e-language

Final ‘Teaching Teachers for the Future’ Meeting
UTS, Sydney
15-16 March, 2012

The final TTF meeting wrapped up a couple of years of Federally funded work in Australia, involving all 39 universities with pre-service teacher education programmes. Part of the Australian Digital Education Revolution, its main focus was on the teacher training needed to ensure new technologies are effectively embedded in classrooms across the country.

Its 3 main components were:

1) developing graduate standards for new teachers (led by AITSL)
2) creating a base of online resources and learning objects for teachers (led by ESA)
3) conducting research and evaluation, and establishing a national network of ICT expertise

AITSL opened the main part of the proceedings by showing a video created about the national standards, simply entitled The National Professional Standards for Teachers, and giving an overview of their National Professional Standards for Teachers website (Component 1 of TTF). ESA followed up with an account of the professional learning and curriculum resources they have been developing, which will shortly be made available to all teachers (Component 2 of TTF).

The keynote speakers, Punya Mishra and Matt Koehler, delivered a talk called T’PACK’d and Ready to Go! Back in 1999, said Koehler, the dominant view was of new technologies just as tools, which could be taught to teachers in workshops, but this didn’t necessarily mean they had much idea of how to apply the tools in the classroom. Mishra and Koehler worked with Shulman’s 1986 notion that there is a need for both content and pedagogical knowledge and, in 2004, published their initial TPCK model (represented as a triangle) and in 2005 modified it (changing it into the familiar circle format). It came to wider attention in 2006 but the acronym was unpronounceable, so they added the vowel to create TPACK, which was announced in 2007. The current model, drawn from Matt Koehler’s TPACK website, is shown below.

Koehler went on to say that a framework has to be complex enough to capture the perspectives of multiple stakeholders but not so complex that people can’t talk about it. The TPACK framework, however, is not meant to be prescriptive, nor is it meant to be complete (that is, it doesn’t cover everything a teacher needs to know). While it has been referred to in more than 300 scholarly articles, and appears in textbooks, the Australian TTF project is the biggest implementation of it to date.

Mishra pointed out that there is no such thing as an educational technology – most technologies are not in fact designed for education. As users, we are always redesigning technologies. “Only repurposing makes a technology an educational technology.” Repurposing is a creative and innovative act, with the crucial mediating role played by the teacher. These tools can allow us to break out of the box; we need to move from using technology to integrating technology to innovating with technology.

Koehler then returned to stress the importance of more work being done on measuring TPACK. To date, most work in this area has been in maths and science, but the TPACK model is meant to be broader than this.

Mishra rounded off the presentation by speaking of the  importance of (in)Disciplined learning, where we think creatively across disciplines and areas. They have recently published a piece in this area called “7 trans-disciplinary habits of mind (for the 21st century)”, and their work is reflected on a website called deep-play.com. Standard solutions don’t work, he suggested: creativity is the only solution. It is time, he concluded, to explore, create and share. Putting your ideas out there, ideally under a Creative Commons licence, will bring great returns.

Glenn Finger kicked off the first afternoon by reporting on the Research and Evaluation Working Group’s major findings (Component 3 of TTF). There were three main research and evaluation strategies:

• the TPACK online surveys, which revealed measurable growth over the duration of the project in pre-service teachers’ confidence to use ICTs as teachers, and their confidence to facilitate student use of ICTs
• the Most Significant Change Methodology, which resulted in 41 stories of implementation being submitted from participating institutions, in turn revealing four categories of engagement with ICTs, namely investigation; application; integration; and extension and leadership
• facilitation of institution-led research projects and collaborations, with the upcoming Australian Computers in Education Conference, to be held in Perth in 2012, having a dedicated TTF strand

‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ Seminar
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
5 – 8 March, 2012

Following directly on from the ‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ seminar in Bangkok, Gavin Dudeney and I ran a second version of the seminar in KL, Malaysia. We had another great group of participants to work with, and enjoyed learning about the differences present in this new context. But even more striking were the similarities. Like the Thai government, with its plan to roll out tablets to all Grade 1 students in the country this year, the Malaysian government is taking the role of new technologies seriously, continuing to push out its smart schools programme as it works towards its Vision 2020 plan. Once again, teachers’ perspectives were similar: what is needed, we heard again and again, is training not so much in the technology itself, but in the intersection between technology and pedagogy. This theme, it seems, repeats itself from country to country.

‘Becoming Digitally Literate’ Seminar
Bangkok, Thailand
27 February – 1 March, 2012

Gavin Dudeney and I have just finished running a 4-day Becoming Digitally Literate seminar in Bangkok, Thailand. It’s been great to work with an enthusiastic group of local language educators from the Ministry of Education, universities and schools. It rapidly became apparent that among progressive teachers in this country there’s a great appetite for learning about web 2.0 and, in particular, how to use it in the classroom. It also became clear, as it always does in different venues, just how important it is to tailor our use of new tools and new pedagogical approaches to the local cultural, institutional and educational context. We’ve left the teachers with lots of new ideas and it’ll be really interesting to watch how they’re implemented over coming years. In turn, we’ve learned a great deal about the Thai context and how to go about implementing the use of new tools and new pedagogies in local classrooms.

8th CamTESOL Conference
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
25-26 February, 2012

It was great to have a chance to present at the 8^th annual CamTESOL Conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Educators from around the region gathered together for two days to share insights from their classrooms. The fact that there was a stream dedicated to Using Technology suggests that new technologies are making inroads into many TESOL classrooms around South-East Asia.

In her opening plenary, The Many Faces of Development in the Classroom, Janet Orr spoke about the degree of development that has occurred in Cambodia over recent years and outlined the ways in which English is becoming important in various ways in the country. She indicated the kinds of practical classroom activities teachers can do to promote language learning, drawing on the use of language in Cambodia itself which, she argued, may be more relevant to students than textbook examples. Unfortunately a 10 minute power cut around 10 minutes into the plenary cut it short – a reminder of the challenges faced by teachers in many parts of the world, especially when it comes to the use of new technologies.

Gavin Dudeney and I ran a workshop called Digital Literacies: Teachers and Learners, in which we introduced the general concept of digital literacies, explained the four-part classification of digital literacies we have developed, and then focused in more detail on one form of literacy from each category: multimedia literacy, information literacy, intercultural literacy, and remix literacy. We offered a number of suggestions as to how to work with each of these literacies in everyday classroom practice. The audience actively responded to our discussion prompts, suggesting that a lot of teachers are starting to think about the use and value of digital literacies and how they might introduce them into language classrooms. The key point we hoped to convey was that it is possible to teach language and traditional literacy skills at the same time as we teach digital literacies: the key is to integrate the old with the new.

In their presentation, Learning Beyond the Classroom: Using Facebook to Facilitate the Informal Learning of English Communication, Chris Harwood and Brad Blackstone spoke about the use of Facebook to support English language courses in Singapore.  They referred to Tina Barseghian’s 2011 50 Reasons to Integrate Facebook into Your Classroom, with these reasons including increased collaboration, knowledge sharing and feedback. They contextualised their use of Facebook with reference to the work of Daniel Bernstein, who has spoken about the distinctive qualities of students today, notably their affinity for technology; connectedness with others; visual orientation to the world; flexible attention; and personal meaning as motivation. In short, students are constantly plugged in and constantly communicating online, and this can be leveraged for educational purposes. They also drew on George Siemens’ 4 principles of connectivism:

• Learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions.
• Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.
• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

They set up Facebook pages (rather than groups) as platforms for students’ informal interactions outside class.  For example, students posted references to useful online resources and responded to each other’s postings.  Conversations occurring online led to in-class conversations: when a student posted a link about Prezi, for instance, an in-class discussion occurred because other students hadn’t heard of it. Students were also using the Facebook page, following up on links and watching videos, on mobile devices while taking public transport.  Students from past semesters would return to ‘like’ or comment on materials posted by current students, and teachers could use links collected by past cohorts as a base for new cohorts to build on. Challenges included the overlap with students’ private worlds; uneven participation; keeping the wall ‘academic’; and, in particular, the posting of inappropriate content and/or opinions. Dealing with the last of these issues did, however, lead to important in-class discussions about online etiquette.

In the presentation, Using a Free Course Management System in an English Class: Moodle in a Grammar Class, Yi-Chen Lu reported on four semesters of using Moodle for English teaching in Taiwan, and explained the mechanics of working with this virtual learning environment. Much of the learning was automated, with students carrying out language learning activities independently. It was reported that the use of Moodle was found to improve students’ learning and motivation, but its value for monitoring their progress was also stressed. In addition, a VLE such as Moodle offers flexibility when students are unable to attend class.

As I needed to head off to teach a course in Bangkok, I was unable to stay for the whole conference but the glimpse I gained of developments in technology-enhanced education in the region was fascinating. It will be interesting to watch developments in this area over coming years.

1st ICODEL Conference
Manila, Philippines
23-24 February, 2012

The first International Conference on Open and Distance E-learning (ICODEL), was held at the Century Park Hotel in Manila from 23-24 February 2012, with the pre-conference workshops having taken place on 22 February. It was great to be back in the Philippines only months after the GloCALL Conference was held here in October last year – a sign, it seems, of increased interest in the field of e-learning in this country.

In her opening plenary, entitled The State of the Art in Open and Distance E-learning, Denise Kirkpatrick spoke about the 2012 Horizon Report, mentioning currently influential technologies such as mobile computing, electronic books, and Open Education Resources, and indicating the future potential of augmented reality, game-based learning, learning analytics, and gesture-based computing. Major contemporary challenges, she suggested, include:

1st ICODEL Conference
Pre-Conference WorkShop
Manila, Philippines
22 February, 2012

The day before the commencement of the 1st ICODEL Conference in Manila, pre-conference workshops took place. Curtis Bonk opened his workshop, Technology-enhanced Teaching and Learning, with a session entitled The Rise of Shared Online Video, the Fall of Traditional Learning. He argued that video can play a major role in bringing learning alive. He started off by showing videos from the History for Music Lovers Channel, where an American history teacher has remixed popular songs to relate historical events. Some videos can be inspirational. Some can convey a great deal of information quickly and easily – Apple makes major announcements through video. Flipped classrooms, where teachers video-record key material for students to watch outside class, allow in-class time to be devoted to more engaging learning. There are growing banks of Open Educational Resources on the web which teachers can draw on. It’s also becoming common for conferences to be filmed and keynotes to be made available to the world. For a list of useful educational videos, see Curtis Bonk’s Shared Online Video Resources, Portals, and Pedagogical Activities, which includes sites like Academic Earth, Book TV, GETideas.org and Howcast.

‘Emergent Technologies in Education’ Seminar
Melbourne, Australia
23-25 November & 8-9 December, 2011

I’ve recently finished running another iteration of the Emergent Technologies in Education course, this time in compressed format for the Library at Victoria University in Melbourne. What really struck me this time is the extent to which social media are increasingly ‘thinning’ the walls of the classroom. One participant revived an old blog as a place to keep a set of hyperlinked, multimedia notes on the seminar; it’s called Librarian’s Web 2.0 Travels. Another created a Libguide called Web 2.0 Examples to showcase some of the technologies covered and to disseminate ideas to other VU educators who were not attending the seminar. Two participants set up brand new blogs – Cameron’s Space and Wiki Thoughts - to give them a space in which to reflect on the lessons they’re learning as they develop their online resources for the final presentations session in February 2012.  And, after most people had signed up to Twitter, we experimented with three live display formats - Monitter (a simple, easy-to-view linear display of the most recent tweets), Wiffiti (a dynamic display which shows the most recent tweets) and Visible Tweets (a dramatic, dynamic display showing a selection of recent tweets, one at a time) - over the last couple of days of the seminar. While the decision wasn’t unanimous, and while most people agreed that context would dictate which service was most appropriate, participants generally preferred the less distracting Monitter. So we used Monitter for backchannel feedback during students’ initial presentations on the last afternoon; you can check out the discussion under the #etvu11 hashtag.

The walls of face-to-face classrooms are getting thinner and thinner, allowing educational conversations to spill into the blogosphere and onto Twitter, encouraging the easy dissemination of ideas, promoting the building of links between course materials and the wider web, and inviting external commentary and feedback. Education is, less than ever, an isolated enterprise, but rather feeds into and is fed into by the world outside the classroom. And that, I think, is a good thing.

ICELF11: The International Conference on E-learning Futures
Auckland, New Zealand
30 November – 1 December, 2011

The key themes to emerge from the inaugural International Conference on E-learning Futures at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand, were linked to mobile technologies – particularly smart, context-aware tools – and the associated personalisation of learning.

Trends in Technology & Education

In his opening keynote, Learning generations: Looking forwards, looking back, Steve Wheeler quoted Arthur C. Clarke’s comment that: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. New technologies are appearing everywhere, he observed, but educators don’t know how to use them; we still see them as magic. Technology won’t impress students, he went on to say, but good pedagogy and inspiration will.  Education is so important that if we get it wrong, we leave a very poor legacy for coming generations.  We need to find ways to use technology appropriately to support pedagogy, but there are many vested interests resisting it.

One issue is that: “For the first time we are preparing learners for a future we cannot clearly describe” (David Warlick). Declarative knowledge is becoming less important than procedural knowledge; it’s less about knowing that, than knowing how. New literacies are therefore important; they go much deeper than skills, because they allow real engagement. Connectivism, he suggested, is a useful approach: students need to learn how to connect with others as they build their PLNs.

Wheeler went on to list key characteristics of the future of education as follows:

• Open: we will have to share more.
• Social: people are already sharing. (Quadblogging is a good example of the application of this idea in education.)
• Personal: homogenised learning is no longer effective, as we move out of the industrial age. (A lot of past educational technologies were teacher-centric, but contemporary technologies are more personalised.)
• Augmented: Augmented reality is becoming more important, enhancing what we see through the naked eye. Context-awareness is key. It’s about “web meets world” (Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle).
• Non-touch:  gesture-based technologies will become more central.

In his presentation The new new things: Emerging trends in technology and education, Derek Wenmoth outlined key trends towards:

• mobility/portability
• miniaturisation
• convergence of technologies into a single device
• personalisation
• openness (the OER University is an example of this)
• gamification
• data visualisation
• contextualisation/location-awareness

These will impact dramatically on our behaviour as information gatherers and learners. We will need to consider how ‘desire pathways’ will take shape, and how we might use services like Yahoo Pipes and ifttt to personalise our information consumption.  Location is now an important characteristic of you as a learner – we see this, for example, with Twitter, iPad apps, or Al Gore’s “Our Choice” app. In the follow-up questions, Wenmoth quoted Neil Postman’s comment: “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.”

In his IBM keynote, Education for a smarter nation: Changing business priorities and trends in education, Dougal Watt discussed five signposts for the future:

• technology immersion
• personalised learning paths
• knowledge skills
• global integration
• economic alignment

These trends, he argued, form an educational continuum, or single view of learning, skills development, and workforce training.  This has implications for the traditional boundaries between academic segments, educational providers, and economic development initiatives.

In her keynote, Digital ecosystems: mobile, portable, embedded and conventional devices, Judy Kay outlined emerging technologies with educational applications, including:

• surface computing: multi-user touch-sensitive tabletops
• data mining/visualisation: using digital footprints to improve learning through data visualisation, e.g., in an activity radar system which shows at a glance the amount of work done by students on a wiki

This keynote, which rounded off the conference, provided a snapshot of current and future trends in educational technology, leaving delegates a lot to think about.

In her keynote, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme outlined current mobile learning projects at the Open University, UK, before going on to talk about self-directed learning, which she argued is a natural approach to lifelong learning. She reported on the results of survey and interview-based studies which aimed to determine emerging trends in the use of mobile technologies in education, and to find out what learners’ wishes are with respect to mobile learning.

She suggested that the following areas need strengthening, specifically in foreign language curricula:

• connection with learners by supporting real needs and performance in situ
• tools and strategies for navigating and exploiting the new (increasingly mobile) ecology of digital learning resources and networks of support
• personal management of language learning across place and time

Next generation designs, she suggested, should take into account time, place, and activity.  She also noted that language use will change; “Find coffee near me” is a perfectly logical statement to a personal assistant like Apple’s Siri, though we wouldn’t say this to a friend. She concluded that:

• we need ongoing research with learners, as mobile practices and technologies evolve
• language curricula will be increasingly intertwined with ways to learn and interact with technology
• the design of learning activities will need to recognise learners’ emerging patterns and preferences regarding:
  • different types of travel
  • short periods of time
  • individual and social learning
  • ways to combine formal and informal learning

In their talk, Making the ‘case’ for the iPad, James Oldfield and Dawn Duncan described a business programme and a law programme in which students were given iPads. Students used these for a variety of pedagogically traditional activities but also for creative and collaborative web-based activities, including tasks on blogging and wiki platforms. The more creative apps used by students included iMovie, Keynote and Prezi. Collaborative tools included Dropbox, Google Docs, Mindmeister, Posterous, Twitter and WordPress. Further details of this work with iPads can be found at http://ipadnzeducation.wordpress.com/.

Language Teaching & Learning

My own paper, Tailoring language learning to a world of screens, sought to build a bridge between the broader field of educational technology and the more specific field of CALL. It outlined 4 key trends associated with the shift towards a world of screens:

• multimedia
• networking
• mobility
• customisation

It then went on to examine the implications of each of these trends for language teaching and learning. A more detailed summary and links are available.

In her presentation, A distinctive blend: Seamless integration of e-learning tools with classroom delivery in a blended learning oral skills language course, Katherine Danaher talked about the importance of redesigning a course to incorporate new technologies, rather than pasting new technologies over the top of an existing design. In the redesign process, it’s important to:

• Know your pedagogy
• Know your learning outcomes
• Know your e-learning  tools (amongst other things, declutter your course, and start small but think ahead to avoid getting painted into a corner later)
• Know the practicalities and pitfalls; issues to consider include:
  • teacher and learner training
  • teacher (and student) workload
  • too much content (it may be better to design only 70% of a course and leave the rest as whitespace, so you can work with what students bring to the course)
  • failure to integrate successfully
  • seduction by the wow factor

It’s valuable to remember that curriculum design is an iterative process; courses don’t have to be fully designed from the start, but will grow and morph over time. To integrate new technologies into a blended course, it’s essential to refer to the online tools regularly in class; to maintain a strong online presence; and to develop scaffolded activities that include both face-to-face and online components.

Danaher finished by quoting Harasim et al (2007): “Online you get to know your students’ minds, not just their faces.”

In her talk, Task implementation in CMC: How does it influence language learning opportunities?, Rebecca Adams focused on the introduction of SCMC (synchronous CMC) into a language course.  Research suggests that synchronous text chat can:

• encourage meaning negotiation
• produce a focus on form
• enhance accuracy
• foster active learning
• develop oral communicative competence (which can transfer to face-to-face contexts)

In the project on which she reported, it was found that reducing a task’s cognitive demands on students freed up cognitive space for them to focus more on grammar and form.  More complex tasks resulted in less focus on form. Not only does synchronous chat have language learning benefits, but using it in class helps prepare students for its use in real-world contexts.

So all in all …

GloCALL 2011: Globalization and Localization in Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Manila, Philippines
27-29 October, 2011

As always, this GloCALL Conference focused on the intersection of the global and the local in teaching language(s).

Technology and language

A number of talks focused on the use of technology in teaching language, with a heavy emphasis – as is usual these days – on web 2.0 tools.

In the talk The use of wikis in collaborative learning, Long Nguyen and Hoa Phan argued there is a continuum between product-oriented and process-oriented CMC, with blogs and wikis fitting around the middle of the spectrum. They cited the work of Lee (2010), who  stated that wikis increase satisfaction and motivation, as well as fostering creativity and encouraging attention to form, but noted that students may feel insecure and uncomfortable in correcting each other’s work.  They also referred to Arnold, Ducate and Kost (2009), who concluded that wikis are effective educational tools, foster collaborative writing and revision behaviours, solve equal contribution issues, and combine the writing process and final product.

They reported on a Vietnamese study where students were asked to do a peer review of each other’s writing, one group using paper, and one using a wiki.  It was found that on average students wrote more than double the number of words on the wiki, and made more than double the number of comments.  The paper group focused more exclusively on the task, but the number of task-related comments by the wiki group was much higher overall.  Students’ feedback on the wiki peer editing process was generally positive, but they noted that it could be fatiguing and inconvenient to read on the screen and to have to go to an internet café for access.

In her talk A new learning space between the course forum and the ‘walls’ of Facebook: A case study of a community of learners of Italian, Marie-Noëlle Lamy reported on a group of learners of Italian at the OU, who created a Facebook group as a way of keeping in touch and continuing to practise language between courses.  Their public Facebook group was observed over a period of 4 months, with a particular focus on the 9 participants who made use of both the institutional Moodle forum set up for the course as well as the Facebook group. Students generally used the target language a far greater proportion of the time on Facebook.

Their posts were analysed using Selwyn’s 2009 ‘Faceworking’ method for analysing text on Facebook, and were found to fall into 6 main categories (e.g., reflections on the course, exchange of practical information, use of humour, etc).  Most categories of communication appeared on both the institutional forum and Facebook, though there was a tendency to exchange more general cultural information on Facebook.

Lamy hypothesised that students might be more wary of publishing in the target language on the institutional forum because they felt monitored by the institution there (though the Facebook group was in fact open to the public). She also wondered whether the anti-/pro-FB polarisation which occurred when the FB group was first set up might have promoted more group solidarity amongst those in the FB group, in turn encouraging risk-taking in the target language. The data are still being investigated as part of an ongoing study.

In my own talk, Language learning in a world of screens:  Customising online spaces, I identified 4 key trends linked to the world of screens in which we now find ourselves, and examined their implications for language teaching and learning:

• a trend towards multimedia, which allows teachers to tailor materials to students’ varying learning styles, as well as helping students enhance their own language production through judicious use of appropriate media;
• a trend towards networking, and to the building of personal learning networks, in which there are great opportunities for language practice, especially if students are encouraged to network across linguistic and cultural boundaries;
• a trend towards mobility of smart devices, which allows just about any real-world context to be turned into a learning environment;
• a macro-trend towards customisation, which builds on the first three trends.

In their talk Digital natives or mobile natives?, Peter Gobel and Makimi Kano summarised the argument of Prensky, Tapscott, and others that there is a distinct generation of ‘digital natives’, or a ‘net generation’. They noted that numerous studies dispute the existence of such a homogenous generation.

Japan is a highly wired society, with the highest mobile phone ownership in the world.  Gobel and Kano conducted a survey of the technology use of Japanese students to find out to what extent they were in fact ‘digital natives’.  Most described their level of technological competence as ‘fair’, suggesting they were not overly confident about their skills.  Most used their phone rather than a computer to access the internet, and it was found that over half preferred to store pictures on their phones rather than computers, while many others simply stored them on their digital cameras – suggesting the photos never leave the devices on which they were taken, and that students are generally not manipulating digital media at all.  Many students made extensive use of Mixi, Google, Yahoo and YouTube, but there was little awareness of Facebook (though this has changed a little due to the recent movie), MySpace, Flickr and Twitter, or of Moviemaker, iMovie or even GoogleDocs.

Overall, the data collected support Helsper & Enyon’s (2010) conclusion that the Prensky model  is flawed, which suggests that we do in fact need to rethink digital native assumptions.  Indeed, suggested Gobel and Kano, many of today’s learners, at least in Japan, might seen as ‘mobile natives’, because of the extensive use they make of mobile phones. As pointed out during the follow-up questions, phones are actually simpler tools to use as they don’t require or offer the more complex understandings that come with operating a computer.

In her plenary, Technological advances towards enhancement of language learning, Rachel Roxas argued that language teachers should adapt to the technological and multimedia orientation of their students. She outlined recent advances in automated natural language processing software, including Popsicle, MesCH, and Picture Books, highlighting its value for the language learning of the younger generation. There is a need, she suggested, to integrate new technologies into curricula and course materials, as well as to train in-service teachers in particular.

In her plenary, Challenges of establishing virtual communities of practice for teacher professional development in a variety of contexts, Siew Ming Thang spoke about the value of CoPs (communities of practice) for teacher PD. Virtual CoPs have the advantage of not being bound by time and space. She listed the following factors which influence the success of a VCoP:

• There should be a common goal or purpose;
• There must be enough time;
• Ideally, it should be blended with face-to-face interaction;
• A traditional national or organisational culture may inhibit the flow of knowledge;
• Valuable information and knowledge must be provided (tacit knowledge, practical experience, hands on solutions – Hinkel 2003);
• Technology must be readily available.

She reported on a case study where limitations on the success of a VCoP were due to:

• Lack of trust and rapport (with other CoP members);
• Concern with suitability;
• Concern with correctness;
• Lack of time (especially if the PD does not seem of real value);
• Problems with technology;
• Lack of trust (fear of monitoring by managers & institutions).

Amongst the challenges which need to be addressed, she mentioned that there is a conflict between a designed and an emergent community – communities typically form naturally, but some degree of facilitation is vital in a CoP.  She noted, too, that because online communication is mostly text-based, the lack of paralinguistic cues can make it more difficult to build trust between community members. She suggested, finally, that teachers must be willing to engage in change, and that it is important for them to be fully involved in this process.

Technology and culture

In her plenary, Developing intercultural communicative competence through online exchanges: Focus on Asian and Pacific languages, Dorothy Chun explained the adaptations of the Cultura model for exchanges involving Asian and Pacific languages.  The original Cultura project involved French and US students comparing word associations in an online forum. The same principle has now been applied in projects involving languages like Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Samoan.  In many cases it was found that students did become very reflective about their own and other cultures. However, there are numerous challenges in such projects.  Sometimes, for example, there may be a mismatch between teachers’ pedagogical goals and students’ desire to socialise and make new friends. Large groups may be difficult to manage, and factors like low reading comprehension levels may limit benefits for some.  It can be useful to include audio-visual materials as stimuli for discussion, perhaps particularly among students of high school age.

In summary, Chun listed the following commonalities between the three exchange projects she had described:

• Students found the experience enjoyable and were motivated to continue studying the L2.
• Students felt part of a larger language learning community beyond their classrooms.
• Students were the experts in their own culture, and the multiplicity of voices and knowledge surpassed what a teacher could provide.
• Students gained new knowledge and understandings.
• Students were able to discover culture through exploration, moving beyond study into intercultural communication.
• Students and teachers believed that making the exchange a more integral part of the curriculum would be desirable.

She concluded that the exchanges were authentic (and invaluable) intercultural learning experiences. Teachers were no longer the cultural authorities, but their role was to facilitate communication, promote reflection, and follow up on misunderstandings.  She added that careful planning is necessary to anticipate and manage technological issues, institutional issues, linguistic proficiency discrepancies between groups, comparable participation between groups, and the use of other technologies such as video-conferencing.  She suggested that we should strongly consider making a Cultura-based exchange the primary (if not sole) component of the language curriculum, with task-based interactive activities enhancing both linguistic skills and intercultural communicative competence.

In her plenary, CALL and sociocultural language learning: A reality check, Marie-Noëlle Lamy discussed reasons for the failure of online collaboration projects involving CALL tools.  She noted that early studies of the reasons for such failures focused on cultural factors. However, she went on to argue that we also need to take into account sociopolitical factors and, in particular, power relationships. She suggested that in order to empower students, there must be both explicitness and flexibility on the following three levels:

• Learning design approach
• Distributed learning environment
• Institutional policy

She presented three case studies to demonstrate how the presence or absence of explicitness and flexibility on these levels can affect the degree of empowerment experienced by students.

She also noted that when cultural differences are examined in educational courses, it is not just a case of challenging expectations, but ensuring that participants have the agency to act on what they learn. This is part of the sociopolitical dimension of courses.

In his talk, Intercultural usability of language learning websites, Jeong-Bae Son argued there are at least four kinds of usability to consider in CALL websites: general usability, pedagogical usability, technical usability, and intercultural usability. He observed there has been little research done to date on the intercultural usability of such websites. User interface design of such sites should consider:

• The source of cultural input & an effective means of interaction;
• An interface design that facilitates user interactions;
• Components of the user interface – metaphors, mental models, etc;
• Cross-cultural issues in the process of website development.

He is currently working on a set of guidelines for designing intercultural language learning websites; an example website can be seen at http://ceklser.org (a Korean resource site).

AILA 2011: The 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics
Beijing, China
23-28 August, 2011

One of the major themes running through the 16th AILA Congress was the relationship of new technologies to language teaching.  Over the course of six days, presenters from around the world discussed changing teacher training, changing  teaching, and changing language – especially the growing importance of digital literacies.

Changing teacher training

In their presentation Language teacher education: Developments in distance learning, David Hall and John Knox reported on an investigation into institutional, teacher and student views of LTED (Language Teacher Education by Distance). Those surveyed believed there are numerous advantages of LTED, including:

• flexibility/accessibility (approx. 70%)
• situated learning (approx. 23%) (in particular the theory/practice interface when teachers study while working)
• learner control
• diversity of the student cohort
• financial issues for students
• interaction & mediation of discourse (you can take time to respond, e.g., in asynchronous discussion)
• learner responsibility
• employability

In short, the old advantages of LTED remain (such as flexibility and situated learning), but new advantages (such as diversity of the cohort and mediation of discourse) are expanding as technology breaks down barriers of time and space. Hall and Knox argued that both face-to-face and distance learning have particular affordances and advantages that in some ways balance each other out.

In her paper The development of language teachers’ expertise in exploiting the interactive whiteboard towards a socio-cognitive approach to computer-assisted language learning, Euline Cutrim Schmid noted that there is some concern that interactive whiteboards (IWBs) can be used to enhance teachers’ control of the learning environment, thereby promoting more traditional transmission or behaviourist educational approaches.

According to Warschauer (2000: 57), a socio-cognitive approach to electronic language learning activities should:

• be learner-centred
• be based on authentic communication
• make some real difference in the world
• provide students with an opportunity to explore and express their evolving identity

The question is whether and how teachers can be encouraged to use IWBs to support this kind of approach. Cutrim Schmid presented a case study of a language teacher who moved from a teacher-dominated stage of IWB use where:

• the teacher focused mainly on form and controlled practice, and overgeneralised the use of the IWB to the whole lesson, doing most activities with a full-class focus (but she felt dissatisfied with students’ level of activity)
• the teacher delivered authentic multimedia-based input (but she realised that students’ fascination for multimedia materials didn’t necessarily correlate with effective language learning)

to a learner-centred stage where:

• students had an opportunity for co-construction of knowledge (where the equipment was not the main focus but was used as necessary to support language-based tasks, and where the IWB was used as a platform to show student-produced web 2.0 materials as well as being used by students themselves for presentations)
• students had an opportunity for self-expression

The teacher developed important CALL competencies as she came to understand the strengths and limitations of the technological options, and to make informed judgements on the suitability of the tool for the task.

Cutrim Schmid concluded that IWBs can present a threat to communicative language teaching, especially as the acquisition of new competencies doesn’t occur automatically.  There is a real need for teacher development in this area, based on a sound theoretical basis and an examination of pedagogical practice.

In a talk entitled Web 2.0 for teaching and learning: Professional development through a community of practice model, Christina Gitsaki reported on a PD programme developed for  English teachers in the UAE to help them integrate web 2.0 into their teaching within a laptop programme.

The results of an initial investigation had shown that teachers reported a high level of confidence with emailing, word processing, accessing a VLE, etc, but made little use of web 2.0 and were in fact concerned about students accessing web 2.0 on their laptops, especially social networking sites. Students reported that the activities they wanted to do with the laptops were very different from what teachers did with them – they wanted to engage in more creative and collaborative activities. In other words, the way teachers were using laptops in the classroom did not reflect students’ online socialising and learning in their own time.

A PD programme, underpinned by a community of practice model, was set up to give teachers greater awareness of web 2.0 and how to use it pedagogically. It was based on the following cycle of learning:

• Introduction to new idea
• Reflection & interaction
• Challenges & negotiation
• Outcome: Adopt, Adapt, Abandon

Tools covered in Semester 1 included Edmodo, Flickr, Google Docs, Mindmeister, MyPodcast, VoiceThread, Xtranormal and YouTube, and in Semester 2 they included Photopeach, Dipity, OurStory, Prezi, Glogster and Comic Life.

Teachers found the community of practice approach valuable. They learned about web 2.0 tools, tried them out, and collaborated with colleagues on how to use them in the classroom. The more confident teachers actually tried the tools with their students and were able to report to colleagues on their experience.

Changing language teaching

In his talk The impact of digital storytelling with blended learning on language teaching, Hiroyuki Obari argued that digital storytelling can improve student autonomy as well as proficiency in English.  He observed that digital storytelling “merges the traditional art of storytelling with the power of new technologies” and can promote linguistic as well as paralinguistic skills in students. Through digital storytelling, students practise rhetorical skills as well as technological skills, with technology becoming an “imagination amplifier”.  Assessment of students’ English following the introduction of digital storytelling into his classes resulted in improved scores, and most students agreed it was useful in learning EFL.

The symposium Computer-assisted language learning and the learner consisted of a number of papers (by Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana, Bin Zhou, Hiroyuki Obari, and Mirjam Hauck) examining the effects of CALL on student learning. In the presentation The effects of games on interaction and willingness to communicate in a foreign language, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana argued that, given the positive effects of gaming on classroom interaction and language production, we should appropriate gaming software for pedagogical purposes (rather than the other way round). The paper concluded with the following recommendations:

• Do not let applied linguists mess up game design.
• Do build on existing non-educational games as ecologies in their own right.
• Do gather evidence of game language use and attitudes to learning.
• Do make links between formal and non-formal learning.

In his paper Students’ perspectives of an English-Chinese language exchange programme on a web 2.0 environment, Bin Zou described a web 2.0-based programme for learners of English in China and learners of Chinese in the UK. Wikispaces was the platform chosen for students in these two groups to interact with each other around topics of common interest. The History function of the wiki allowed students to easily identify corrections made to their texts by the native speakers of the target language, though some students preferred to upload Word documents containing the corrections. Overall, wikis were found to be a useful and motivating platform for language education.

In his paper Integration of technology in language teaching, Hiroyuki Obari argued that social learning is the key trend of coming years. Open Educational Resources, he suggested, will be a big part of it. He noted that mobile technologies can be used to support lessons in a number of ways; for example, announcements and information about words and phrases can be sent to language students on mobile devices while they are commuting. Digital storytelling, he suggested, is also a very useful tool which allows students to demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products. Social learning and blended learning, he concluded, can both help students improve English proficiency and IT skills, while fostering autonomous learning.

In her paper Promoting teachers’ and learners’ multiliteracy skills development through cross-institutional exchanges, delivered at a distance by Skype video, Mirjam Hauck reported on two empirical case studies of a task-based telecollaborative learning format.  She argued that it is important for both teachers and learners to develop multimodal communicative competence, as defined by Royce (2002), and showed Elluminate as an example of a multimodal communicative environment. There is an “orchestration of meaning” in multiple modes online. It is important, she suggested, that language teachers design tasks that oblige learners to make use of multiple modalities online.  She quoted Hampel and Hauck (2006) on the need to promote the kinds of literacy required to use new democratic learning spaces to their best effect.

Changing language: New literacies

In introducing the Digital futures symposium, David Barton suggested that literacy studies research is a good lens for looking at language and new technologies. In his own paper, Creating new global identities on the web through participation and deliberate learning, he stressed that literacy studies research sees literacy as a social practice. With the advent of web 2.0, there are new spaces for writing (with writing becoming more and more important), including multilingual writing. There are also new spaces for learning.

His paper focused in particular on the photosharing site Flickr. He suggested that a typical Flickr page involves a number of different writing spaces: textual description, discussion, tags, etc. He reported on a study of Flickr use conducted collaboratively with Carmen Lee. New multilingual encounters occur online – such as when a Chinese person learning English in Hong Kong discusses photography with Spanish speakers elsewhere in the world. Comments may be left on photos in different languages.

He noted that many Flickr users write about learning, even though it’s not predominantly a learning site. He spent some time discussing ‘Project 365’ (in which people take one photo a day for a year), where it is very noticeable that many people refer specifically to learning. These are, he suggested, “deliberate acts of learning”. He listed the following key characteristics of Project 365:

• it’s social
• deliberate acts of learning
• discourse of self-improvement
• it’s life-changing (people are not just learning about photography but about life; learning, he suggested, should be life-changing)
• vernacular theories of learning (where people present their own views of how learning takes place)
• reflexive writing spaces
• a passion (something, he argued, that is often left out of theories of learning)

My own paper was part of the symposium Enhancing online literacies: Knowledge and skills for language students and teachers in the digital age, organised by Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler from the Open University. As part of this symposium, papers were delivered by myself, Linda Murphy, Aline Germain-Rutherford, Cynthia White, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana, and Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler. Paper summaries, reference lists and links can be found on the E-language Wiki.

In the opening paper, Digital tools and the future of literacy, I argued that our communication landscape has shifted dramatically in a few short years. New web 2.0 and related tools, ranging from blogs, wikis and podcasts to social sharing services, social networking sites and virtual worlds, are having an increasing impact on our everyday lives – and our everyday language and literacy practices. It’s more crucial than ever for language teaching to encompass a wide variety of literacies which go well beyond traditional print literacy.

I focused on four specific digital literacies of particular relevance to language teachers and students: multimodal (multimedia) literacy, information literacy, intercultural literacy, and remix literacy. I showed how language teachers can incorporate elements of each into their everyday classroom activities. I concluded that combining traditional print with multimodal, information, intercultural and remix literacies can make the language classroom much more dynamic – and much more relevant to our students’ future lives and future uses of language.

In her paper Tutor skills and qualities in blended learning: The learner’s view, Linda Murphy argued that the difference between distance learning and regular learning is breaking down, thanks to the arrival of new technologies.  The top-ranking important skills for online language tutors, as viewed by students in a 2011 study conducted at the OU, were:

• native/near native speaker competence (due in part to a need for cultural input)
• teaching expertise in supporting grammar and pronunciation development
• strong emphasis on affective dimension: approachable, enthusiastic, encouraging, fostering group participation with confidence, catering for differing needs and styles
• well-organised, focused use of contact time
• competent IT users
• prompt responses and awareness of support systems

In a previous study conducted in 2008, IT skills had not been listed in the top five most important skills, but by 2011, 20% of respondents mentioned IT skills. The idea of IT also overlaid many of the other tutor skills mentioned in student comments.  She concluded by suggesting that teaching online is not so much about adding to one’s repertoire as transforming one’s practice for the online context.

In her paper Preparing our students for the intercultural reality of today’s online learning spaces, Aline Germain-Rutherford focused on intercultural issues. She opened with a quote from Edgar Morin, who argues against inadequate, compartmentalised learning and in favour of learning “about the world as world” in its contextual, global, multidimensional and complex reality. She referred also to Reeder, Macfayden, Roche & Chase’s (2004) description of culture as ‘negotiated’ rather than ‘given’.

Our job as language teachers, she suggested, is to design learning environments where students can co-create linguistic and cultural content through their collaborative contributions to blogs, wikis and social networking platforms. She recommended Henderson’s (2007) model of E-learning Instructional Design, which is centred on epistemological pluralism and is designed to help raise students’ awareness of cultural diversity as they engage in co-construction of a learning space where multiple cultural contexts are made visible and debatable.

In her paper Online academic literacy within user-generated content communities: Connections and challenges, Cynthia White started with the new literacies position, which sees literacy as a social practice.  There is of course a need to switch practices between different contexts. She referred to Kern (2006), who suggested that the internet has complexified the notion of literacy by introducing multimedia dimensions and altering traditional discourse.

She described a telecollaborative project involving students from Germany and New Zealand, where they interacted online, e.g. collaboratively writing on a wiki, as well as making use of tools like Facebook and YouTube which they themselves introduced.  She explored how students practised language and negotiated meaning in examining the relationship between German and New Zealand/Maori culture.  She finished with a number of questions, including:

• What are the dimensions of literacy as social practice in web 2.0 telecollaborative projects?
• What is the intersection between intercultural literacy and online literacy?

In the paper Incorporating computer games into the EFL classroom, Hayo Reinders and Sorada Wattana focused on gaming literacy and asked how, as teachers, we can move from an entertaining to an educational use of games. Key learning principles present in many games include:

• the active, critical learning principle (gaming environments are about active and critical, not passive, learning)
• the psychosocial moratorium principle (it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them)
• the practice principle (learners get lots of practice which is not boring and where they experience ongoing success)

However, language learning through games is not yet well developed. Many online language games do not really exploit the capabilities of the digital medium, but essentially reproduce offline activities.

The paper reported on an experiment conducted in Thailand, where students were able to communicate in English in a copy of a commercial gaming environment. It was found that students had a greater willingness to communicate in online gaming than in the classroom.  It was also found that students produced a greater quantity of language in the gaming environment compared to the face-to-face class.

In the concluding symposium presentation, Transforming teaching: New skills for online language learning spaces, Regine Hampel and Ursula Stickler focused on teachers and how they can transform the spaces that exist online into learning spaces. Referring to their previously developed skills pyramid for online language teachers, they pointed out that the two base layers have to be taken for granted nowadays, as teachers can’t operate online without them, but the higher level skills still need to be developed.

Some of the key literacies for students are:

• Basic literacy
  • technical competence with software
• Multimodal literacy
  • dealing with constraints and possibilities of the medium
  • having basic IT competence
• Linguistic and inter-/multicultural literacy
  • facilitating and developing communicative competence
  • online socialisation
• Remix literacy
  • own style
  • creativity and choice

Online learning spaces allow:

• blending of environments – beyond time, space, and pace (making learning flexible)
• individualised learning (making learning relevant)
• authentic communication (making learning real)
• collaboration (making learning interactive)
• online telecollaboration (making learning multi/intercultural)
• creativity and choice (making learning fun)

Of course, as they stressed, there is still a need for negotiation of a number of aspects of learning spaces.  Future developments, they suggested, should include the development of new pedagogies; online communities of practice; institutional training; and curriculum planning.

Conclusion

Overall, the AILA Conference provided lots of food for thought for anyone working in the overlapping areas of language teaching and new technologies. It will be interesting to see how both teaching and technologies have continued to develop when the 17th AILA Congress takes place in Brisbane in 2014. Watch this space …