A vision of K-12 Students

I think this video tells a lot about what K-12 students are expecting from teachers. Yet, I think students only know half the story and they think that the lack of integration technology in their classes lies only on the teachers’ will. It seems the lack of use of technology in classes is blamed on teachers and their supposedly reluctance to innovate their teaching. This is, from my point of view, what the video clip suggests through the voices of children. However, little is said about the lack of resources that some schools face, let alone the few possibilities of training that are offered to teachers. It is true that we are dealing with a new generation of students and new ways of learning which imply new ways of teaching, and educational theorists as well as policy makers agree on this and demand changes. But they have not all realized that changes have to be made at all levels and that resources and pedagogical materials such as computers and technology in general (and all they entail) are pivotal if we are to embrace the changes that new populations of students (and teachers) are demanding. Technology is not ontologically meant to perform any pedagogical task, as it seems to be depicted in the video; that is, just by using technology children are not going to learn whatever it is they will need to ‘succeed’ professionally, cognitively and spiritually. The three things are not necessarily dependent on each other, not all great professionals or people who have achieved higher positions in society can be thought of as cognitively advanced or ‘intelligent’. Conversely, not every intelligent or cognitively advanced person can achieve important job positions. As for the dimension of spirituality, which in my conception concerns the human inner condition (values, ethics), I have to say that being spiritually rich is not a necessary condition to be successful professionally or cognitively.

Coming back to my previous point, I don’t see technology accountable for these three dimensions that I mention; the reason is that it is only a tool that can play any role we want it to play. I consider that we must be very cautious about assigning certain properties to technology that are not inherent in it e.g. that it is educational by ‘nature’. Sometimes, we tend to confuse education with acquisition of information; for example, some people think that the fact that technology or computers allow such flow of information is an indicator of their educational value. However,  information is only one of the elements that comprises an educational process. In short, technology should be thought of in terms of its educational and pedagogical potential. With this I mean that it is definitely the use we give to technology which can make it pedagogically sound. It offers a potential of functionalities and uses which can be oriented towards the achievement of pedagogical and educational purposes.

From post-pictographic to post-typographic eras

The issue of multimodality has impacted multiple areas of knowledge. In particular it has entailed a new way to think of literacy. Literacy has to do with the ways we make meaning out of all the social practices in which we are involved. Multimodality has changed the way communication is understood; I would say it constitutes a change of paradigm to some extent similar to the transition that took place several centuries ago when humans moved from a pictographic era to the development of fully writing systems, that is, the movement to a typographic era. Nowadays, authors like Kress and van Leeuwen talk about post-typographic era to refer to the phenomenon that multimodality has brought about. This is a period of communication and meaning making governed by the image and the combination of various modes of communication where verbal language is no longer the dominant mode. Of course, multimodality it in its infancy, in contrast to all the academic tradition that for centuries has focused on studying verbal language; it still has a long way to go and many epistemological and conceptual shortcomings to overcome.

Web-based ESL courses: A search for industry standards

Smith, M. & Sal, U. (2000).Web-based ESL courses: A search for industry standards. In CALL-EJ Online 2 (1). Retrieved on April 16, 2011from http://callej.org/journal/2-1/msmith-salam.html

Back in 2000, web-based language courses were at their infancy. Few explorations, if not any about the characterization of websites as another option to approach language learning and teaching, had been done in the area of CALL. Based on this backdrop, the authors of this article set out to assess what they called online language schools. Drawing on a set of criteria on how to evaluate such schools, as proposed by Sandery (1993), the authors carried out an assessment of 35 websites. In what follows, I will present a more detail description of the procedure and results of the study.

By the year 2000, online education was starting to gain more importance and although there was a growing body of literature discussing the advantages and disadvantages of technology use in education, little had been said about cyberschools. In fact the authors do not present a strong revision of literature about the topic, neither did they ground their study in a direct way to any of the frameworks identified along the development of CALL. They suggest that online schools were a manifestation of distance learning education and from that perspective they undertake their study. In addition they state that due to their growing number of cyberschools available on the Web, it was necessary to develop a set of criteria to enable teachers and learners to evaluate these cyberschools.

Based Sandery (1993), the authors propose the next criteria to be considered in the assessment of cyberschools:
• The site’s country of origin. This is likely to influence the kind of English it teaches… (British English, American English, etc.)
• The equipment that a student would need.
• Access to a ‘real’ teacher online.
• The length of the courses, and where possible the number of lessons a week.
• What its syllabus is and whether or not it has a teaching philosophy.
• The type of instruction offered: for example if there is a business English option, or if it concentrates mainly on writing skills;
• The cost.
The authors followed the next steps in order to develop the assessment of the websites. First, they identified and chose a number of 35 cyberschools (most websites were found in a list provided on the Dave’s ESL Café); second, they assessed them according to the set of common criteria based on the list above; and third, they attempted to enroll into some of the cyberschools to assess their viability as learning resources (this last stage was not completed due to delays and lack of response of websites’ owners).

Results
The authors identified three kinds of websites: Sites delivering content, Interactive pages without teacher-student communication and Full-blown virtual schools. In regards to the two first websites the authors observe that most pages ranged from colleges in the USA to universities in some other parts of the world. Most sites considered themselves online English courses which offered teacher training courses or ESL courses. In regards to interaction, little interaction between teacher-student, student -software or student-student was provided by the sites delivering content. However more interaction was afforded by Interactive pages without teacher-student communication. While the group of websites within the interactive pages did allow users to type input into an on-screen task and receive immediate feedback, websites that delivered content limited these actions.
The third type of website Full-blown virtual schools was divided into some websites that required a monthly tuition and some which were free of charge. The authors report that the amount of materials provided by the websites was usually linked to whether the school was free or not. Some lessons were required to be completed online once a week or in other cases materials were sent to students via email. In relation to the organization of the programs, it was found that some schools offered programs organized by terms and required online attendance at specific times and days. Some offered lessons were followed by feedback from teachers or used communication strategies such as email or listservers. Despite the fact that several activities that users were required to do implied a degree of computer literacy, most websites did not specify the technical and equipment requirements. The study also shows that none of the websites used a formal syllabus that could be seen on the websites and very few attempted to state their alignment to any teaching philosophy. Another missing aspect of the websites was their enrolment level. It was not possible to determine the level of attendance to these cyberschools which would have helped determine the size of classes.

The authors also point at the practical problems of cyber-schooling mainly: problems that students face that are inherent in the uses of technology for distance learning such as lack of computer literacy; the difficulty to put together a distance class taking into account timing differences across the world and “[t]he need to maintain high levels of motivation on the part of the students” (without page). Other issues they mention refer to the lack of human face which means that most sites were characterized by the absence of graphics and images that conveyed a more welcoming experience to users. In addition to this, these websites failed to provide enough information about the schools and the courses which evidenced their poor marketing strategies. Finally, the study shows that these websites were not always trustworthy. According to the authors, users were likely to find hidden costs when it came to enrolling in these schools.

The authors conclude by establishing that cyberschools as an industry was still in its infancy and that its future would depend partly on its capacity to make itself more credible. To do this, cyberschools would need to set language teaching based on international recognized standards such as: the Cambridge Certificate, TOEFL and IELTS. The authors claimed that cyberschool were not “any different from the traditional language schools of the 1960s.”

Comments and critique

Although this is an old article, it is important because it shows the stage of what I call Language Learning Websites (LLW) back in 2000. It is very informative in terms of what CALL looked like in regards to the area of online language teaching-learning. As the authors laid it out at the end, cyberschools were quite similar to the schools of the 60s. This means that they replicated the traditional practices of language teaching but they did it through another medium: the internet. The pedagogical practices they mentioned basically match many of the principles of the structural stage of CALL if we recall Warschauer’s framework (2004).

In terms of my area of interest, this article allows to see the affordances that website design offered to language teachers in that time. Websites were monomodal or at least they were used from a monomodal perspective. Moreover, technological affordances were still in a developmental process leading towards more multimodal uses. It was the era of the web 1.0 and soon around 2001 the web would be impacted by the new affordances that web 2.0 would bring about.

The use of the term cyberschools in itself represents the liaison that existed between traditional schools and the new types of schools on the internet. Cyberschools seemed to have been seen as an extension of off line schools. This totally contrasts with what we can observe nowadays where online language learning distances from the concept of school by establishing other types of language use where words such as community opposes the concept of school, community member opposes the concept of student and so forth. By comparing the state of CALL in 2000 to how it looks nowadays, we can establish the changes that language education has experienced during more than a decade. From this perspective this paper offers compelling evidence of the CALL’s evolution.