I’ve just finished teaching a Master’s level unit on e-learning in Hong Kong for third year running.  There can’t be a better place to talk about digital technologies in education, with such a technologically wired population inhabiting such a technologically wired urban landscape. Of course, I’m continually reminded that using technology for social and entertainment purposes in everyday life is not the same as using it for pedagogical and professional purposes, so that there’s still always a lot of ground to cover in such courses.  But what really struck me this year, looking back to the first course I taught here two years ago, is that around 50% of my teaching material is different now from what it it was then.  That in turn is a reminder both of how fast the technology is developing, as well as how fast our understanding of the technology is having to develop to keep pace with it.  Perhaps more than any other courses, e-learning courses can necessarily only provide a base level of understanding and familiarity with key tools, on which participants can continue to build as technology, and our underrstanding of it, keeps evolving at breakneck speed.

The Cutting Edges Conference at Canterbury Christ Church University opened with a specialist day on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis.  Unfortunately I had to take a taxi to Heathrow at the end of the final session on the first day and therefore missed the rest of the conference, but I did manage to catch a series of informative and inspiring papers.

I gave the opening plenary, entitled Seeking a third space in intercultural education: What discourse analysis tells us, which picked up the same ideas as my Open University paper the previous week, putting a little more emphasis on the discourse analysis aspects.  The handouts are available here.

Regine Hampel delivered a plenary co-authored with Ursula Stickler and entitled Multimodal classroom conversations in an online environment, where they showed that different communication channels – audio and text chat in their example from Project CyberDeutsch – are used in different ways.  Sometimes the relationship between different channels is one of complementarity; sometimes one of compensation; and sometimes one of competition. It is clear that the affordances of tools have an impact on communication and interaction, with multimodal environments giving rise to new forms of communication.

Lisa Buranen’s paper, The internet’s illegitimate offspring? Pornography and plagiarism, drew a fascinating parallel between reactions to pornography and plagiarism, both of which are often seen in ethical or moral terms, and both of which are very difficult to define.  The internet becomes a screen onto which people project their anxieties, she argued: pathos has overwhelmed logos in rhetorical terms.  The internet, ultimately, is the cause of neither porn nor plagiarism: both are far older.

Telling all students we see them as potential cheats is not, she suggested, a productive strategy.  Indeed, cheating is often a rational strategy for students in a culture where grades are paramount.  We need to notice and reward information-finding behaviour, while making sure cheating is strategically not the best choice for students to make. Criminalising all students is not the way forward.

Ruby Rennie’s paper, Discourse in virtual worlds, outlined her research on students’ discourse in virtual worlds, drawing on data from the Virtual University of Edinburgh’s (VUE) island in Second Life. Most research currently in progress, she suggested, takes either a virtual community approach (with a focus on social contexts and the construction of context and identity) or an ethnographic approach (with a focus on authenticity of interactions, online/offline boundaries, etc).  Social context comes into play in a way it doesn’t in purely text-based forms of communication like email or discussion boards.  There is a greater sense of physical presence and of group solidarity and identity in virtual worlds, as participants collaboratively construct not only texts but contexts.

Mirjam Hauck spoke on Task design for multi-literacy training, outlining the wide range of literacy skills needed by students to engage in contemporary multimodal communication.  21st-century literacy, she argued, can be developed through telecollaboration, but this is an area where there are more failures than successes, meaning that students need extensive training and support. She described an International Network project which attempts to gauge awareness of and foster multimodal awareness and multiliteracies among students, while helping tutors to develop appropriate multimodal pedagogy skills.

David Crystal’s thought-provoking closing plenary, New discourses in electronically mediated communication, gave an overview of key changes in discourse brought about by digital technologies.  Suggesting that the term CMC (computer-mediated communication) is too narrow, he opted for EMC (electronically mediated communication), while acknowledging an alternative term, DMC (digitally mediated communication).  There has never been such a large corpus of discourse available to linguists, he noted, although certain kinds of EMC – emails, chat, texting – are difficult to access.

Key differences between EMC and speech include:

• totally new options for turn-taking, with discourse becoming “creatively chaotic”
• the use of emoticons, which reflect the immediacy of EMC (after all, why didn’t they turn up in writing before?)

Key differences between EMC and writing include:

• persistence, with texts being alterable and webpages varying from encounter to encounter

There are some electronic texts that just reproduce offline texts (e.g., pdf documents) but at the other extreme, there are electronic texts with no complement in the offline world, for example:

• anti-spam texts designed to avoid spam filters
• texts seeded with keywords or metadata to gain higher rankings in Google
• texts whose aim is to save time or money, like abbreviated text messages, or emails that allow “framing” of replies (with a respondent replying section by section)
• texts where ads are matched to subject matter, maintaining a surface appearance of semantic coherence
• multiply authored texts, e.g. on Wikipedia, which may be stylistically and pragmatically heterogeneous as well as ongoing and never finished

That was, I’m afraid, the point where I had to make a dash for my taxi to Heathrow … though I would have loved to stay and hear more about what is clearly a burgeoning area of education and educational research.  In years to come, we’ll all need to consider in detail how discourse is changing online; how to study and code that online discourse; and how to handle the growing move towards multimodal textuality.  I’m sure there’ll be much more to say on all of this in the not-too-distant future.

The INTELLECT Research Day at the OU focused on intercultural issues. There were two presenters, Adelheid Hu and myself.

I opened with a paper entitled Building a Third Space in Intercultural Education, focusing on the need for educators to help students develop intercultural competence and, more specifically, ‘epistemological humility’ (Ess, 2007) – essentially, the recognition that their own perspective on the world is not the only one. My talk reported the results of the 3^rd Space in Online Discussion Project, based on a set of international forums for language teachers run through the University of Western Australia and the University of Canterbury Christ Church, UK, in 2007–2008. It focused on three main aspects of the project:

• the construct of the ‘educational third space’ which, building on Bhabha’s work on the intercultural ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994), is a useful theoretical standpoint from which to analyse the interactions of multicultural cohorts in online forums, and to assess the development of intercultural competence and epistemological humility;
• the value of asynchronous discussion boards in building such an educational third space;
• the application of computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) to asynchronous discussion transcripts in order to reveal key features, including the extent to which intercultural competence and epistemological humility are developing in a given cohort.

I showed that, while a number of factors limited fuller development of an educational third space, there was some evidence of an increase in participants’ intercultural competence and epistemological humility.

Adelheid Hu’s paper, entitled Intercultural Competences and Language Learning: Empirical Insights and the Question of Evaluation, provided a clear list of key issues around the concept of intercultural competence.  Among the points she raised were the following:

• the lack of connections being made between research on intercultural competence in different fields;
• the disjuncture between theory (often focused on culture as a construct) and practical applications (often focused on national differences);
• the need to obtain empirical evidence of theoretical constructs;
• the question of whether ‘competence’ is measurable and, if so, whether it is at odds with ethical goals of personal development;
• the question of whether ‘competence’ has become another empty term like ‘excellence’;
• the extent to which ‘culture’ should be a universally valid concept or whether we can accept a pragmatic notion of culture which varies from context to context (and may be simplified in some contexts);
• the difference between structure/component and developmental models of intercultural competence;
• the dangers of utopian notions of intercultural competence which neglect factors like power and economics;
• the question of how to empirically identify intercultural learning processes, when & why shifts happen, whether they stay, under what conditions, etc.;
• the connection between intercultural competence and language learning (which don’t necessarily entail each other);
• the connection between multilingualism and intercultural competence.

The papers were followed by extensive discussion, which demonstrated both how important intercultural competence has become – and how problematic it remains as a concept.

This year’s GloCALL Conference focused on Globalization and Localization in CALL, bringing together presenters and participants from a wide variety of countries to discuss their shared interest in the broad – and expanding – field of computer-assisted language learning. We spent two intensive days in the Hotel Ciputra, many floors above the busy, traffic-filled streets of the Indonesian capital, sharing international, national and local perspectives on technology-enhanced communication and collaboration, much of it facilitated by web 2.0 tools. Key themes included the fostering of collaboration and growth of community through CALL, and the vast range of CALL manifestations, each of which may be appropriate to different students indifferent contexts. There was a notable focus on the use of audio and/or video in conjunction with blogs, e-portfolios, digital storytelling, podcasting and m-learning.

Blogging was the focus of Penny Coutas’s session, Blogging for learning, teaching and researching languages, in which she demonstrated the principles behind blogging in an interactive paper-based exercise, before going on to outline the uses of blogs for learners, teachers and researchers. She stressed that the value of blogs lies as much in the interactions and community building that go on around them as it does in the actual blog postings themselves.

Podcasting was the focus of Wai Meng Chan’s plenary, Harnessing mobile technologies for foreign language learning: The example of podcasting. After reviewing the literature on podcasting, he described a research project conducted at NUS, which showed very positive overall student reactions to podcasting. He noted that podcasting can lead to a great variety of different kinds of language practice.

My own talk, entitled Web 2.0: Connecting the local and the global, discussed the ways in which a variety of web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, vodcasting and virtual worlds, can be used to connect the local and the global as part of the language learning process. These tools can help students not only to learn language, but also to begin to develop the local and global linguistic affiliations which are so important for today’s citizens.

There is continued interest in the area of e-portfolios, complemented by rapidly growing interest in digital storytelling, as reflected in a number of talks and workshops. Debra Hoven, in a paper entitled Digital storytelling and eportfolios for language teaching and learning, spoke of digital stories, whether collaborative or individual, as a valuable mode of communication. She noted that digital stories can be used for reflection, sharing, presentation, showcasing knowledge or skills, and can even function as part of or in conjunction with e-portfolios. Typical goals may include improvement of L1 and L2 literacy as well as multiliteracy skills, (re-)connecting with family, culture and traditions, and intergenerational communication. They can be a means of expression, an avenue of creativity, a way to make the mainstream curriculum more meaningful, and can help L2 learners to find their own voices. They are, ultimately, about language for real purposes and real audiences, involving practice in the following areas:

• writing/scripting (grammar, vocabulary, syntax, genre, register, audience, interest)
• communicating a message
• organising ideas

The notion of community was also stressed by Peter Gobel in his paper, Digital storytelling: Capturing experience and creating community. He described a pilot project conducted with Japanese learners of English from Kyoto University, who were asked to create digital stories about key experiences on overseas language learning trips from which they had recently returned.

A number of language areas were involved:

• topic choice – focus
• narrative awareness – voice and audience
• organisational skill – expression of ideas
• mixed media (created and found objects)

In addition, students required scaffolding in multimedia and digital composition skills. Overall benefits of the exercise included:

• debriefing after the trip
• creating a database (to be consulted by future students travelling overseas)
• reflection on learning experiences
• comparison and sharing of experiences
• creating a social network of shared experiences

There is also continued and even growing interest in open source software such as Moodle (which was covered in a number of presentations) and Drupal, as well as other freeware which can be used in language teaching. John Brine, in a paper entitled English language support for a computer science course using FLAX and Moodle, outlined developments around the New Zealand Digital Library Project run by the University of Waikato, with particular focus on the Greenstone Digital Library and the FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) Project, which allows language exercises to be created based on freely available material drawn from web sources such as Wikipedia and the Humanity Development Library. There is now a prototype version of a FLAX module for Moodle, which allows students to collaborate on language exercises.

Phil Hubbard’s plenary focused on the need for Integrating learner training into CALL classrooms and materials. He argued that CALL can give students more control over – and thus more responsibility for – their own learning, but that they are generally not prepared to take on this responsibility and so need training in this area. Reiterating the learner training principles he outlined at WorldCALL 2008, he concluded that it is not just the technology that matters; nor is it just a case of how teachers use the technology; rather, it is important to train learners to use it effectively. In his paper, entitled An invitation to CALL: A guided tour of computer-assisted language learning, he introduced the online site which underpins his own teacher training course, An invitation to CALL.

In her plenary, Individuals, community, communication and language pedagogy: Emerging technologies that are shaping and are being shaped by our field, Debra Hoven suggested that rather than using multiple, slightly different terms to describe different aspects of language learning with technology, we should work with one main term (such as CALL) to maintain cohesion in the field. She went on to argue against chronological classifications of CALL which, she said, do not really capture what people are doing with the technology. She proposed her own six-part model to capture the main roles of CALL:

1. Instructional/tutorial CALL (language classroom applications, sites such as Randall’s ESL Lab)
2. Discovery/exploratory CALL (simulations, roleplays, webquests)
3. Communications CALL (CMC involving language for real communication purposes)
4. Social networked CALL (blogging, microblogging, photosharing, SNS and social bookmarking)
5. Collaborative CALL (notably wikis)
6. Narrative/reflective CALL (digital storytelling and e-portfolios)

It became apparent in a number of talks that, while educators around the world share similar interests and concerns with the use of technology, there are also important geographical differences. In his opening plenary, entitled CALL implementation in Indonesia – Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Indra Charismiadji explained that obstacles to use of recent educational technologies in Indonesia include technological issues such as lack of hardware, software and internet connectivity; policy issues such as governmental and institutional support for behaviourist pedagogical approaches; teachers’ resistance to change; and a general lack of computer literacy. Computer-based teaching (which fits with a transmission pedagogy where the teacher remains in control) may represent a first step towards broader adoption of more recent e-learning approaches and tools.

All in all, it was fascinating to compare CALL perspectives and experiences, noting some differences but also the considerable similarities in educators’ interests around the world.

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.

Tag: WorldCALL08

This symposium, organised by ACER, education.au and supported by DEEWR, was a chance for teachers to explore the potential inherent in the Australian Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution, which will receive AUS $1.2 billion in funding over the coming 5 years. The programme, PowerPoint presentations and podcasts are all available online.

In both the plenary talks and the breakout sessions the message came through that new technologies are leading to major social and cultural shifts, which educators are in a good position to capitalise on. As at most academic conferences these days, presenters stressed the need to focus on the pedagogy and for teachers to work in partership with their students, with the teachers bringing the pedagogical expertise and the students much of the tehcnological expertise. In short, rather than shying away from the technology and the uncertainties it may represent, teachers need to engage with it more fully – and be inspired by the new possibilities it opens up.

The Australian Copyright Council conducted a series of illuminating seminars which helped to shed light on the confused and confusing area of copyright as it pertains to digital media and new technologies. I certainly left with a much more informed perspective on the intricacies of copyright law.  Further useful information on this area is available at Smart Copying Australia.

I also left with a much better overview of looming legal battles. Key insights I derived from the sessions I attended included:

• Copyright is very much a grey area. It’s not just educators who are unsure. The law is scrambling to catch up with recent technological advances and many areas are simply untested in the courts.
• The law, by nature, is a conservative institution and there is inevitably growing tension between the law (with its careful preservation of the economic status quo) and social technologies (which, with their sharing and remixing practices, are based on a radically different paradigm).

For both of the above reasons, in years to come we’re going to see a series of court battles where details of the law will be clarified as the latent conflict between the law and new technologies is played out. The outcome is going to make a big difference to what we can and can’t do, and what we will and won’t attempt, with technologies in the future.

This year’s SLanguages Conference, the second in the annual series, shows just how far we’ve come – technologically and pedagogically – since the first conference in 2007. With an extensive programme, sessions were split across two venues in EduNation II and EduNation III.

On the technological side, many of the limitations of 2007 had disappeared. In 2008 there were far more presenters (over 20 as compared to 5 in 2007), far more attendees (over 300 registered as compared to 50 in 2007), and there was almost unimpeded voice chat between participants before and after each session. (For more on the numbers, see the comment posted by Gavin Dudeney, Conference organiser, at the end of this blog entry).

On the pedagogical side: the degree to which our pedagogical understanding of SL has advanced can be seen in the range of topics addressed in the different papers, and the wealth of perspectives and practices outlined there. There are some incredibly innovative uses of SL underway in educational institutions stretched across the globe.

And something has to be said about multitasking as well: this blog was being written and published piece by piece during the conference itself, and Gavin’s comment on it appeared during this process (i.e., during the conference, as will be obvious if you read it). Email announcements of starting times for talks were sent out regularly, so that checking your inbox was a good way of making sure you didn’t miss anything. It was also only a few minutes after watching Paul Preibisch’s talk on EduNation that I messaged him in Facebook – and received a reply within minutes. This is a great illustration of the multichannel communication which is increasingly becoming the norm in this area!

Given international time differences, I couldn’t see nearly as many papers as I would have liked, but I was able to be present at a selection of very informative sessions.

In her talk “Teaching Training: Second Life vs. Online/Blended Courses” (see image at top of posting), Dafne Gonzalez (SL: Daf Smirnov) contrasted what is now seen as ‘more traditional’ web-based teacher training with newer forms of teacher training in virtual worlds. She presented an elegant series of Venn diagrams showing some points of similarity alongside numerous areas of contrast.

In his talk “Bots for Educators!” (image above), Paul Preibisch (SL: Fire Centaur) explained the role that could be played by bots in language teaching and learning areas of SL. Bots are automated avatars which can give simple responses to visitors, illustrating language usage in the process. They are already being used to give students grammar guidance by reformulating erroneous questions.

In the plenary talk “Motivated Interactions in Second Life” (image above), Chris Surridge (SL: Christopher Flow) presented a whole range of tasks – or “missions” – which can be set for student avatars in SL. Students reported that the more challenging missions, which were more game-like, were also more interesting. Chris pointed out that even when they were ‘cheating’ to complete the missions, students were in fact learning.

In his talk “Second Life in Conservative Societies: Considerations from the Middle East” (images above & below), Mark Karstad (SL: Buy Short) used the example of Dubai Women’s College to illustrate the importance of balancing technology and cultural values. There is a requirement, for example, that teachers avoid taking students to places where there are ’skin’ images – though in fact students in many cases choose NOT to be covered in SL. Even conservative students feel quite free, he suggested, in how they are willing to represent themselves through their avatars, often dressing more as they would in their homes. Interestingly, one student was admonished by another avatar when she appeared, uncovered, at the model of Mecca in Islam Online.

There was a sense at the colloquium that in some ways virtual worlds, which have been at the cutting edge of web technology for some time, are now pushing beyond the boundaries of what we can reasonably call web 2.0. Are we in fact witnessing the emergence of web 3.0? I guess we’ll need to watch this space … and turn up for SLanguages 2009!

Tags: SLanguages2008, virtual world, Second Life, education, TESOL, language teaching, language learning

]]> http://elanguage.edublogs.org/2008/05/23/beyond-web-20-teaching-in-virtual-worlds/feed/ 2 http://elanguage.edublogs.org/2007/09/20/tesol-goes-mobile-and-social/ http://elanguage.edublogs.org/2007/09/20/tesol-goes-mobile-and-social/#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:10:09 +0000 Mark http://elanguage.edublogs.org/2007/09/20/tesol-goes-mobile-and-social/ 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.

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.