Monthly Archives: May 2007

The unevenly distributed future

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Conference: Best Practices in Education
Second Life, 25 May 2007

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“The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed.” This quote from William Gibson was amply illustrated by the first Best Practices in Education Conference to be held in the virtual world Second Life. This international event – presenters and participants were located all around the world – took place on 25 May from 12.00 to 23.00 SLT (Second Life Time), which is equivalent to PDT (Pacific Daylight Time).

There were a number of venues, including the welcome center, the main presentation area (provided by Hyperstring), a second presentation area (Edulsland), a space for vendors and exhibits, and a poster area (Rockcliffe University). The main conference website contains links to the presentation schedule and the conference blog.

I caught parts of Melissa de Zwart’s (SL name – Bramwell Writer) presentation on IP and virtual worlds and Suku Sinnappan’s (SL – Study Writer) presentation entitled Virtual identity and representation. Both were delivered very effectively in live audio, with follow-up questions typed in by audience members. These were followed by the informative Australian Educators’ Panel, in which the panel discussed a variety of issues pertinent to virtual worlds. There seems to be very widespread interest in legal and IP issues, naturally enough given the new terrain that is being broken in virtual worlds – and its uncertain relationship to the legal terrain of the real world.

It was fascinating to be surrounded by a large crowd of delegates whose avatars ranged from those you wouldn’t blink at if you passed them in the street to those at the more striking end of the spectrum, arranged on a continuum from animals to angels. While most delegates sat in the chairs provided during the presentations, there was considerable coming and going – new avatars materialising, others vanishing, still others wandering the rooms – which was entertaining but ultimately also distracting. Clearly, the relationship between RL and SL conference etiquette is also new ground which will need some exploring!

Overall, this conference was a captivating experience. I left with the feeling that those of us lucky enough to attend had been offered a glimpse of Gibson’s unevenly distributed future. See more pix below …

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Vendor displays in the Outreach Center

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Presentation IP and virtual worlds (de Zwart)

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Presentation Virtual identity and representation (Sinnappan)

Technology: To use or not to use?

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Symposium: Language, Literacy & Technology
Auckland, New Zealand, 18-19 May 2007

This 2-day CALL symposium, entitled Language, Literacy & Technology, was organised by Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand, and brought together a wide range of language educators currently making use of, or interested in making use of, technology in their teaching. An associated wiki, CALLsympNZ, provided a contact point for an initial exchange of information and views prior to the conference, with more content added in the period since the event itself.

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The keynote speakers included:

  • Mike Levy, who spoke about the importance of not just seeing the technology wave but perceiving the underlying current. He suggested that, amid all the hype, we should be selective and focused in our choice of technologies, ensuring that they are always aligned with our learning goals.
  • Terry Locke, who focused on a now more traditional but very robust technology, the asynchronous discussion board, examining it as a particular kind of rhetorical space which may contain hidden biases in terms of the way students are positioned and limits set on the construction of their online identities. He suggested that asynchronous online discussion may be more favourable to a constructivist approach than face-to-face discussion, but warned of cultural issues in norms of interaction and politeness. He also stressed the need for educators to “redesign in real time” in response to the needs of students.
  • Cynthia White, who argued that participating in new online literacy practices means taking on new roles and that students need to learn to negotiate new identities in this context. She suggested that there are more cultural aspects to the social constructivist approach online than we might intially expect.

My own paper was entitled Unmodern or postmodern? The human dynamics of the social web and explored how seemingly “unmodern” ideals and values persist in the postmodern era and are fostered and facilitated by web 2.0 technology. I argued that, as language and literacy educators, we should be exploiting the “unmodern” potential of web 2.0 for forming connections and building communities through language.

Along with Mike Levy, Cynthia White and Giedre Kligyte, I took part in the panel discussion in the final plenary session, where we attempted to draw together the main themes of the conference and then responded to questions from other participants. It seems to me that during the conference two main themes emerged, both of which might best be expressed as questions:

  1. Should we be using digital and web-based technologies in language teaching? The answer is a combined yes/no. Numerous presenters indicated that they were working in blended mode, combining the most appropriate of the new technologies with older “analogue” approaches and materials (if I can use that expression). There are certainly times when analogue technologies are just as appropriate, if not more appropriate, than recent innovations. However, that’s not an argument against e-learning, which brings me to the second question; assuming that new technologies are sometimes more effective, then …
  2. Which new technologies should we be using in language teaching? Over the two days of the conference, there were papers and workshops touching on technologies ranging from blogs to podcasting, m-learning, and virtual worlds; the conference itself, as mentioned above, had an accompanying wiki. The answer to this second question may again be a combined one, since all these technologies have their advantages for different purposes in different contexts. The key, to echo the point made in Mike’s opening address, is to start with the learning goals and then select the technologies which best align with these.

The fact that these kinds of questions are being raised suggests to me that a stage of maturity is being reached in the field of CALL. There’s no doubt, as was amply demonstrated at the conference, that many of the new technologies can deliver dramatic pedagogical benefits – but we need to constantly ask ourselves whether new technologies are appropriate in a given context and, if so, which ones promise the greatest advantages. E-learning isn’t a replacement for face-to-face learning, but it can certainly complement it – and, in the process, stretch the teaching and learning processes in new directions, bringing new benefits and new challenges.

Tags: e-learning, CALL, web 2.0, language, literacy

Judgement calls on e-learning

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Seminar: Nothing New Under the Sun
Perth, Australia, 07 May 2007

winthrop1.jpgI’ve just given a seminar presentation entitled Nothing new under the sun? Eight ‘new’ technologies in the service of ‘old’ ideals as part of UWA Teaching Month. In it, I explored the emergent web 2.0 and its relevance to today’s classrooms, focusing on eight interrelated technologies (the first of which predates web 2.0, though it’s fundamentally aligned with it in spirit):

  • VLEs (esp. asynchronous discussion boards)
  • blogs
  • wikis
  • new search facilities (incl. searchrolls & blogsearches)
  • folksonomies
  • rss
  • m-learning
  • virtual worlds

It was a fairly practically oriented presentation, covering the ease of setting up each technology as well as its range of educational applications. I suggested that appropriate use of social web technologies can enormously enhance our teaching, allowing us to pursue long-established educational ideals in a way that will appeal to today’s students.

After the presentation, two audience members spoke to me individually. Both were interested in what one called the “dark side” of e-learning, a point I hadn’t addressed in much detail. In fact, I spent much of last year talking about the dark side of e-learning at conferences (Cyprus) or writing about it (Brave New Classrooms), so this year’s presentations represent a switch of emphasis!

These questions raise an interesting point, though: how careful do educators have to be when starting out with this technology in order to avoid potential traps and pitfalls?

It seems to me that the main pitfall is a lack of balance, something I addressed in my seminar from a different angle. After all, as suggested by Stephen Bax in his work on normalisation (see summary by Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou), if we are to use computers appropriately in the classroom or anywhere else, we need to stop fetishising them and seeing them either as magic bullet solutions to all our problems, or alternatively as the cause of all our problems. Rather, we need to see them as tools. Like all tools, they do some things very well, some things reasonably well, and some things poorly or not at all. For me, the greatest danger in employing e-learning tools is to overemploy them: to imagine that we must replace everything we’ve done previously with new, e-learning-centric modes of teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 provides us with a whole suite of tools, different combinations of which will be appropriate in any given context. And there are other contexts where it’s appropriate not to use e-learning tools at all, or to use them in conjunction with more traditional face-to-face methods. The role of educators is to be informed about the possibilities and to make judgement calls, ideally in collaboration with students, to suit each individual situation.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0

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