Chatterbots and Penguin Clouds

Chatterbots and Penguin clouds... that's what we discussed in class this week! Here's the web address for the Wikipedia entry for chatterbot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot. I was hoping it would be an actual robot, but it's just a computer program that tries to fool you into giving away your bank account info. Sigh. Actually, we discussed a lot of cool stuff on Wednesday. I really enjoyed Nour Cherif's presentation on word clouds. I can see some practical applications for using word clouds. I feel it would benefit me to have a visual representation of the words I use more or less frequently, especially if writing in a foreign language. Nour discussed how students depend on high frequency vocabulary, and using word clouds can be used to bring attention to using new vocabulary. I liked how ss can look for high frequency vocabulary words in the word clouds, and try to think of synonyms, and I thought using word clouds for assessing vocabulary use and development was an interesting idea. For reading development, I think word-clouds could be used as a pre-reading activity to prepare ss for vocabulary used in the passage, or as a post-reading activity to check comprehension of words used in the text. For writing, I envision word clouds being used as part of a portfolio, where ss have a word cloud for each essay/text they write. Ss could look back and see their progress as far as vocabulary development is concerned. Moving on to a discussion of blogs, I thought Katie Morris' comments about how her student's motivation increased when writing blogs--because they were writing to their peers rather than to her--was interesting. I also thought it was interesting that the students preferred writing on blogs rather than paper. Are we--or have we--moved into a world where writing on paper is obsolete? At the very least, it has become archaic. How relevant is that for students? Katie's suggestion to encourage or require ss to respond to different people's blog posts was a good one. As far as our required reading and Language Standards are concerned, I enjoyed looking at the Standards for Foreign Language Teaching. The handout included clear examples and further explanations of what the standards meant. Very helpful! I'm sure at some point I will be working with standards again. As far as the reading was concerned, I couldn't figure out how they tied in blogging and wikis with standards and... was it performative writing? Did anyone catch anything I missed? Thanks for reading! Question: Was the original Chatterbot the Chatty Cathy doll from the 60's? My, how technology has advanced...