3.1 Comparison with existing solutions

Web 2.0 tools such as Microblogs (Borau et al., 2009), Wikies and Forums can support learners’ communication, collaborative project-work and cultural competence training. Typically such tools provide specific functionalities in a closed environment. LearnWeb2.0 goes one step further and supports appropriate media types in an integrated way, providing an open environment where users can find different kinds of resources and share them with their colleagues and friends in their social networks. The Graasp system (http://graasp.epfl.ch) is “a Web 2.0 application that can serve simultaneously as an aggregation, contextualization, discussion, and networking platform, a shared asset repository, or an activity management system” (Li et al., 2010, p.163; see also Bogdanov et al., 2010). Whilst in Graaasp the main focus lies in project management and activity organization, LearnWeb2.0 is designed as a collaborative tool for searching and sharing resources found in social networks, and working with them in a critical way. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW, http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) is a large-scale repository of learning materials for undergraduate and graduate level courses started in 1999-2002 and is supported by a number of universities around the world. OCW materials are stored in the form of textual or multimedia documents including lecture notes, exams and interactive demonstrations. Whilst OCW sources can be integrated into LearnWeb2.0 as modules, the latter additionally provides means for the collaborative creation of course supporting materials rather than for their storage only. Edshare (http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/) is a content learning and teaching repository created by the University of Southampton. Users create and manage educational content in a Web 2.0-like way. LearnWeb2.0 additionally helps students to find relevant material on the Web. eTwinning (www.etwinning.net) is a free platform for educational staff (teachers, head teachers, librarians, etc.) in Europe to connect, develop collaborative projects, share ideas, exchange best practice and start working together using various customised tools. However, to use the platform users need to register as official teachers in a school in Europe. This can be a limitation for trainee teachers who do not yet work in a school. YELL/TELL on LernWeb2.0 has a public interface and it is freely accessible through registration (http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/new). Thus the platform is private, but osmotically connected to the wider web. It is the administrator’s duty to check and assure fair play and pertinence of participation. To summarize, LearnWeb2.0 offers flexible networking facilities and tools for searching resources, sharing, tagging, commenting and reflecting on resources and practices collectively in the spirit of socio-constructivism, open educational practices and resources, and peer-learning/peer-teaching

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(Marenzi, in press; Marenzi, 2013). For these reasons, it was adopted as a virtual learning environment by the YELL/TELL community and was recently customised specifically for its needs. 3.2 Software customization for the YELL/TELL users To become suitable for a community of adults who are or will become school teachers, LearnWeb2.0 has been progressively customised according to the users’ requirements. Here are some examples: Homepage – The YELL/TELL logo was added on the homepage to promote community identity. In this way, users refer to the LearnWeb2.0 environment as the YELL/TELL platform. Thumb down – The moderator of YELL/TELL raised the ethical issue of the thumb up and thumb down rating system, which can be interpreted as judgmental rather than collaborative. Therefore this control was made unaivalable in the YELL/TELL environment. Only star-rating is available to assess the relevance of resources. Groups and Subgroups – Users can create folders to bundle learning resources that belong to the same learning context. The need for subgroups was raised in YELL/TELL to better organize the resources in several folders and provide a list of activities carried out by the group members. YELL/TELL users can copy or link a resource from one group to another using the “Copy to…” or the “Link to…” buttons. In the former case, a new instance of the resource is created in the new folder, so that users can re-use the same resource in a different context with different metadata and meaning (for example the picture of an eagle in biology or in poetry). “Link to” creates a pointer in the new folder to the original resource and annotations. Delete resources – The YELL/TELL administrator can add, delete and check anything s/he deems un/suitable for the community. This means that if somebody posts materials that are irrelevant, offensive or infringing on copyright regulations, the administrator can delete them. Individual users can only delete what they post. 3.3 Use of the platform by the YELL/TELL community Currently the YELL/TELL platform is used for pre-service and in-service post-graduate courses for primary and nursery school teachers, and secondary schools teachers at the University of Udine, in Italy. The courses are in presence, but they become blended due to the active use of the platform as collaborative virtual environment. The use of the platform contributes to enhancing teachers’ multiliteracies skills (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009a, 2009b; Jones and Hafner, 2012), promoting individual and collaborative reflexivity for the teaching profession (Edge, 2011) and improving on the target language competence (all participants are non-native users of English). Taking active part in a virtual community of practice with the specific professional interest of teaching and learning languages (English in particular) improves the language competence of the users (Bailly, Ciekanski and Guély-Costa, 2013). Once the courses are over, the participants are able to keep in touch with their colleagues, educators and lecturers through the platform; they can remain part of the community after they graduate when they become professional teachers in geographically distant schools. The key aspect of the YELL/TELL platform is offering a virtual space for different groups of trainee teachers for a variety of schools; teacher training is thus presented as the beginning of a continuous process of lifelong learning shared by professionals and language educators with diversified backgrounds. Students in school often experience clear-cut differences in teaching methodology and strategies when they move from one school level to another (e.g. from primary to

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lower secondary) and even from one class to the next; in fact, the process of learning is a continuous flow and should not undergo drastic caesurae and changes. Frequently, teachers themselves do not have a clear and competent outlook on what is done and how language is taught in the levels of schooling where they have never taught. For this reason, each platform user can decide which are the groups s/he is interested in and all groups are open to everybody. There are general interest groups for the whole community of educators, as well as groups related to specific professional contexts. It is fruitful and encouraged to participate in groups which target teaching contexts different from the teacher’s own; this should result in raising awareness about strategies and methodologies across the school system to prevent students and teachers from feeling out of place in a new school or a new class. The flexibility of the platform allows the community to re-contextualise resources for professional use and exploit the peer-teaching environment to share and exchange both resources and the competence of adapting them for one’s own teaching context. By sharing resources from one group to another, learning materials can be re-contextualised to promote collaboration and sharing across education levels. In the YELL/TELL platform, general interest resources are re-contextualised and re-semiotised for language teaching. For example, the Documentary Heaven portal (http://documentaryheaven.com/) stores a wide variety of documentaries; it was not created purposefully for teachers, but once uploaded onto YELL/TELL, it is re-semiotised by users as a cross-curricular teaching resource. 4 The YELL 2012-13 case-study and methodology 4.1 The context and the participants The case-study presented here consisted in using the platform with a fairly homogeneous group of postgraduate students (25 female and 1 male) who are studying to become primary and/or nursery school teachers and teachers of English for young learners (for this reason we focus on the YELL part of the community from this section onwards). They are all Italian native speakers and foreign users of English. At the time of the data-gathering (winter 2012-2013), they were attending the 3rd or 4th year of their degree at the University of Udine. They had chosen to follow the non-obligatory English course and, at the start of the course, they all had (at the very least) a B1.2 linguistic competence in English (Common European Framework of Reference), while some already had a B2 competence. 19 trainees were between 22 and 26 years old and the other 7 were between 30 and 44 years old. The sample is rather small, but representative of pre-service teacher-training programmes in Italian universities as regards the overwhelming majority of female students, their age range and the ICT literacy level for learning and teaching. The English course in presence consisted of 50 contact hours with two teachers. The course was learning to teach English to nursery and primary school children and the students were required to prepare lessons mainly based on oral skills, experiential and content-based learning. The main aims of the course were: reflecting on the identity of today’s school teachers, improving on their multiliteracy competence and on their proficiency in English as a foreign language. Participants were expected to use the YELL collaborative platform to search for educational resources, share them with their colleagues, tag and comment on resources that other trainees and teachers had posted on the environment. 4.2 Data gathering To answer the research questions, we carried out a qualitative data-driven study: we collected the students’ “voices” as evidence for findings that were not determined in advance, although we had some expectations about the probable outcomes. We expected students to react positively to

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becoming part of the professional e-community, and we expected them to find the platform easy to use due to their age group and their familiarity with social platforms. Students were asked to access the platform from the very beginning of the course and they were asked to carry out specific tasks to train themselves to use the platform and become acquainted with the community (Appendix 1). The tasks were discussed during the first weeks of the course. The final project that contributed to coursework assessment was to be shared with the community on the community platform. At the end of the course, the teachers administered a questionnaire to gather the trainees’ “voices” (through open-ended questions) and some impressions about the system usability (through closed questions adapted from Chin et al., 1988). The deadline to answer the questionnaire was a month and a half after the end of the course. Filling in the questionnaire was not obligatory, but strongly advised. All 26 students regularly attending classes provided their answers. The first part of the questionnaire investigated the use of the YELL website (http://yell.uniud.it) and is not analysed in this paper. The second part about the YELL community environment is in Appendix 2 and the results are reported in the following section. 5 YELLing voices: data analysis and results 5.1 System use and evaluation The questionnaire required the respondents to rate the platform functionalities on a likert scale from 1 to 10. The quantitative results showed the general appreciation of the users for the platform with some contradictory findings. The platform was rated clear to use: on a 10-point scale from confusing to very clear, only 4% of respondents rated the platform unclear, 29% rated it clear and 57% very clear. Tagging and commenting resources were rated 92% from helpful to very helpful; also tagging and commenting was declared to be easy and very easy by the 80% of the respondents. However, when asked how much they used these functionalities, the answer was surprisingly low: 46% had never tagged or commented a resource and an additional 35% of respondents had tagged and commented rather infrequently. In the open-ended questions, one of the respondents even remarked that she only tagged her own resources, not what other colleagues posted. These results are in keeping with the study “Evaluating the benefits of social annotation for collaborative search” (Abel et al., 2009) where social annotations are only considered as secondary relevance indicators for search results: title and description are viewed as more important. It has been shown that, when sharing resources in a relatively small corpus, users prefer writing comments rather than using light-weight mechanisms such as tagging. Organising resources in meaningful groups is sufficient for categorising, sharing and re-finding materials. The respondents were extremely positive about the relevance of the platform for them as trainee teachers (96% responded positively to Question 6) and future teachers (88% answered yes to Question 7). 100% responded that we should carry on utilizing the platform for future courses. What is rather striking, however, is that 77% had never used a professional platform before (Question 11). The respondents who gave examples of platforms they regularly used, mentioned mostly websites, blogs or portals (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/, http://www.dltk-kids.com, http://www.teachingchannel.org). Only 8% gave examples of social platforms used for learning with peers and mentioned Anobii (shared bookshelves; http://www.anobii.com) and Facebook, neither of them specifically for teachers. 5.2 Users’ perception of their identity within the community

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The qualitative analysis of the open-ended answers was performed manually and was cross-checked using the eMargin software for collaborative tagging and labelling (http://emargin.bcu.ac.uk/; Figure 1).

Figure 1 – eMargin data tagging The analysis of the answers identified two main aspects related to the research questions: how users perceive their identity within the professional e-community (research question 1); how the platform is perceived by users in terms of usability and professional relevance (research question 2). We classified the first aspect in 4 overlapping categories (described in Table 1 below), and the second aspect in 2 categories described in Section 5.3. The categories are data-driven and derive from the word-choice of the participants. Table 1: The users’ perception of their identity within the community

Categories % 1. Learning from other teachers: the respondent wrote that by using the platform s/he learns from other teachers, from lecturers, and from websites.

57

2. Finding resources: the platform is used to find resources of different kinds posted by the community (materials, websites, ideas, etc)

100

3. Using the platform as a professional teacher: the platform is a useful professional tool for them as teachers or prospective teachers.

100

4. Sharing and collaborating: the respondent shares resources, ideas, materials, links, etc with the community.

96

The four categories described in Table 1 range from less (item 1) to progressively more pro-active ways of positioning themselves as professional users within the e-community (item 4). The students’ point of view shifts from a less active role, seeing themselves as trainee teachers who rely on others to learn, to the more confident status of professionals who can contribute to the community by sharing their work and ideas. We categorised the students’ answers according to this progression of independence and self-confidence as a user-teacher. A few examples and quotes from the questionnaires are reported below. The quotes are verbatim and errors or slips have not been corrected. All respondents used English as a foreign language. To respect privacy, we use initials. The numbers refer to eMargin software line numbering. 1. Learning from other teachers: 57% of respondents wrote that, by using the platform, they can learn from other teachers, from lecturers, and from websites. Since this platform is used for teacher education, the idea of learning from others is an expected outcome. Interestingly, however, some of the respondents are aware of the complexity of their double identity as learners and professional educators and mention lifelong learning.

RDV 175 “The aspect I like the best is the fact that the social platform was created expressly thinking about the needs of trainee teachers that have to get experience and also for English teachers who everyday have to think about something special for their children”. MB 34 “[I]t is useful because gives you a sense of confidence. Maybe sometimes when you’re preparing your lessons you want to have a look to the works done by the others”.

2. Finding resources: the platform is used to find resources of different kinds such as materials, websites, and new ideas. Particular emphasis is given to the reliability of professional resources for teachers and teacher education that are shared within the e-community. Relevant resources include materials posted by other trainees, i.e. peer-generated resources:

MB 2 “So I think that it is important to know that in Yell you can find interesting and reliable resources”.

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MLG 203 “Yes, it is very useful. It is a space where find qualified information and suggestion. It is a very good guide to navigate in the Internet sea (of course for topics related with English and education!)”.

3. Using the platform as a professional teacher (or prospective teacher): all respondents confirmed the relevance of the platform for them as future professional teachers. The main positive aspects are: belonging to the community for lifelong learning; enriching professional competence; promoting cross-curricular links, collaborating among teachers of different schools, and developing creativity. Several mentioned that belonging to the community will be even more relevant when they work in school.

CS: 181 “I think it will be more useful than now because now we have to prepare an exam, but when we will teach, we’ll have to prepare lessons for long periods of time (months or years) and the necessity of materials will be greater.”

The platform is the means for professional development: SDM 256 “I think this platform is very useful because it’s a place where teachers can share their materials, ideas and works. It can be a support when planning the work in class. Teachers from different places can consult [the groups] about activities, projects and methods and in this way, improve their teaching.”

MB remarks that it creates a “web between schools” and SG that it can be used across the curriculum. Participating in the community can promote collaboration and creativity:

IV 271 “I think that YELL is a very good idea because the collaboration among teachers is fundamental in this job. Besides the creativity of the teacher is an important aspect in this profession and YELL could be a good platform where to take inspiration”.

A last point made by one of the respondents focuses on the flexibility of this tool for the e-community:

ReS 67 “I think teachers can use the platform to find something different according to their need and to fight the stereotypes about English teaching and multiculturality”.

Some of the responses cross over categories 3 and 4, as shown below. 4. Sharing and collaborating: the platform is seen as a virtual space in which the respondent has a more active role in the community by ‘sharing’ resources, ideas, materials, links, etc. and sharing tags and comments on resources and materials. Only 1 respondent did not mention sharing aspect: RS is rather critical about the platform while recognising that it offers a lot of resources. Cooperation among trainees and teachers is clearly highlighted:

BF 156 “In the social platform the aspect I like best is the [...] exchange, comparison and collaboration among users because in this way we can help each other to find the best ideas and strategies in [our] field”.

Some respondents clearly refer to the professional community they belong to through YELL: MB 395 “But I think that the most important thing is to keep in touch with other teachers for sharing ideas and opinions. We have all different minds and we have to remember that this is our richness.”

The respondents realise that the community can help them maintain their links with the university and the colleagues they met there:

MLG 179 “[I]t will be able to keep in contact with university world and with other colleagues”. Peer-learning is explicitly mentioned:

MB 388 “In this way everyone learns new things from peers”. MDM 362 “In my opinion, on YELL there is a great respect for each work posted on it. Collaboration is one of the main reason why YELL exists”.

5.3 Problems and suggestions

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The second aspect in the data is related to the perception users have of system usability and professional relevance. The following table summarises the problems encountered by the respondents when using the platform, and their suggestions to solve some of them (Table 2). Table 2 Problems and suggestions

Problems/Suggestions % 1. the YELL website entry point is problematic (this is not strictly a problem of the platform, but of the position of the platform entry point on the YELL website: the users remark that it should be more prominent)

34

2. platform lacks user-friendliness and intuitiveness of use; suggestions for improvement (changes have already been implemented at the time of writing)

54

3. need for more time in class to learn how to use the platform (also to give time to users to adapt to this tool and allowing time for the learning process of using a new tool)

15

4. need for a clear userguide (released in November 2013 at the time of writing) 7 5. personal reasons for negative attitude towards the platform (not used to sharing materials and resources; ‘maybe I am not ready yet’)

15

6. additional groups are needed; suggestions of topics/groups and different additional resources are given by the respondents

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7. more widespread use of the platform needed to share experience with more teachers/lecturers, etc.

15

8. never used a professional platform apart from YELL 77 6 Discussion As shown in the data analysis, the answer to the first research question is positive and our initial expectation is confirmed: trainee teachers are highly interested in using the YELL platform to become part of the wider e-community of professional teachers. There is almost unanimous agreement about the fact that the resources found in YELL are professionally reliable and valuable. Many trainees remark that belonging to this community will be even more relevant once they are full-time teachers in school. Learning from peers and lifelong learning are regarded as desirable and fostered by the community. The majority of respondents writes that being part of the community promotes teachers’ creativity offering new stimuli and peer collaboration. Even the most critical voice in the group (RS) confirms the importance of using the platform for teacher training. This supports the relevance of teachers’ networks to enhance a socio-constructivist view of teaching and learning (Sections 3.1 and 3.2), while supporting online and offline positive changes in communications (Vuorikari et al. 2012, p. 7) and promoting reflective teaching on action and professional identity (Duensing, Gallardo and Heiser, 2013; Edge, 2011). The second research question about how easy trainees find using the platform to become part of the community has a more multifaceted answer. While it seems positive if we look at some results of the quantitative answers (Section 5.1), the open-ended answers show the limited transferability of generic digital competence to a professional platform. 48.5% of the respondents found that the platform (LearnWeb2.0, third release: http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/lw/) should be more user friendly. The current version of LearnWeb2.0 was released in May 2013 (http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/new/) and has overcome most of the usability problems raised by the results of the questionnaire. Other suggestions are being implemented at the time of writing, as described in section 7. The difficulties some trainees experienced in using the platform might have been due to some aspects of the system release they used, but these problems were certainly exacerbated by their inexperience with social ICT tools for professional use: interestingly, some participants wrote that they would need more time to learn the potentialities of the platform.

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The questionnaire shows that there is the need for more guidance in the professional use of the platform to become “networked teachers” (Vuorikari et al., 2012). There is also a clear correlation between individual problems in using the platform and the fact that those respondents had never accessed social platforms for professional purposes before. This confirms that the use of community platforms in teacher education is a positive step ahead towards multiliteracy for learning and teaching (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009a, 2009b; Duensing, Gallardo and Heiser, 2013). 7 Ongoing research and further developments The research on the YELL/TELL platform and community is still ongoing. The YELL case study is a limited but representative sample of social platform users and it offers us the insights of trainees on a blended course. The questionnaire will be administered to other groups of users in future courses, and groups of teachers in school will be involved in the next research stages. To support the process of learning and using the platform efficiently for professional purposes, we shall identify expert users who can welcome new users and introduce them to the community. This will also establish stronger links with and among school communities. A new video userguide in Italian was made available online at the time of writing (November 2013; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3cTYga4C2g). Further developments of the YELL/TELL project aim at promoting a growing collaborative international community which can expand and reach the whole professional life of teachers and educators, including retired teachers whose competences and experience are precious and often undermined. Acknowledgement We are grateful to Sergej Zerr, Philipp Kemkes and Jaspreet Singh (L3S Research Center, Hanover, Germany) for developing the LearnWeb2.0 platform and customising it for the YELL/TELL community. Many thanks to Mityana Vaccaro (Udine University, Italy) for supporting us throughout this project. References Abel, F., Herder, E., Marenzi, I., Nejdl, W. and Zerr, S. (2009) ‘Evaluating the benefits of social annotation for collaborative search’. Presented at the 2nd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009), co-located with ACM SIGIR 2009 Conference on Information Retrieval, Boston, USA. Bailly, S., Ciekanski, M. and Guély-Costa, E. (2013) ‘Training language teachers to sustain self-directed language learning: an exploration of advisers’ experiences on a web-based open virtual learning environment.’, The EUROCALL Review, Vol. 21 No.1, pp.35-54. Block, D. (2003) The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Bogdanov, E., El Helou, S., Gillet, D., Salzmann, C. and Sire, S. (2010) ‘Graaasp: a Web 2.0 research platform for contextual recommendation with aggregated data’, in Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, ACM Press 978-1-60558-930-5/10/04, New York, USA, pp.3523-28. Borau, K., Ulrich, C., Feng, J. and Shen, R. (2009) ‘Microblogging for language learning: using Twitter to train communicative and cultural competence’, in Spaniol, M., Li, Q., Klamma, R. and Lau, R.W.H. (Eds.), Advances in Web Based Learning - ICWL 2009, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Web-based Learning, Springer, LNCS 5686, Berlin-Hidelberg, pp.78-87. Bortoluzzi, M. and Cauzzo De Luca, B. (2006) ‘La Sala degli Specchi: teoria e pratica nella formazione iniziale degli insegnanti’, in Griggio, C. (Ed.), Incontri di discipline per la didattica, Franco Angeli Editore, Milano, pp.335-345.

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Chin, J.P., Diehl, V.A. and Norman, K.L. (1988) ‘Development of an instrument measuring user satisfaction of the human-computer interface’, in ACM CHI'88 Proceedings, pp.213-218. Cope, B. and Kalantzis M. (2009a) ‘Multiliteracies: New literacies, new learning’, Pedagogies: An International Journal, Vol. 4, pp.164-195. Cope, B. and Kalantzis M. (2009b) ‘New media, new learning’, in Cole, D. R. and Pullen, D. L. (Eds.), Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and Practice, Routledge, London, pp.87-103. Dede, C. (2008) ‘A seismic shift in epistemology’, EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 43 No.3, pp.80-81. [online] http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/ASeismicShiftinEpistemology/162892 (Accessed 10 February 2010). Dooly, M. and O’Dowd, R. (Eds.) (2012), ‘Researching online interaction and exchange in foreign language education: Introduction to the volume’, in Dooly, M. and O’Dowd, R. (Eds.) Researching Online Interaction and Exchange in Foreign Language Education, Peter Lang, Bern, pp.11-41. Duensing, A., Gallardo, M. and Heiser, S. (2013) ‘Learning to share and sharing to learn – professional development of language teachers in HE to foster open educational practices’, in Beavan, A., Comas-Quinn, A. and Sawhill, B. (Eds), Case Studies of Openness in the Language Classroom, Research-publishing.net, Dublin, pp. 121-133. Edge, J. (2011) The Reflexive Teacher Educator in TESOL. Roots and Wings, Routledge, London. European Union (2007) Key Competences for lifelong learning. European reference framework, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg [online] http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/publ/pdf/ll-learning/keycomp_en.pdf (Accessed 10 June 2013). Greenhow, C., Robelia, B. and Hughes, J. E. (2009) ‘Learning, teaching, and scholarship in a digital age. Web 2.0 and classroom research: What path should we take now?’, Educational Researcher, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp.246-259. Jones, R.H. and Hafner, C.A. (2012) Understanding Digital Literacies. A practical introduction, Routledge, London. Kalantzis, M. and Cope, B. (2008) ‘Language education and multiliteracies’, in May, S. and Hornberger, N.H (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd ed., Springer, N.Y., pp.195-211. LearnWeb2.0. [online] http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/new/lw/index.jsf (Accessed 25 November 2013). Li, N., Ullrich, C., El Helou, S. and Gillet, D. (2010) ‘Using social software for teamwork and collaborative project management in Higher Education’, in Luo,X. et al. (Eds.), Advances in web based learning - ICWL 2010, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web-based Learning, Springer, LNCS 6483, Berlin-Hidelberg , pp.161-170. Marenzi, I. (in press) ‘Interactive and collaborative supports for CLIL: towards a formal model based on digital literacy’, in Kupetz, R. and Becker, C. (Eds.), Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) by Interaction, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main. Marenzi, I. (2013) ‘A multiliteracies approach for supporting language learning courses at university level’, in Jovanovic, J. and Chiong, R. (Eds.), Technological and Social Environments for Interactive Learning, Informing Science Press, Santa Rosa, CA., pp.249-276. Marenzi, I. and Nejdl, W. (2012) ‘I search therefore I learn. Supporting active and collaborative learning in language teaching’, in Okada, A., Connolly, T. and Scott, P. (Eds.), Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources, IGI Global. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, pp.103-25. Marenzi, I. and Zerr S. (2012) ‘Multiliteracies and active learning in CLIL - The development of LearnWeb2.0’, IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT), Vol. 5 No. 4, pp.336-348. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical applied linguistics, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London. Rheingold, H. (2012) Net Smart. How to Thrive Online, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Riley, P. (2007) Language Culture and Iidentity, Continuum, London.

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Scardamalia, M. and Bereiter, C. (2006) ‘Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy and technology’, in Sawyer K. (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.97-118. Sloep, P. and Berlanga, A. (2011) ‘Learning Networks, Networked Learning’, Comunicar, Vol. 19 N. 37, pp.55-64. Vuorikari, R. et al. (2012) Teacher networks. Today’s and Tomorrow’s Challenges and Opportunities for the Teaching Profession, European Schoolnet, Brussels. [online] http://service.eun.org/teachers-newsletter/TellNet_Teacher_Networks_web.pdf Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and language, MIT Press, Boston. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind and society, MIT Press, Boston. Wallace, M. (1999) ‘The reflective model revisited’, in Trappes-Lomax, H. and McGrath, I. (Eds.), Theory in Language Teacher Education, Longman, London, pp.179-187. Williams, M. and Burden, R.L. (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. YELL/TELL. [online] http://yell.uniud.it/?page_id=157&lang=en (Accessed 2013). Yelland, N., Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2008) ‘Learning by Design: creating pedagogical framework for knowledge building in the twenty-first century’, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp.197-213.

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Appendix 1: Tasks to learn how to use the platform 1. Search the resources of the different groups on YELL platform (Materials and Projects). Click on all the groups and decide what are going to be the most relevant for you after you have explored them Tag the resources and comment on them. Why do you think this activity can be relevant for you as a teacher? Learning goal: relevance of tags and comments 2. Learning how to search using the YELL platform. Think of a keyword you find relevant for you as a teacher, go on a websearch using the facilities of the platform: refine your search, expand or restrict it according to what you need and find (only social platform, wider web, etc). Share and upload one important link you find in this way. 3. Focus on some sections which you find particularly relevant for you in the link: http://yell.uniud.it/yellrep/Websharing4U.pdf. Add to the YELL platform 5 websites from the list online which are not yet present among the platform resources. Of course you have to check that they have not been uploaded first. Please, keep track of what you added and be ready to explain why you think those sites are relevant for teachers. 4. Add to YELL LearnWeb2.0 platform one or more websites you know of, and are relevant for you and are not yet present in the platform. Keep track of what you added. 5. Using the forum ask your classmates to comment on and tag the websites you added. 6. How do you think this platform can be useful to you as a language teacher? 7. Please, talk to a classmate / tutor in school who does not follow the English course and present the YELL LearnWeb2.0 platform to her/him. What is her/his reaction? For other subjects.

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Appendix 2: Section 2 of the questionnaire Questions on YELL platform accessed via username and password: http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/lw/ from our Materials and Projects links: http://yell.uniud.it/?page_id=157 1. How many times have you accessed the platform? Never once a few times once a week more than once a week very frequently 2. Please, rate the layout and the structure of the YELL social platform: Highlight the number you choose using bald character (grassetto) or underscore (sottolineato) as you prefer: Group overview (collection of resources and people) confusing 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 very clear Resource sharing through groups not useful 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 very useful Resource sharing among groups (from one group to another) difficult 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 easy Tags and comments for the resources not helpful 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 very helpful Creating tags and comments for the resources difficult 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 very easy Creating tags and comments for the resources. How often do you use it? never 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 always 3. Are there any aspects that you would like to be added to the platform system? 4. Have you used the YELL platform as a search engine? Yes No 5. If you answered yes to question 4, how useful was it? 6. As a university student do you think the YELL social platform is useful? Can you explain? 7. As a primary or nursery teacher do you think the YELL social platform is useful? Can you explain? 8. What are the aspects you like best in the YELL social platform? Why? 9. What are the aspects you like the least in the YELL social platform? Why? 10. Do you think we should carry on using the platform for teacher training courses? 11. Do you use any other social platforms for studying and/or for your teaching profession? If yes, could you list them here? 12. Do you have any further suggestion or comment?

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Figure 1 – eMargin data tagging