|
January 1, 2003
The Viva Project: the Virtual Interactive Village in the Ardıche
By Philip Benz
The Viva village is a dynamic online writing project created by a team of educators including Christine Nucci, Benjamin Friess and Jırımy Royannez from the CDDP de l'Ardıche and Philip Benz, English teacher at the Lycıe Astier in Aubenas.
After several years of experimenting with message board projects, we have tried to bring together a whole palette of tools that will allow both teacher-guided written expression activities and student-centered free-form writing in the target language. It's a space where students can not only work on themes developed in class, but also express themselves openly and autonomously on subjects of their own choosing.
Several points of view:
Christine Nucci: "The goal is two-fold: on one hand to have students learn a foreign language, and on the other to contact young people in other countries through problems of interest to both sides."
A student: "It's an original and interesting way to learn English and it's a bit of a change from our usual classes."
Another student: "We can talk about cinema and music. I go more often to the cafı, where we can communicate with the Brazilian students who send a message and introduce themselves. We can answer them and introduce ourselves; ask them about their country. We can talk about our country, and it allows us to communicate in English."
Another student: "It seems easier to learn English with Viva, because it's true that we are in a more realistic situation and the words come out more easily."
A dynamic environment
The Viva project is designed like a small village. The idea was to give students a familiar and friendly representation of a group of work spaces where they have the impression that they are not merely writing for their homework, or for their teacher. Here they get the feeling that they are really "somewhere" and they are writing in a context that reaches beyond the all too often artificial limits of the classroom. We originally created five different writing spaces, each with a different purpose:
- The Cafı, for introductions and discussions about current events;
- The Library, to speak about literature or other things students have read;
- The Cinema, to speak about films and videos of interest to students;
- The Bakery, for round-robin story writing; and
- The Town Hall, to present the village rules and to suggest the creation of new spaces.
From the outset, we wanted a mechanism that would allow the village to grow over time, and very quickly our students seized this opportunity. For example, after reading a text about social problems in London suburbs, my students proposed the creation of a "squat," or homeless refuge, where they could discuss the problems of homeless people and write stories with homeless people as characters. Their Brazilian partners decided to create a whole new neighborhood within weeks of discovering the Viva village, with spaces to discuss issues related to sports, music, nature and food. Over the following months we also welcomed new spaces such as residential homes, a school, a science lab, a haunted house, a newspaper, a travel agency and even a videogame store. Each of these new spaces was created in response to a proposal either from participating teachers who had a new project, or directly from students who had made detailed proposals in the Town Hall.
The presence of foreign partners in the project added great depth and interest, both in the creation of new spaces for exchange and also in providing real partners, authentic readers for students' writing. Responses were not systematically organized but rather left to the students' own initiative. Whenever my students saw that some Brazilian, American, Caribbean, Danish, Canadian or Italian students had added their grain of salt to the discussion, it had a profound effect on their level of motivation. Even though each one did not have her "own" pen pal, they realized that they were no longer writing only for the critical eyes of their teacher. This gave some measure of authenticity to students' writing, something that we are not always able to find in a traditional classroom setting.
One example of using the environment
Let's have a look at one concrete example of the way my students used the Viva village this year. I tried in every case to respect two guiding principles: first, continuity with what they had studied beforehand in class or in their textbook; and secondly, a division of online writing time that leaves them time for open, autonomous expression on topics of interest to them, in order to encourage exchange with their distant partners.
Each time I took my students to the school's computer room, I began with a writing assignment connected with what we had just done in class, either a fully-developed project as when we did a WebQuest on robots before working on the film Bladerunner or when we studied cloning through the film The Sixth Day, or just following up to a text they have studied in their textbook.
Visit the Viv@ village.
As we see here, in the Anderson family house, I begin with a sort of "starter message" following their reading of "The Letter," a novel extract from the Your Way 1ıre book:
Then the students have to write the next chapter in the story, using various structures that we have studied in class, like obligation, regrets or past perfect, that I remind them of on the board while they are beginning to write. A few students take the whole hour to write their chapter, but most have finished in fifteen to thirty minutes, so they can then either read what the others have just written and add a further chapter, or else they can go somewhere else in the village and write about something completely different, answering messages left by students from another site. Students can write in their target language, or they can write in French in response to a message written in that language by their partners in Brazil or in the United States, for example. Over the ensuing weeks, it also happens that their partners read what they have written about "The Letter" and add on to the story. As we see below, two weeks later Steph, a student in Angola High School in Indiana, added her own chapter and the next day two of my students wrote a further extension to Steph's chapter.
The conversations, whether they are succeeding chapters in a story as in this example, or different views about a film, contrasting opinions about the World Cup soccer match, or simply a student's personal introduction and questions about her country, can grow with the passage of time. Each time I bring my students to the computer room there are new ideas to discover.
Call for participation
The first year of this project turned out to be quite a satisfactory experiment, with participants at a dozen different sites and considerable growth in the scope and nature of the spaces represented in the village. But a new school year is upon us, and if I have come to speak about this project here today, it is not without ulterior motives. Our project continues, and needs new participants. It is an open project that you can join at any time during the year, either for a one-shot visit in conjunction with a specific unit of study or by participating regularly as my students and their overseas partners have done. You can join in on the stories, discussions and themes you find already running in the various spaces in the village, or you can start up your own topics, or even propose the creation of new spaces or new neighborhoods on different themes altogether, if this corresponds to the way you imagine using the tools we have provided. There are many possibilities open to you in the Viva project, and I am convinced there are many that we haven't even begun to imagine yet. It is in the process of experimentation and collaborative work that we will pursue its development.
If this project interests you, you can either contact me, or through the Ardıcol site.
Philip Benz
|
