Department of Modern Foreign Languages

Faculty of Arts

The Sage Off-Stage

The role of the teacher on the ICT stage

Elizabeth Bergman

How does one keep up with blogging, wiki-ing, delicious, flikr, podcasts, twittering, chatting, Skypeing, e-mailing, Facebook, MySpace, maintaining a website, teaching, marking, preparing, going to meetings, setting papers -- and remain a relatively sane, moderately social being?

Questions

• Why should the classroom teacher buy into the hype surrounding ICT?

• What evidence is there that CALL is effective? • What technical knowledge and skills are needed for teachers not to

feel at a disadvantage with technology and/or to take advantage of technology which is available?

• How can these skills be acquired? • How can ICT and CMC be put into practice in the classroom in a way

that is pedagogically sound?• How does one decide which technology will best support a specific

learning task? • What are the limitations of the school environment with respect to

time and resources? • How can these limitations be managed?

Hype?

Steve Jobs couldn't possibly be more out of touch with today's Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and the erasing of the boundary between producer and consumer. Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It's as self-contained as a hammer.User-generated content? Hah! We're not even allowed to change the damn battery. In Jobs's world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

Which is, of course, why the iPhone, like the iPod, is such an exquisite device. Steve Jobs is not interested in amateur productions.

Steve's devices (Nicholas Carr)

January 10, 2007

A response

Always remain healthily sceptical when confronted with promises of a miracle cure: the snake oil vendors have simply found a new avenue in which to peddle their wares. More money has been spent on software that promises to teach our learners to read, write, be creative, critical, thoughtful, polite, responsible, thrifty … anything really, than on thousands of bottles of snake oil.

And with the same miraculous results.

Teacher training?

In the consideration all what the classroom teacher is expected to do, one would expect ICT to occupy a small part of the overall concern.

The need is for focused training to acquire skills which can be used optimally in a school environment.

Technology in itself does not ensure quality and does not automatically lead to pedagogical innovation.

“Fitness for purpose” – it remains the teacher’s responsibility to decide which strategy is best for teaching a specific skill. Education is a process which cannot be driven by technology.

Study by Kessler & Plakans (2008) looked at the relationship between teacher confidence in using ICT and innovative and integrated classroom use. What they found was that more attention ought to be focused on context and pedagogy in order to integrate technology in a contextualised way.

Web 2.0 – hooray!

Constructivism as an educational paradigm

The rise of Web 2.0 – which does away with passive consumption of material produced by others – meshes well with learning theory that emphasises interactivity and involvement in one’s own learning. Learners are assessed not only on what they produce but also on how they interact with their peers and the processes they use to attain the product.

BUT

“Web 2.0 is a set of technologies that doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.”

Posted by Nicholas Carr, October 3, 2005 (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php)

Blogs

Why use them?

The perceived advantages of blogs are

• to assist learners in becoming regular readers/writers and so improve both critical, interpretative and presentation skills (Williams & Jacobs, 2004)

• to facilitate knowledge sharing, reflection and debate (ibid)

• because blogs do not require knowledge of HTML and their technical simplicity provide an attractive medium for promoting literacy skills (Blood, 2002)

• to create a conducive environment for social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) as learners interact as both readers and writers

• to provide an authentic audience which could result in learners being more careful in content and structure (Godwin-Jones, 2003)

So maintaining a blog is undoubtedly educationally sound and “good practice”.

Does research support these suppositions?

Research findings

In an action research project conducted at the University of South Carolina the researchers found that while the students’ perception was positive overall, the “blogs tended to lend themselves to the establishment of private spaces for students to express their own ideas and feelings without needing input from other students”. Students were, in fact, quite ambivalent about the comments posted by their classmates which exploded their hope of creating a “conducive environment for social constructivism”. As they conclude: “the results of this study suggest that [blogs] should be used outside the classroom: a forum for expressing oneself and one’s opinions, similar to a diary, where topics are mostly self-selected.” (p 24)

Ducate, LC & Lomicka, LL (2008) Adventures in the blogosphere: from blog readers to blog writersComputer Assisted Language Learning, 21 (1), 9-28

Wikis

How viable are they?

Podcasts

• authentic learning material

• iTunes arranges podcasts by topic

• radio stations have podcast archives

• audiobooks – setworks usually out of copyright

• Podzinger

Potential uses:

• remedial intervention for learners with reading disabilities

• assist L2/L3 learners as they can stop and start; listen many times

• have learners listen to material at home (setwork for example) and use class time for discussion/review/feedback

• can be given as supplementary material

• can assist auditory learners

• certainly enriches the learning environment

Because the iPod (sorry, I’m a fan) can display .txt files and synchronise them to audio files, the potential to read while listening opens up even more possibilities:• use transcripts for comprehension• shadow reading• pronunciation work

Limitations

Obstacles to achieving schools’ ICT objectives

Lower secondaryUpper secondary

Not enough computers available 76 67

Not enough copies of software 64 59

Not enough variety of software 57 52

Insufficient teacher time 59 54

Difficult to integrate into instruction 58 66

Not enough supervisory staff 51 54

Scheduling computer time 42 71

Not enough space to locate 52 29

Lack of interest of teachers 57 29

Teachers lack knowledge/skills 58 68

Not enough training opportunities 34 56

Howie, S, Muller, A & Paterson, A (2005) ICT in South African Secondary Schools

And the teacher is where?

In the director’s seat of course!

Bibliography

Blood, R (2002) The weblog handbook: Practical advice on creating and maintaining your blog. Cambridge, MA. Perseus Publishing

Ducate, LC & Lomicka, LL (2008) Adventures in the blogosphere: from blog readers to blog writers Computer Assisted Language Learning, 21 (1), 9-28

Godwin-Jones, R (2003) Emerging technologies: Blogs and wikis: Environments for online collaboration. Language, Learning and Technology, 7 (2), 12-16

Howie, S, Muller, A & Paterson, A (2005) ICT in South African Secondary Schools HSRC Press

Hubbard, P (2008) CALL and the future of language teacher education. CALICO Journal, 25 (2), 175-188

Hubbard, P & Levy, M (eds) (2006) Teacher Education in CALL John Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia

Kessler, G and Plakans, L (2008) Does teachers’ confidence with CALL equal innovative and integrated use? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 21 (3), 269-282

Rosell-Aguilar, F (2007) Tops of the Pods – In Search of a Podcasting “Podagogy” for Language Learning Computer Assisted Language Learning, 20 (5), 471-492

Vygotsky, L (1978) Mind in SocietyCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Williams, JB & Jacobs, J (2004) Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20 (2), 232-247

URLs

• Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kindhttp://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b01001.htm

• Web 2.0 Is the Future of educationhttp://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html

• Is Google Making Us Stupid?http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

• http://www.eltpodcast.com/archive/lounge/dialogs.htm• http://www.eslpod.com/• http://www.myilibrary.com/• http://www.ict4lt.org/en/index.htm• http://polyglot.cal.msu.edu/llt/• http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/listen/• http://www.springbokradio.com/media/• http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/