EVO Minecraft MOOC is in TESOL Chicago, where Jeff Kuhn, Jane Chien, Aaron Schwartz and I will be streaming live as...

EVO Minecraft MOOC is in TESOL Chicago, where Jeff Kuhn, Jane Chien, Aaron Schwartz and I will be streaming live as #learning2gether episode 360 from #TESOL2018 on March 28 from 1500 UTC, thanks to #evomc18 participant Heike Philp, in Adobe Connect, http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/guinevere

Shoot the QR code in the handout, which takes you to https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QYq0cf-ACkFO6f0jv9uRZc5qNWf3kYKZTwanWvrhqK8/edit?usp=sharing for more information. Recordings will be shared afterwards on our Live Events page http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/121439859/2018_Live_Events.

If you can join us live in Minecraft, come there, and use Discord, if you want to speak to us in the stream.
https://www.smore.com/f2z9g

In preparation for our Real Life Meet up at TESOL 2018, I copied the server files to a much larger hard drive and...

In preparation for our Real Life Meet up at TESOL 2018, I copied the server files to a much larger hard drive and restarted dynmap. If you have some time this week, please play to help the map repopulate. The web address is the same as the server address just add :8123 for the port. Here's a direct link to the survival map -- http://mc.evomc.net:8123/?worldname=Electronic%20Village%20Online%20Survival#
http://mc.evomc.net:8123/?worldname=Electronic+Village+Online+Survival#

Built-in thematic based vocabulary learning environment on Minecraft.

Built-in thematic based vocabulary learning environment on Minecraft.

I'd like to share a random thought before I forget.

I am a strong believer of thematic based vocabulary learning as opposed to semantic clusters. It's true that we learn numbers and colors using semantic clustering; however, aside from that, I think learners remember words faster/better when they are presented under a specific schema. At lease this is what I believe how we built our vocabulary as we grew up.

Thematic vocabulary sets refer to a group of words that belong to a specific schema. In minecraft, to make a bed, learners need to wooden planks and wool. To get wool, we can shear a sheep to get wool or to craft wool from strings. Here "bed, wool, wood planks, string, sheep, and shear" are thematic sets.

Sure there are things that are present in semantic sets such as different types of wood planks, but you'd only come across one or two types of wood at a time. You don't remember all different types at once (as presented in textbooks). Some particular types of wood planks only exist in certain biomes.

Unlike EFL textbook curriculum where vocabulary are often introduced with semantic clusters so that sentence patterns can be practiced by drill and kill activities replacing words in semantic sets, learning new vocabulary in minecraft is more meaningful and situated within context relevant to the players.

Of course, this would apply to any other similar types of gaming. Please feel free to comment or disagree. =)

What are some thematic vocabulary for throwing a birthday party on MC?

when you see a large brick building... you never know what might be inside...

when you see a large brick building... you never know what might be inside...
(I was looking through some old save files for the design details of a ship model I had worked on a couple years back, and poked around inside the buildings on campus... lol, sometimes not having a memory can be fun )

Making a case of vocabulary learning via Minecraft videos and playing Minecraft.

Making a case of vocabulary learning via Minecraft videos and playing Minecraft.

A learner needs to encounter a vocabulary for more than seven times for incidental vocabulary learning to take place. The number of times of retrieval of a word meaning is what matters. With this in mind, after a closer look at one single Minecraft video, I found that some target vocabulary occur more than seven times (I'm not counting the function words).
For example, the word “lamp” is a required vocabulary listed in the elementary school English curriculum in Taiwan (which only occured 3 times in the textbook). The word "lamp" has occurred 26 times within several minutes in the video. My guess is that this would not normally occur in a National Geographic video where the narrative are usually pre-edited to be succinct and to the point. The Minecraft gamers’ monologues are spontaneous speech and contain redundancies that provide repeated exposure to certain vocabulary in a short amount of time.
Here's an example of the word "portal" that is mentioned repeatedly.

00:44
8 portals 8 brand-new portals in our
00:48
Minecraft world and we have to find
00:49
emeralds in every portal ladies and
00:52
gentlemen let's get started on this
00:54
beautiful map called 8 portals so
00:56
welcome to 8 portals let's watch this
00:58
beautiful introduction welcome to the 8
01:01
portals you have to find all emeralds
01:04
okay okay I got that okay Indy portals
01:08
are different worlds okay so basically
01:11
every portal is a different world in
01:13
every world there are eight emeralds and
01:16
we have to find eight emeralds in each
01:19
world and there's eight portals can you
01:21
find them all

By the way, this is from unspeakablegaming's video. Mattie has been watching his channel lately. Don Carroll What do you think?

A couple of ideas. :)

A couple of ideas. :)

1- I'm combing the community posts to see what I may have missed but more importantly to find the conversations that have useful information and discussions. I'm using Padlet to collect what I find here https://padlet.com/Maha4learning/EVOmc . I left open to allow for collaborative curation. So, please take a look at what I have so far and feel free to add to it. If you are not familiar with how it's done let me know and I can help.

2- When we are discussing a research or a paper that someone has shared, it can be very useful to be able to see, highlight and annotate the document in the same space and may be have a link here for anyone who wants to join the discussion. How about using https://web.hypothes.is/ . Again, if anyone is not familiar with it I can help.
https://padlet.com/Maha4learning/EVOmc

I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D.

I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University who is working on MC interaction with language learners. He published a paper in 2014 in the JALT CALL Journal. I'll try to upload that to my google+ page then provide a link here.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1f35YJBY7_DMV6xxOgjAs0oCDezMgEflu

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2018 conference starts on Thursday 15th March 2018 in Secondlife , where...

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2018 conference starts on Thursday 15th March 2018 in Secondlife , where most of the sessions this year take place.. I would like to invite you to attend the conference or at least some of the sessions that may be of interest to you (there is a discussion session about Minecraft). Here is the Calendar where all the activities including pre and post conference ones are listed https://vwbpe.org/conference/vwbpe-calendar . If you've never been to Secondlife or have tried it once and found it a bit of a challenge on your own, I'm offering to help you get comfortable enough to be able to attend. While I'm in world very often these days, I suggest that you tell me when you'd like to have a session, which can also be a group session, so that I make sure I'm logged in and waiting for you at the right place. I'll add a post about the main steps you need to take to be ready to log into Secondlife.
https://vwbpe.org/conference/vwbpe-calendar

Jane and I are also "getting our ducks in a row" for an additional MC research project looking at vocabulary...

Jane and I are also "getting our ducks in a row" for an additional MC research project looking at vocabulary frequency in YouTube MC videos. Jane taught me the basic steps of how to get the transcripts and then how to plug them into the online frequency analysis app. Now we need to decided on which videos we should analyze.

Regarding the auto-transcriptions generated by YouTube, there are obvious errors in the transcription. But my feeling is that these errors should not significantly effect the outcome of the vocabulary analysis.

What do you think?

Baby steps being made with our MC research.

Baby steps being made with our MC research. Today I experimented with combining the three separate recordings into one .mov video using Quicktime 7 Pro so that they are all visible and play simultaneously.

The QT steps are simple, but getting the three recordings cropped so that they all start at exactly the same precise moment is difficult. I think I may have been a few frames off so I am getting some echoing. Or maybe it's a problem with the audio settings.

I was up at 5 this morning getting ready for work and had just started my second cup of coffee when I remembered...

I was up at 5 this morning getting ready for work and had just started my second cup of coffee when I remembered that I had been invited to a VSTE event in Minecraft by Kim Harrison, aka K4sons which had started about the time I was brushing my teeth (more on VSTE at http://vste.org/). So I popped by and caught her and EVOMC MOOCer Mary O'Brien (hope I tagged the right one, a.k.a. Maincakes :-) in an area far far away from any development, in a place where pigs could fly. We were in creative, so for me it was just a fly-by, but I took some snaps of what they were up to, and here they are :-)

I found my old file of how to use COCA and Lextutor that I created for my class.

I found my old file of how to use COCA and Lextutor that I created for my class. I used vocabulary profile on lextutor to do the analysis. I selected BNC-COCA25 for the analysis.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v3lwm00er4dbnv3/corpus%202013%20December.pptx?dl=0

Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles.

Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open transcript. 2. Then on the upper right corner of the transcript click on the vertical ellipsis to toggle timestamps. 3. Copy and scroll down and past it on word. Save it as .txt file. =)

So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of people doing "online commentary" as...

So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of people doing "online commentary" as they play Minecraft? They certainly put you squarely in the learner's seat when confronted by such materials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5mnohamv8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5mnohamv8