Setting a Precedent with Open Resources Development in English for Specific Academic Purposes

Setting a Precedent with
Open Resources Development
in English for Specific Academic Purposes
Alannah Fitzgerald, Martin Barge, Saima Sherazi, William Tweddle
Image: "The Village Lawyer's office" by Pieter Brueghel the Younger - Sotheby's. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Workshop Overview
• Research and development project with FLAX
– Who we are
• Demonstration of free gamed-based apps for
Android devices for interacting with FLAX
collections
• Reflection on ESAP resources development with
openly licensed content
– Demonstration Law Collections
– Creative Commons
– Open Access
– MOOCs

The FLAX Vision
“FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) is
both a vision and a tool that you can use for
language learning. The Web contains
innumerable language activities, quizzes,
and games, but they are fixed: the activities
are cast in stone and the material is chosen
by others. Our vision is to put the control
back where it belongs, in the hands of
teachers and learners.” (eBook of FLAX)
http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf

Who are we in this flax research &
Development collaboration?

FLAX Language Project http://flax.nzdl.org
at the Greenstone Digital Library Lab,
Waikato University NZ
Professor Ian Witten
FLAX Project Lead
Dr Shaoqun Wu
FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer

Research on Open FLAX Collections
http://oerresearchhub.org/
Alannah Fitzgerald
Open Fellow with OERRH
FLAX Language & Open
Education Researcher

OER Research Hypotheses
http://oerresearchhub.org/collaborative-research/hypotheses/

Queen Mary U. of London Language Centre
http://language-centre.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/home
William Tweddle, Martin Barge, Saima Sherazi

Demonstration of Interactive flax
activities and apps

FLAX TEAM Apps for Android via GooglePlay
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Android_robot_skateboarding.svg /
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Play_Store.svg

Split Sentences
Developers’ Interface

Split Sentences
Learners’ Interface

Setting a Precedent with Open Resources Development in English for Specific Academic Purposes

Related Words

Related Words
Learners’ Web Interface

Collocation Guessing

Collocations Guessing

Collocation Dominoes

Reflection on Open Educational
Practices (OEP)

Openness in EAP?
What do you perceive as the biggest barriers
and affordances for adopting open resources
and practices in EAP?

Research into EAP Mats Development
Do you perceive the current culture of EAP as
being supportive of research into materials
development?
Why/Why not? Can you give us an example?

The eBook of FLAX
“FLAX enables teachers to build bespoke
libraries very easily. It is built upon powerful
digital library technology, and provides access to
vast linguistic resources containing countless
examples of actual, authentic, usage in
contemporary text. But teachers can also build
collections using their own material, focusing
on language learning in a particular domain
(e.g. business, law) or motivating students by
using text from a particular context (e.g.
country or region, common interests).”
http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf

http://wikipedia-miner.cms.waikato.ac.nz/index.html

Wiki-Annotate Articles
http://wikipedia-miner.cms.waikato.ac.nz/demos/annotate/url/

Demo Law Collections in FLAX
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=BlaRC&if=

Domain-specific Collocations
We focus on lexical collocations with noun-based
structures because they are the most salient and
important patterns in domain-specific text.
Collocations from the English Common Law MOOC:
•verb + noun e.g. abolish judicial review
•noun + noun e.g. precedent case
•adjective + noun e.g. common law
•noun + of + noun e.g. court of appeal

Linking to the FLAX Learning Collocations
Collection (Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)

Lexical Bundles
“Lexical bundles” are multi-word sequences with distinctive
syntactic patterns and discourse functions that are commonly
used in academic prose (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al,
2003, 2004).
Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC):
•noun phrase + of e.g. In the course of his
•prepositional phrase + of e.g. on the part of the
•it + verb/adjective phrase e.g. it is common ground that
•be + noun/adjective phrase e.g. be taken into account in
•verb phrase + that e.g. There is no doubt that

Good Ol’ Part-Of-Speech Tagging

Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/videos/wanna-work-together

http://creativecommons.org/

Steamboat Bill Jnr  Steamboat Willie
 Mickey Mouse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#/media/File:Steamboat-willie.jpg

Culture as Owned
“The meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear
to those who pay to produce it. The meaning is:
No one can do to the Disney Corporation what
Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That
though we had a culture where people could
take and build upon what went before, that's
over.” (Larry Lessig, Keynote address at the
Open Source Convention, 2002)

Common Sense of the Commons
“I've told a dark story. The truth is more mixed.
A technology has given us a new freedom.
Slowly, some begin to understand that this
freedom need not mean anarchy. We can carry
a free culture into the twenty-first century,
without artists losing and without the potential
of digital technology being destroyed. ...
Common sense must revolt. It must act to free
culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be
realized.” (Larry Lessig, 2004)

http://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/2fpoym/i_started_reading_aaron_swartz_650x500/

Aaron Swartz
What do you know about Aaron Swartz and his
contribution to the Open Access and Open
Education movements?

Aaron Swartz
“Aaron Swartz was a brilliant young programmer and internet
activist. Among many other things, he helped found the social
news site, Reddit, and helped Larry Lessig establish Creative
Commons... Schwartz believed deeply that information of all
sorts should be widely accessible. And that belief proved his
undoing.” (William Fisher, 2014)

“In 2011, while he was a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center,
Swartz surreptitiously downloaded a large number of journal
articles from the website of JSTOR, a massive nonprofit
repository of such articles, to a laptop computer that he had
placed in a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Most likely, Swartz intended to make the articles
available to the public at large, but he never did so. His
actions were detected, and he was arrested. He subsequently
returned to JSTOR all of the data he had downloaded.
JSTOR itself, the ostensible victim of Swartz's misconduct,
released a statement indicating that it would not bring a civil
copyright infringement suit against him and did not support a
criminal prosecution. Nevertheless, the United States
Attorney in Boston pressed forward with a prosecution.
Swartz was indicted, not for violating Section 506(a), but for,
quote, "wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining
information from a protected computer, and recklessly
damaging a protected computer," close quote.” (William
Fisher, 2014)

“Perhaps some sort of criminal penalty was warranted in
this case, perhaps a deferred prosecution agreement,
which would have been effective in preventing Swartz
from engaging in similar conduct in the future. Perhaps.
...In short, the prosecutors in this case failed to exercise
their power wisely. I know and respect one of those
prosecutors. He's not a cruel person. But he and his
colleagues acted irresponsibly, and the result was
tragedy.” (William Fisher, 2014)

“I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron
died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating
that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles
to anybody around the world who wanted access — exactly
what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it
to Aaron; I was on — I was traveling. But I looked forward to
seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before —
and celebrating that this is what had happened.
Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be
fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives. … Every time
you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different
people who loved and respected and worked with him. He
was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that
the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t
enough... This was somebody — this was somebody who was
pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by
our government.” (Larry Lessig, 2013)

http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/open-sesame-and-other-open-movements

Directory of Open Access Journals
http://doaj.org/

EThOS at the British Library
e-theses online service
http://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do;jsessionid=D5C054EBBD8621322F76B65408CC0932

Openness in Mainstream MOOCs?
http://www.michaelbransonsmith.net/blog/2012/12/19/day-of-the-mooc-now-animated/

How Open are MOOCs?
• Mostly Open Gratis or Open Libre?
• What difference does open licensing make to
the education community?

Current MOOC Language Issues
• Mainstream MOOCs (Coursera, edX, Udacity) are predominantly in
the English Language
– MOOC learners are not registered as language learners
• Language ability impacts on retention and course completion
• Crowdsourcing and funding for commercial translations of MOOCs
is currently limited
– Translations of lectures only do not assist with assessment
requirements in e.g. English-medium MOOCs
• Receptive versus productive language needs
• Mainstream MOOCs do not (in most cases) license content openly
as Open Educational Resources (OER)
– Open licensing with Creative Commons is vital for developing
derivative resources to support language learning
– Building linguistic support into MOOC learning platforms? e.g. a
combination of translation and corpus-based tools?
• Online learning offers a compelling case for corpus-based approaches

Look Out for FLAX with
Russell Stannard’s Teacher Training Videos
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com

FLAX Across Platforms
• FLAX Website flax.nzdl.org for hosting open online
language collections
• Building directly onto the Web with OER
• FLAX multilingual open-source software for download
• Set up your own FLAX server online or;
• Build collections offline for use on your PC
• FLAX Android apps for download
• Interact with game-based FLAX collections while on the go
• FLAX for MOODLE plug-in for download
• FLAX for MOOC Platforms?
• FLAX in conjunction with translation technologies?

References
• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2003). Lexical bundles in speech and
writing: an initial taxonomy. In A. Wilson, P. Rayson, & T. McEnery (Eds.),
Corpus linguistics by the lune: A festschrift for Geoffrey Leech (pp. 71–92).
Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at . . .: lexical bundles
in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405.
Biber, D. (2006). University Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and
written registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
• Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and
written registers. English for Specific Purpose, 26, 263–286.
• Lessig, L. (2013). In Democracy NOW! "
An Incredible Soul": Larry Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz After Cyberactivist
’s Suicide Before Trial; Parents Blame Prosecutor”
• Lessig, L. (2004).Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the
Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
• Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining
Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222-239.
• William Fisher, (2014). CopyrightX: Lecture 12.3, Remedies: Criminal
Penalties.

Thank You
FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/
The How-to eBook of FLAX: http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with
%20links.pdf
FLAX Game-based Apps for Android via Google Play Store (free):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en
Ian Witten (FLAX Project Lead): ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Shaoqun Wu (FLAX Research and Development): shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz
Alannah Fitzgerald (FLAX Open Language Research): a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca
Xiaofeng Alex Yu (FLAX Apps Development): Alex.Yu@wintec.ac.nz
Martin Barge (Queen Mary Language Centre): m.i.barge@qmul.ac.uk
Saima Sherazi (Queen Mary Language Centre): s.n.sherazi@qmul.ac.uk
William Tweddle (Queen Mary Language Centre): w.tweddle@qmul.ac.uk
OER Research Hub: http://oerresearchhub.org/
TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
Twitter: @AlannahFitz

Setting a Precedent with Open Resources Development in English for Specific Academic Purposes

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