Category Archives: E-learning

Literacy, numeracy & ICT

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Education Dept, AISWA & CEOWA Literacy & Numeracy Workshop
James Nestor Hall, CEOWA, Perth
02 September, 2010

As part of National Literacy & Numeracy Week, 2010, I delivered a literacy workshop for the Education Department, AISWA and CEOWA at the CEOWA’s James Nestor Hall in Perth.  Speaking to a group of primary and secondary teachers, I outlined the suite of new digital literacies I believe are essential for educators to acquire and to pass on to our students.  The flyer for the event is available here.

My workshop was followed by a numeracy workshop by Steve Routledge, who outlined the varying degrees of ICT integration in schools – ranging from the use of traditional computer labs with locked down machines to the widespread employment of computers and, increasingly, mobile devices in the classroom.  He argued that we need to be where the students are and to find ways of helping them use their digital devices not just for social and entertainment activities, but for learning.  He concluded by showing teachers some of the great, free materials now available online for maths teachers.

Local + global = glocal

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GloCALL 2009
Chiang Mai, Thailand
8-11 December, 2009

Chiang Mai 1As always, the GloCALL Conference provided a good illustration of its own key theme – that the global + the local = the glocal – in the mix of presenters and attendees in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.  A major theme running through many plenaries and papers concerned the ongoing shifts in technology and its use in education.

In the opening plenary, Integrating ICT into teaching and learning English in Thailand, Thanomporn Laohajaratsang noted that because teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, they sometimes struggle with the integration of new technology into the classroom. For the new generation of students, the so-called net generation or “screen-agers” (defined here as those born in the 2000s), this will increasingly be an issue. The slogan of the screen-agers, according to Thanomporn, is: “I, me first, I-Pod, Myself, My own needs”, and their preference is for learning from the network of people surrounding them rather than from teachers.

But classrooms are changing: she presented a range of examples of technologically enabled teaching, ranging from the sophisticated use of feedback mechanisms in lectures to the use of OLPC laptops in developing areas. Citing Rik Schwier’s (2008) model of “Learning Theories Supported by Computer-based Learning”, she noted a move over time from software that supported objectivist and cognitivist educational approaches towards software that supports constructivism and connectivism, with a parallel move from individual learning to group learning. She argued that we should not overlook the power of social software like blogs, wikis and social networking sites.

In her plenary, Why the social in sociocollaborative CALL, Carla Meskill pointed out that in CALL we’ve moved from a ‘because we can’ paradigm (where pedagogical considerations were not paramount) through an ‘intrinsic rewards’ paradigm to a ‘communication with others’ paradigm. There has been considerable support from psychology and, more recently, neuroscience for the notion that human beings are socially responsive by nature and that all learning is social. Recent research suggests that humans respond to computer screens similarly to the way they respond to each other. Our responsiveness to screens has moved from text through noise, movement, simulated people and on to web 2.0, or social networking.

Teacher responsiveness has only recently been recognised as a critical component in successful student learning, especially the learning of discourse norms. Responsiveness is about instructional conversations orchestrated by a teacher – and nothing can replace a really excellent human teacher, Carla argued. We need to refocus CALL on what excellent teachers do – on the instructional conversations by which they teach, and on creating instructional conversations that render our machines and screens optimally responsive. It is the person on the other end who is responsive, not the machine.

Sociocultural CALL acknowledges language growth and learning via the recreational web 2.0. There is a lot of language, responsiveness and literacy – social literacy – on which language teachers can capitalise here. We have to get our heads around this kind of social literacy. A sociocultural view of CALL sees teacher-orchestrated instructional conversations with students, on screens, as essential. It’s not sufficient to just send students off to practise by themselves; rather, teachers need to respond to teachable moments, to who learners are, to their needs. The pedagogical implications are extensive. The machine is now at the service of human instructional interactions – and that means, at the service of really excellent language educators. Sociocollaborative CALL, Carla concluded, is about humanware and teacherware to which learners are optimally responsive. Teachers ultimately need to embrace this technology because it can amplify and extend their already excellent practices.

Carla opened her paper, The language of teaching well with digital learning objects, with a quote by Andrea diSessa: “Information is a shockingly limited form of knowledge” (Changing Minds, 2000). She then went on to discuss digital learning objects, which she described as designed to be under student control and open to exploration. They are dynamic and multimodal, so the term is not used to refer to static worksheets, pages of text or overheads. These learning objects can be seen as:

  • public
  • anarchic
  • malleable
  • unstable
  • providing anchored referents

Appropriate instructional conversation involves thinking and speaking that is:

  • joined in a dialectic way
  • dynamic, generative, process-oriented
  • cumulative with the goal of shared, mutually generated understanding

Teacher strategies might include saturating; linguistic traps; modelling; form-focused feedback; and providing linguistic/thinking tools.

Carla offered a number of oral synchronous examples. When a student is searching for a particular vocabulary item, the teacher can draw visual cues from a databank or quickly Google an image (which will become an increasingly important skill for teachers). This can be done not only in a face-to-face classroom, but in a virtual classroom in Second Life. Oral asynchronous examples can include models of physical gestures, or threaded asynchronous voice conversations where, with the help of images, the teacher provides cues and responses.

In his plenary, Tom Robb asked: Can we still call CALL CALL? Referring to Stephen Bax’s notion of normalisation, he pointed out that computers are now becoming everyday tools. Using Wordle diagrams, he showed that terms such as ‘CALL’ and ‘computer’ are no longer mentioned very often in conference paper titles or abstracts; the emphasis has shifted from the tools themselves (which are slowly disappearing as a focus) to the processes (collaboration, etc). He suggested that it might be better to change the term ‘CALL’, since people are less conscious of the role of computers as normalisation sets in; anyone can do CALL but they don’t necessarily see it as their primary interest; and often we’re not actually using computers any more but mobile technologies.

The new game in town, Tom suggested, is access outside the classroom. This is important, given the high number of hours required to progress at higher levels of language learning – especially as we tend to give students fewer contact hours as they advance. In other words, we need to increase the number of language contact hours without increasing class time. CALL outside the classroom wasn’t possible as an integral class component until recently – but universal access is now a reality in many areas and expanding rapidly elsewhere, and tracking is possible. Tracking makes the difference between making CALL material available and using the material effectively. Technology can be an ‘enforcer’, by tracking students’ use of material. If material can’t be tracked, teachers should use alternative means of keeping students accountable, like printed copies or screenshots.

There are different kinds of self-access: true self-access by motivated, independent learners; recommended self-access, where a teacher recommends that a student needs practice in a particular area; required access, where access counts for grades; and class access, where everyone is working in a lab. Only the last two are really viable with dependent learners. Tom argued that we shouldn’t try to eliminate more restricted CALL drill exercises, where the teacher steps out of the picture, suggesting these can be valuable for some students in some contexts. That means the teacher can save class time for non-CALL work in areas where teacher presence is important.

He finished with the following summary list of conclusions:

  • Use of technology is shifting from a focus on the tools to a focus on procedures
  • Use is shifting from in-class use to out-of-class use
  • Out-of-class use requires suitable tools to monitor and encourage use
  • Result: more contact with the language and improved language skills
  • Need for academic societies to help teachers use effectively those aspects of technology that they are starting to take for granted.

The 3-paper symposium Meeting places for the local and the global? Telecollaboration and intercultural learning on web 2.0 focused on the advantages and disadvantages of telecollaboration, and the need for new literacies and new understandings of intercultural interaction.

Sarah Guth and Fran Helm began by discussing the need for changing definitions of culture (with the rise of online cultures) and literacy (with the rise of digital literacy) – and the need for a concept of second generation telecollaboration, involving three domains (Byram’s five savoirs, they argued, need to be complemented by the CEFR foreign language skills and new online literacies) and three dimensions (operational, cultural and critical).  They then went on to offer a practical example, the Soliya Connect Program, a telecollaboration project involving students in the West and in the Arab and Muslim world.

In my paper, entitled Web 2.0 ::: Space 3.0, I argued that in a rapidly globalising world, it is vital 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. Drawing on the work of Bhabha, Kramsch and others, I briefly described the notion of an intercultural third space, before going on to describe an educational third space, defined as a third space purposely fostered in an educational context for educational purposes, and governed by social constructivist principles of deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge and understanding. In the best cases, the mediated interaction which takes place in such a space can lead to intercultural learning and a growth in epistemological humility. I finished up by examining a series of web 2.0 and web 2.0-related tools (discussion boards, blogs, wikis and virtual worlds), showing how they can be used as platforms for the emergence of an educational third space, and outlining some examples of successful practice from language learning programmes around the world.

Marie-Noëlle Lamy rounded off the symposium in a paper which asked: Is ‘interculturalism’ an obstacle to telecollaboration 2.0? She pointed out that there are in fact numerous tensions and failures in telecollaboration projects, many of which are not necessarily linked to either ‘language’ or ‘culture’ per se. Reporting on a recent collection of essays co-edited with Robin Goodfellow, she indicated that three main themes had emerged:

  • individuals and their self-image (which is not necessarily connected to nationality or culture in any simple way – individual psychology often comes across more strongly than ethnicity)
  • the ‘imagined community’ (people are influenced by the rules of the imagined community to which they belong, as well as the understanding they construct of the online community)
  • the tool: neither neutral or passive (tools carry cultural assumptions and may not be culturally appropriate in all contexts)

The overarching theme, then, was not so much how ‘to communicate’ online but how ‘to be’ online.  Conclusions to be drawn for teaching include:

  • the need to move from culture-as-essence to culture-as-construction
  • the need to redefine ‘local’ conditions as > 1st click to last click (i.e., local = local to the online situation)
  • the need to look out for the many, unexpected cultural strata that impact on the intercultural life of a student group.

Technologies continue to be widely explored, exploited and developed.  In his paper, Not alone: Developing a model for a new Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, Andrew Ross described the US-based Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, consisting of Ivy League schools and other US institutions, which existed from 1987-2009 to support language learning. A task force constituted in 2008-2009 reviewed the purpose of the Consortium, which now consists of seven members. The plan is to share curricula, courses and instruction and pool resources between institutions, especially to promote the learning of less widely taught languages. This may involve distance and/or blended learning, which is different from the traditional face-to-face model typical at these institutions. Institutions will thus be able to contribute in different areas (providing instruction, resources and/or students) in different languages.

In his paper, Developing an intelligent reading system for vocabulary learning, Glenn Stockwell observed that language teachers cannot always be aware of which vocabulary their students don’t know. He described the development of an intelligent system to create individualised vocabulary exercises for students depending on which hyperlinked words they clicked on in online reading exercises.

In Digital mentoring for student teachers, Peter Gobel focused on using technology as a mentoring tool, where mentoring is defined as a relationship where there is transmission of knowledge and experience alongside relevant psychosocial support. Describing teacher training programmes in Japan, Gobel noted that trainee teachers on school placements often find there is a clash of educational philosophies with their host teachers, and they have little peer support available. One possible solution involves peers and near peers providing feedback during placements, by using an online space to create a digital community for discussion, problem solving and general support and encouragement.

Advantages for students include: such a space is accessible (including from mobile phones), builds up an archive of material over time, and allows communication and engagement with peers. Advantages for the programme include: the space can be used for debriefing, teacher trainers can use it for monitoring and trouble-shooting, and because an archive is built up it can be used to better tailor the programme for future students. A useful strategy involves students recording thoughts in a daily diary, reviewing their diaries, and reflecting on their teaching in groups and as individuals. Results of a pilot project have been positive, with trainee teachers exchanging and analysing ideas as a group.

In the paper Improving English language and computer literacy skills, co-authored with Jeong-Bae Son, Henriette van Rensburg spoke about developing language and computer literacy skills for refugees, with particular reference to Sudanese refugees in Australia. At the start the refugees in the pilot group had no idea what kinds of activities they could do with computers and needed instruction in basic functions, but they were extremely keen to learn and made good progress both in computing skills and associated key language. Internet images were extremely helpful for deciphering vocabulary. The participants were particularly interested in images of Sudan, around which they were able to share stories and memories. Rensburg concluded that the net provided authentic materials that enhanced language learning and computer skills, and noted that the researchers were impressed by how participants improved their computer literacy in a short space of time.

Chiang Mai 3In the closing colloquium, participants commented positively on the mix of presenters and presentations at the conference, but also reflected on the need to find additional ways to reach out to greater numbers of local teachers in conference locations.  Next year’s GloCALL venue has been announced as Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.

Language meets culture in online discourse

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Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis Specialist Day
Cutting Edges Conference
Canterbury Christ Church University, 25 June2009

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.

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

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