e-language

WorldCALL
Fukuoka International Congress Center, Fukuoka, Japan, 6-8 August 2008

The theme of WorldCALL 2008, the five-yearly conference now being held for the third time, was “CALL bridges the world”.  With participants from over 50 countries, and presentations on every aspect of language teaching through technology, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Key themes

Key themes of the conference included the need for a sophisticated understanding of our technologies and their affordances; the importance of teacher involvement and task design in maximising collaboration and online community; the potential for intercultural interaction; the role of cultural and sociocultural issues; the need for reflection on the part of both teachers and students on all of the above; and, in particular, the need for much more extensive teacher training.

There was a wide swathe of technologies, tools and approaches covered, including:

• email;
• VLEs, in particular, Moodle;
• web 2.0 tools, especially blogs and m-learning/mobile phones, but also microblogging, wikis, social networking, and VoIP/Skype;
• borderline web 2.0/web 3.0 tools like virtual worlds and avatars;
• ICALL, speech recognition and TTS software;
• blended learning;
• e-portfolios.

With up to 8 concurrent sessions running at any given moment, it was impossible to keep up with everything, but here’s a brief selection of themes and ideas …

Communication & collaboration

In her paper “Mediation, materiality and affordances”, Regine Hampel considered the contrasting views that the new media have the advantage of quantitatively increasing communication but the disadvantage of creating reduced-cue communication environments.  She concluded that there are many advantages to using computer-mediated communication with language learners, but that we need to focus on areas such as:

• multimodal communication: we need to bear in mind that while new media offer new ways of interacting and negotiating meaning, dealing with multiple modes as well as a new language at the same time may lead to overload for students;
• collaboration: task design is essential to scaffolding collaboration, with different tools supporting collaborative learning in very different ways; there is also a need to make collaboration integral to course outcomes;
• cultural and institutional issues: this includes the value placed on collaboration;
• student/teacher roles: online environments can be democratic but students need to be autonomous learners to exploit this potential;
• the development of community and social presence at a distance;
• teacher training.

Intercultural interaction

Karin Vogt and Keiko Miyake, discussing “Telecollaborative learning with interaction journals”, showed the great potential for intercultural learning which is present in cross-cultural educational collaborations.  Their work showed that the greatest value could be drawn from such interactions by asking the students to keep detailed reflective journals, where intercultural themes and insights could emerge, and/or could be picked up and developed by the teacher.  They added that their own results, based on a content analysis of such journals from a German-Japanese intercultural email exchange programme, confirmed the results of previous studies that the teacher has a very demanding role in initiating, planning and monitoring intercultural learning.

Marie-Noëlle Lamy also stressed the intercultural angle in her paper “We Argentines are not as other people”, in which she explained her experience with designing an online course for Argentine teachers.  After explaining the teaching methodology and obstacles faced, she went on to argue that we are in need of a model of culture to use in researching courses such as this one - but not an essentialist model based on national boundaries.  She is currently addressing this important lack (something which Stephen Bax and I are also dealing with in our work on third spaces in online discussion) by developing a model of the formation of an online culture.

Teacher (and learner) training

In their paper “CALL strategy training for learners and teachers”, Howard Pomann and Phil Hubbard offered the following list of five principles to guide teachers in the area of CALL:

• Experience CALL yourself (so teachers can understand what it feels like to be a student using this technology);
• Give learners teacher training (so they know what teachers know about the goals and value of CALL);
• Use a cyclical approach;
• Use collaborative debriefings (to share reflections and insights);
• Teach general exploitation strategies (so users can make the most of the technologies).

In conclusion, they found that learner strategy training was essential to maximise the benefits of CALL and could be achieved in part through the keeping of reflective journals (for example as blogs), which would form a basis for collaborative debriefings.  As in many other papers, it was stressed that teacher training should be very much a part of this process.

In presenting the work carried out so far by the US-based TESOL Technology Standards Taskforce, Phil Hubbard and Greg Kessler demonstrated the value of developing a set of broad, inclusive standards for teachers and students, concluding that:

• bad teaching won’t disappear with the addition of technology;
• good teaching can often be enhanced by the addition of technology;
• the ultimate interpretation of the TESOL New Technology standards needs to be pedagogical, not technical.

In line with the views of many other presenters, Phil added that we need to stop churning out language teachers who learn about technology on the job; newer teachers need to acquire these skills on their pre-service and in-service education programmes.

Important warnings and caveats about technology use emerged in a session entitled “Moving learning materials from paper to online and beyond”, in which Thomas Robb, Toshiko Koyama and Judy Naguchi shared their experience of two projects in whose establishment Tom had acted as mentor.  While both projects were ultimately successful, Tom explained that mentoring at a distance is difficult, with face-to-face contact required from time to time, as a mentor can’t necessarily anticipate the knowledge gaps which may make some instructions unfathomable.  At the moment, it seems there is no easy way to move pre-existing paper-based materials online in anything other than a manual and time-consuming manner.  This may improve with time but until then we may still need to look to enthusiastic early adopters for guidance; technological innovation, he concluded, is not for the faint of heart and it may well be a slow process towards normalisation …

Normalisation, nevertheless, must be our goal, argued Stephen Bax in his plenary “Bridges, chopsticks and shoelaces”, in which he expanded on his well-known theory of normalisation.  Pointing out that there are different kinds of normalisation, ranging from the social and institutional to the individual, Stephen argued that:

A technology has arguably reached its fullest possible effectiveness only when it has arrived at the stage of ‘genesis amnesia’ (Bourdieu) or what I call ‘normalisation’.

Normalised technologies, he suggested, offer their users social and cultural capital, so that if students do not learn about technologies, they will be disadvantaged.  In other words, if teachers decide not to use technology because they personally don’t like it, they may be doing their students a great disservice in the long run.

At the same time, he stressed, it is important to remember that pedagogy and learners’ needs come first - technology must be the servant and not the master. Referring to the work of Kumaravadivelu and Tudor, he suggested that we must always respect context, with technology becoming part of a wider ecological approach to teaching.

There were interesting connections between the ecological approach proposed by Stephen and Gary Motteram’s thought-provoking paper, “Towards a cultural history of CALL”, in which he advocated the use of third generation activity theory to describe the overall interactions in CALL systems.  There was also a link with my own paper, “Four visions of CALL”, which argued for the expansion of our vision of technology in education to encompass not just technological and pedagogical issues, but also broader social and sociopolitical issues which have a bearing on this area.

Specific web 2.0 technologies

In “Learner training through online community”, Rachel Lange demonstrated a very successful discussion-board based venture at a college in the UAE, where, despite certain restrictions - such as the need to separate the genders in online forums - the students themselves have used the tools provided to build their own communities, where more advanced students mentor and support those with a lower level of English proficiency.

In Engaging collaborative writing through social networking, Vance Stevens and Nelba Quintana outlined their Writingmatrix project, designed to help students form online writing partnerships.  Operating within a larger context of paradigm shift - including pedagogy (didactic to constructivist), transfer (bringing social technologies from outside the classroom into the classroom), and trepidation (it’s OK not to know everything about technology and work it out in collaboration with your students) - they effectively illustrated the value of a range of aggregation tools to facilitate collaboration between educators and students; these included Technorati, del.icio.us, Crowd status, Twemes, FriendFeed, Dipity and Swurl.

Claire Kennedy and Mike Levy’s paper “Mobile learning for Italian” focused on the very successful use of mobile phone ‘push’ technology at Griffith University in Queensland.  In the context of a discussion of the horizontal and vertical integration of CALL, Mike commented on the irony that many teachers and schools break the horizontal continuity of technology use by insisting that mobile phones are switched off as soon as students arrive at school.  Potentially these are very valuable tools which, according to Mellow (2005), can be used in at least three ways:

• push (where information is sent to students);
• pull (where students request messages);
• interactive (push & pull, including responses).

Despite some doubts in the literature about the invasion of students’ social spaces by push technologies, Mike and Claire showed that their programme of sending lexical and other language-related as well as cultural material to Italian students has been a resounding success, with extremely positive feedback overall.

Other successful demonstrations of technology being used in language classrooms ranged from Alex Ludewig’s presentation on “Enriching the students’ learning experience while ‘enriching’ the budget”, in which she showed the impressive multimedia work done by students of German in Simulation Builder, to Salomi  Papadima-Sophocleous’s work with “CALL e-portfolios”, where she showed the value of e-portfolios in preparing future EFL teachers as reflective, autonomous learners.

Beyond web 2.0 - to web 3.0?

As Trude Heift explained in her plenary, “Errors and intelligence in CALL”, CALL ranges from web 2.0 to speech technologies, virtual worlds, corpus studies, and ICALL.  While most of the current educational focus is on web 2.0, there are interesting developments in other areas.  It seems to me that, to the extent that web 3.0 involves the development of the intelligent web and/or the geospatial web, some of these developments may point the way to the emergence of web 3.0 applications in education.

Trude’s own paper focused on ICALL and natural language processing research, whose aim is to enable people to communicate with machines in natural language.  We have come a long way from the early Eliza programme to Intelliwise’s web 3.0 conversational agent, which is capable of holding much more natural conversations.  While ICALL is still a young discipline and there are major challenges to be overcome in the processing of natural language - particularly the error-prone language of learners - it holds out the promise of automated systems which can create learner-centred, individualised learning environments thanks to modelling techniques which address learner variability and offer unique responses and interactions.  This is certainly an area to watch in years to come.

On a simpler level, text to speech and voice processing software is already being used in numerous classrooms around the world.   Ian Wilson, for example, presented an effective model of “Using Praat and Moodle for teaching segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation”.

Another topic raised in some papers was virtual worlds, which some would argue are incipient web 3.0 spaces.  Due to time limitations and timetable clashes, I didn’t catch these papers, but it’s certainly an area of growing interest - and in the final panel discussion, Ana Gimeno-Sanz, the President of EuroCALL, suggested that this might become a dominant theme at CALL conferences in the next year or so.

The final plenary panel summed up the key themes of the conference as follows:

• the importance of pedagogy over technology (Osamu Takeuchi);
• the need to consider differing contexts (OT);
• the ongoing need for conferences like this one to consider best practice, even if the process of normalisation is proceeding apace (Thomas Robb);
• the need to reach out to non-users of technology (TR);
• the need for CALL representation in more general organisations (TR);
• the professionalisation of CALL (Bob Fischer);
• the need to consider psycholinguistic as well as sociolinguistic dimensions of CALL (BF);
• the shift in focus from the technology (the means) to its application (the end) (Ana Gimeno-Sanz);
• the need to extend our focus to under-served regions of the world (AG-S).

The last point was picked up on by numerous participants and a long discussion ensued on how to overcome the digital divide in its many aspects.  A desire to share the benefits of the technology was strongly expressed - both by those with technology to share and those who would like to share in that technology. That, I suspect, will be a major theme of our discussions in years to come: how to spread  pedagogically appropriate, contextually sensitive uses of technology to ever wider groups of teachers and learners.

Conference: The 20th English Australia Conference
Sydney, Australia, 13-15 September 2007

Once again this year, the largest TESOL conference in Australia saw a number of sessions on CALL and e-learning, especially the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Jock Boyd & Mauricio Buchler, in a session entitled Technology in the ESL classroom, focused on the benefits of using mobile technologies as well as social networking sites, offering concrete illustrations of the potential of each for the language classroom and concluding with the strong message that “change isn’t optional, it’s imperative”. Kerrie Burow, whose session was entitled Exploring the use of social networking sites in the language classroom, opened with the slogan: “Play.Connect. LEARN.” After a brief overview of Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, key Web 2.0 technologies were presented and it was argued that these fit well with a constructivist approach to pedagogy. The main focus was on applications of social networking sites, ranging from Flickr and YouTube to Facebook.

In a paper entitled Catering to diversity through asynchronous online discussion, Stephen Bax and I discussed the nature of communication and collaboration which can occur in asynchronous forums. On the basis of data from an international online discussion forum for language teachers which took place in early 2007, we are currently investigating whether and to what extent such an online learning community can be seen as constituting an educational or intercultural “third space”. Further information is available on our Third Space in Online Discussion project webpage.

Other presentations covered community in CALL (Ian Brown), multimedia materials design (Megan Yucel) and PowerPoint (Sandra Casey).

It’s apparent that CALL and, more generally, e-learning are areas of growing importance for TESOL practitioners - and their students! More and more educators are interested in and have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies, while teachers everywhere are becoming more innovative as they discover the educational potential of these new technologies.

Conference: New and Emerging Technologies in ELT
Chennai, India, 3-5 August 2007

This 3-day event, entitled New and Emerging Technologies in ELT, was jointly organised by the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG and ELTAI. Delegates from across the world met at Loyola College in Chennai, India, to discuss web 2.0 and other technologies currently making an impact on the TESOL classroom.

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The majority of plenaries and presentations over the 3 intensive days were informed by the twin themes of context and community. Context, it was repeatedly stressed, should be paramount in making decisions about whether to use technologies and which ones to employ. Community was seen as central to web 2.0, on which the majority of sessions focused. These two concepts, it was suggested, must jointly inform the pedagogically sound use of technology in language teaching.

Jim Coleman’s opening plenary, entitled “Eeyore and the pixel dropout: What’s wrong with technology-enhanced learning?”, began with a strong reminder that students and teachers come first; technology comes later. He suggested that the reverse situation - technology driving pedagogy - was responsible for giving us the traditional language lab, which has been long abandoned by most educators. He argued against what he terms the Mekon Syndrome - cognitive approaches to SLA which treat the learner as a big brain with no personality or emotions - and suggested that the recent social turn in SLA fits well with the social networking capabilities of web 2.0, where identity is of great importance. Indeed, he went on to say, we have to harness social networks if we are going to be successful language teachers. At the same time, we should be aware that CMC brings both pedagogical advantages and disadvantages and must be used judiciously to support learning appropriately in any given context.

The problems with traditional language labs were further elaborated upon in the plenary discussion on “New learning technologies and language laboratories”. Gary Motteram argued that these labs have always been about isolating people, rather than facilitating communication, which is the most important factor in language learning. While acknowledging that in newer labs students may in fact be communicating with the wider world, he suggested that the metaphor - with its implication of an experiment - is far from ideal. Eric Baber agreed that when students are together in the same room, we should make the most of the chance to have them working together rather than separating them artificially.

Gary Motteram and Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou’s plenary asked: “Are teachers fit for web 6.0?” The plenary described the changes currently taking place through web 2.0 but sought to disengage the term from the hype. Explaining that web 6.0 was a speculative term he had encountered on the internet, Gary argued that the names we use - web 2.0 or otherwise - are not really important. While recognising that many teachers face difficulties as a result of having inadequate access to technology and/or being overwhelmed by it, the session offered some useful advice on how teachers can take advantage of the new technologies. This included the “three Ps” rule - pedagogy, pedagogy and pedagogy! In other words, as a number of other presenters argued in this conference, technology must not be allowed to drive education … Because it’s impossible to keep up with the range of changes going on, what is important, Sophie and Gary suggested, is for teachers to find one innovation or technology which is relevant in their contexts and to begin working with it - a point echoed later in the day by Michel Coghlan.

Neatly reflecting the conference’s concern with context and community, Michael Coghlan’s plenary was entitled Language learning in a connected world. He balanced some of the drawbacks of recent developments - increasing miscellany around the world, the cult of the amateur (feared by some to be leading to the killing of culture), disintermediation (the decline of the gatekeepers of content), and the very real dangers of internet predation - with the advantages, such as empowerment and the realisation of identity through personal publishing to social networking sites. Clearly, although we are technologically able, we may not be sociologically ready to deal with the effects of web 2.0, and Coghlan insisted that adults need to be offering guidance to students as to how to behave online to avoid potential dangers. Teachers, he suggested, need to be ready to integrate more with students, to teach SMS as a legitimate form of communication, and to maintain not just a traditional language focus but to consider multiliteracies, digital literacy and e-literacy. Ultimately, he concluded, the new technologies are all about networks and connection, and we need to find ways of working with these paradigms.

Eric Baber’s plenary put it this way: To innovate or not to innovate, that is the question. After a brief historical review of technological innovation, he drew on the work of Rogers on the diffusion of innovations and the factors which make an innovation successful, which were listed as:

• relative advantage
• compatibility
• complexity
• trialability
• observability

He also spoke of how to measure success - by numbers, by user satisfaction, and by achieved learning outcomes - before giving examples of recent innovations. He concluded with a reminder that because motivation and enthusiasm eventually fade, it is essential to consider relative advantage when innovating.

There were a large number of informative papers and workshops on inspired and inspiring uses of web 2.0 and related technologies. Sessions I attended focused on:

• asynchronous discussion boards for reflective teacher training (Meg Cassamally)
• producing videos and video blogging (Nicolas Gromik)
• producing student YouTube videos (Michael Cheng)
• wikis for learning written language (Sudakshina Roy)
• a comparison of blogs, wikis & review forums (Caleb Prichard)
• social networking sites (S.K. Chitra Lakshimi)
• m-learning for teaching soft skills (Revathi Viswanathan)
• VoIP and voiceboards (Claire Pinks)
• interactive whiteboards (Julia Glass)

My own paper, entitled “Talking to the digital natives: Building connections and community on web 2.0”, further developed ideas I first discussed in a paper in Auckland in May. I argued that web 2.0 is fundamentally about connections and community but that, because these connections and communities are being built online in largely text-based environments, they can only be created through language. Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, rss, m-learning and virtual worlds can thus be exploited by language teachers as they help their students in the further acquisition and refinement of the language and literacy skills they need to engage in social networking online.

All in all, this was a very successful conference, bringing together people from very different teaching and learning environments around the world to share their experiences of, enthusiasm for and words of caution about new technologies and, in particular, web 2.0.

Colloquium: SLanguages
EduNation, Second Life, 23 June 2007

Organised by Gavin Dudeney of the Consultants-E, the First Annual Second Life Language Teaching Colloquium took place on EduNation last Saturday. With a little over 50 registered participants from around the globe, it was a chance for educators to share their experience of teaching in SL – and was, in itself, a great advertisement for the educational potential of virtual worlds.

During his opening speech, Gavin warned of the limitations and dangers of both old functional (teaching) models and new business models applied to language learning in SL. However, there are some interesting developments underway, as this colloquium amply illustrated.

The first presentation of the day was from Paul Preibisch and Kip Boahn (see image above), who described their innovative work on the English Village Project, the largest languages group in SL. The pros and cons of a number of teaching formats were discussed:

• 1:1 (relatively problem-free, allowing teachers to move around with students);
• small group + 1 teacher (where the ideal number may be 2-3 students);
• large group + more than 1 teacher (where matching teaching styles may be an issue);
• team teaching (where students benefit from the experience of different teachers);
• guided self-study (a promising development; Sloodle seems to be moving this way).

Kip concluded with a series of suggestions aimed at the “Aufmotzen” (dolling up) of SL. He suggested that SL shouldn’t be seen as a solution for everything but as part of a suite of tools. Some aspects of SL still require improvement and more interesting in-world tools are needed. Meanwhile, Sloodle may represent a way forward, and many other web 2.0 tools can be integrated into SL. He also stressed that there is a real need for community – that both teachers and students need to bond around the educational process – and that location is key to creating a sense of community.

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Hugh O’Donnell (see image above) then spoke about the Scottish Secondary Sector, stressing that virtual worlds have a great deal to offer in connecting students in remote locations, without necessitating long hours of travel. There are many educational possibilities – from an avatar of Keats posing questions on his own poems to involving living artists who could interact with students – and ideally there would be in-world travel between schools on the teen grid. However, he acknowledged that there are many problems to overcome, not least of all problems of image: it’s necessary to explode the myths of SL (like those of the internet before it) which suggest that it’s just the province of unsalubrious characters …

Nik Peachey, who spoke on Designing a Language Course for SL, began by asking what theory might underpin learning through gaming. His answer was 1960s flow theory, which suggests that certain key elements – such as concentration on clearly articulated goals, availability of feedback, deep but effortless involvement, a loss of self-consciousness and the development of an altered sense of time – can contribute to learning in an optimal way. He referred also to Prensky’s work on digital natives, but argued that the old ways of teaching (notably lectures) had actually never been effective. Now, however, we have the tools to easily change these old modes of education.

Although SL is not a game, he suggested that it can be used like one, with tasks designed with the principles of flow theory in mind. In a partial echo of Preibisch and Boahn’s presentation, he indicated that one of the major reasons for the success of games, and the learning that takes place within them, is the presence of community. It’s important that we design tasks with collaborative principles in mind. A residential distance learning course, where students could “live” and socialise in a communal space outside of class time, might be ideal.

Many standard communicative activities lend themselves to use in language teaching in SL, most notably roleplays since, after all, SL is a roleplay. However, we should beware of imposing too many layers; to have a student playing an avatar playing a character might be too much. Roleplays, Peachey advised, should be more like jazz improvisation than Wagnerian opera, with students allowed a degree of control and flexibility.

Some of the problems he outlined at the conclusion of his talk include:

• presenting language in-world is difficult;
• the teacher’s paralinguistic cues are absent;
• there is a loss of student reaction;
• we are building on quicksand in the sense that the SL environment is constantly changing.

For more information, see the Tips for language learning materials design in Second Life on Nik’s own blog.

By the time these talks were over and the poster session began, to be followed by virtual lunch, it was rather late on the west coast of Australia so I took my leave. However, there’s no doubt that there are plenty of inspiring educational developments in SL being driven by real enthusiasts. It’s a case of watch this space – closely – in the weeks, months and years to come. Indeed, as Gavin mentioned in a summary talk, it’s not unthinkable that the day will arrive when the internet as a whole comes to resemble a virtual world which we navigate with the help of avatars. It’s good to get a sense of just how much educational potential there may be in such a development.

Tags: slanguages2007, virtual world, Second Life, education, TESOL, language teaching, language learning

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.

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

Conference: Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom: A Step Closer to the Future
Nicosia, Cyprus, 26-28 May 2006

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This 3-day event, entitled Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom, was organised by the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG and the University of Cyprus. It was a chance to explore technologies in the language classroom, with particular emphasis on key issues in e-learning and lots of discussion and speculation about its future directions. Naturally, there were numerous talks and workshops which focused on hardware (especially interactive whiteboards) or software (ranging from Hot Potatoes to wikis), but there’s no doubt about the main focus of the conference: the wetware.

This term, according to Wikipedia, is probably derived from Rudy Rucker’s 1988 novel of the same name, and is used to refer to ” the integration of the concepts of the physical construct known as the central nervous system (CNS) and the mental construct known as the human mind. It is a two part abstraction drawn from the computer related idea of hardware or software”. More simply and more generally, we can say that it refers to the human beings who interact with the hardware and the software.

The core theme of the conference, which surfaced and resurfaced repeatedly in different guises and contexts, was that it’s the people who matter. Yes, the hardware and software need to be in place, but what matters is what we do with them - how we use them to construct knowledge, to communicate, to teach and to learn. Crucially, it’s about people working together, meaning teachers with students, but also students with students, and teachers with teachers … as in a conference forum like this one.

I’ve developed my thoughts on this subject more fully in my article “Hard, soft or wet: Directions in e-learning“, published in summer 2006 in the CALL Review. The same issue also contains summaries of the conference by plenary speakers Stephen Bax and Gavin Dudeney.

My own presentation was entitled “E-learning: From hype to hope”; the PowerPoint and handout are available on the conference website. [As of April 2007, this website was in the process of redevelopment, during which period not all documents are available. In the meantime I'm happy to supply copies if you contact me.]

Tags: hardware, software, wetware