Tag Archives: web 2.0

New media, new learning

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

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

Bonk listed key reasons for using video which have emerged from research, including:

  • dual coding theory, i.e., the idea that information learned verbally and visually is more richly stored (Alan Paivio)
  • anchored instruction, macrocontexts (John Bransford)
  • multimedia theory (Richard Mayer)
Some recommended strategies for teachers who want to embed videos in education include:
  • anchoring learning (i.e., finding an anchoring event for the learning)
  • starting online discussions before class
  • initiating a pause-and-reflect process
  • stimulating reflections on key concepts
Students can be asked to:
  • find useful video resources for class
  • edit collections of videos to sift out the most effective examples
  • preview and discuss videos before class
  • create videos to summarise their learning
  • evaluate and update archive videos from past years/cohorts
  • send effective videos to the teacher, with those chosen for class viewing receving bonus points
  • share videos across classes or even institutions
  • find videos that support, or contradict, their side of a debate

Bonk concluded with some key pieces of advice for educators using videos:

  • consider the underpinning learning theory or approach that makes videos more powerful than other media
  • get students to reflect on why or how you are using them
  • the length of video for activities should be short (under 10 mins, but preferably under 4 mins)
  • get students to create videos, not just watch them
  • get students to find some course videos rather than looking for them all yourself
  • watch and approve all videos before selecting them, and test for linkrot
  • have a backup plan if links don’t work or bandwidth is limited
  • have a guide sheet to foster students’ reflections
In  later parts of the workshop, Bonk went on to discuss Adding Jumbo Motivation to Online Courses and Activities with the TEC-VARIETY Model, where the value of online video was again an important theme. The workshop was wrapped up with a brief discussion entitled Blended Learning from A to Z: Myths, Models, and Moments of Magic. All in all, the workshop provided a wealth of ideas on how online video sharing can support contemporary educational approaches.

Changing language, changing learners, changing teachers

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

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

Changing teacher training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to a learner-centred stage where:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing language teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing language: New literacies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the key literacies for students are:

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

Online learning spaces allow:

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

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

Conclusion

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

International connections

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GloCALL
Hotel Ciputra, Jakarta, Indonesia, 8-9 November 2008

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.

Technology bridging the world

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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.

Tag: WorldCALL08

TESOL goes mobile and social

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

sydney1.jpgOnce 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.

Context & community in e-learning

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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.

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