Allow me to preamble a little while to get you and I (and LLU readers) up-to-speed on my version of events that led to this open letter being electronically penned….

• I have been a subscriber to Inside Higher Ed for about a year now…found out about it from Facebook, of all places. I think of it as a fantasy Web 2.0 mashup of the best of the Chronicle of Higher Ed and the defunct Lingua Franca, for those of you who can think back about a decade or two. Great journalism and an enjoyable read.
• I noticed around the start of this school year that the BlogU section of the IHE site added a Technology and Learning blog (your blog, to be precise) and began to follow it. In my mind (perhaps based on the “feel” of the rest of the site) I had visions of a mashup of Jane Hart, a learning-technology  version of Lingua Franca’s old BreakthroughBooks section, and perhaps a little gravitas à la Gee, Rheingold, etc. But as a language-learning technologist who spends as little time as possible working with course management systems, thinks that even constructivism is too straight-laced (I trend toward SCT and dialogic constructionism myself), and as one who is definitely not a generalist (nor are most learning technologists, I’d bet), I find myself either straining to meaningfully connect to your posts (although I do agree with most of your “cloud computing” arguments) or just get downright irritated with them.
• Those of us in the language -learning technology discipline who follow IHE were (cue the Captain Renault paralanguage) shocked, shocked to find that we were (yet again) “obsolete”, that you declared our centers to be “basically gone“.
• This of course created some chatter on LLTI, the ListSERV for the International Association for Language Learning Technology. Knowing that your home institution houses LLTI, I was certain that you would likely see this chatter, yet that did not prevent me from clicking the send button on this hastily-made and admittedly snarky contrubution: [I don't know how many of you follow Inside Higher Ed., but it has been my experience that anything that Joshua Kim pens has to be taken with a grain of salt...you'll notice he doesn't get a lot of comments on his entries, which for someone who is begging for them speaks volumes. I find he is mostly off-the-mark (present case in point), so much so that it seems pointless to take on the task of continually correcting him, although this case might be an opportunity to gently inform him of his misinformed state....]
• As almost expected, your reply was swift, yet decidedly less snarky: [Hi Doug........Would always enjoy a discussion - as a guy who is usually off-the-mark I see these as opportunities to learn something new. Yours...Josh]

My first reaction to all of this is pure elation at the confirmation of how small our world has become. While I suspect that our ListSERV daemon or a minion forwarded the comments along, I would not be surprised (even more elated) if it turned out to be a colleague from the West Coast that developed a relationship with you through technology. And Steven Thorne is right: all of this technology…these tools we use and take for granted… are cultural artifacts that must be mediated culturally.

That having been said, lest you esteem me to be an enemy (or worse yet, a gadfly), let me say that my comments were an extremely truncated version of what follows. The  LLTI comments, in retrospect, really do seem ad hominem. Mea culpa.

I think that your role at IHE as the “learning technologist” by default places you into what I think is an untenable position. General Learning Technologists (GLTs, to distinguish them from Disciplinary Learning Technologists or DLTs) by and large are an outgrowth of Rousseau’s educational model: dualism of pedagogy/technology/instructional design and subject matter. In this model, you bring a subject-matter expert (SME) together with a GLT and voilà!… your online course is perfect. I do not subscribe to the “plug-and-play” metaphor of educational technology, and I dare say that most SMEs don’t, which is why you see subject disciplines running away from this model. Pedagogical and technology environments in higher education are now more and more contextual, even if common tools are shared at times.  A great deal of authority in the pedagogical/IT training of graduate students lies at the disciplinary level and is facilitated by DLTs. I believe that this structure has been necessary for the achievements we have enjoyed in our lifetime. Some of the great advances in thought and technology use in many disciplines would not have been possible without the affordance of a system that fosters more highly specialized expertise and discipline-specific leveraging of technology.  Disciplines have emerged that are devoted to the idiosyncracies of teaching certain subjects, even using technology in teaching certain subjects .

It could be argued that as society becomes more and more specialized, people become less and less effective in communicating with professionals in other fields. I would respond that while this may be true, it also creates the need for interdisciplinarity and collaboration, which may be what you are asking us (me) to do. My point is that there is a difference between inviting professionals to a discussion on a blog and goading them with ill-researched hyperbole, which is why I will likely continue to lurk, hoping that I get to see a few more “cloud computing” geek-gasms to make my trips worthwhile.

In short, a few bad eggs in classes that surf their eBay bids or FaceBook page during class are causing many faculty to ponder whether they should ban laptops from classes. The University of Chicago Law School, for example, recently removed Internet access in classrooms because of concerns about students surfing the Web during class.

I happen to be taking some Instructional Technology and Educational Psychology classes, and in large part, the Instructional Technology courses are awash in technology…if someone saw something they wanted to share in class but couldn’t remember the details or name, etc., we are usually all online looking the information up. We surf to find opposing views to those offered in class, and quite often perspectives and facts that would have otherwise been left out find place in class discourse due to the instant access to the Internet.On a personal level, my laptop is a trusted note taking tool, in addition to the points made above.

A professor I had last semester had a bad experience with her undergraduates and laptops, banned them, and noticed a dramatic change in her classes. She then decided that she would do the same thing with her Educational Psychology graduate course on CMC, (a course full of 30 and 40-somethings), due to seeing someone in class doing e-mail next to her and her being distracted by the typing sound. Needless to say, I was very upset. I simply cannot keep up when trying to write by hand, and the Internet access allows me to better challenge points raised in class that need challenging. I think I understood her position, but I didn’t agree with the policy.

When I put on my teacher cap, I can understand the urge for faculty to ban everything they can’t control, including the technology of the time. We’ve all heard the stories of the ballpoint pen being banned by faculty in the late 1940’s in favor of the fountain pen and the calculator in the 1950’s in favor of the slide rule. Faculty do have legitimate authority to control the classroom environment, and to eject students from class for anything they choose, including staring at a laptop screen instead of the professor, I guess.

Of course, the first things that come to my mind go something like this: How good of a teacher can you be if your students would rather surf Facebook than pay attention to what’s going on in your class? Why aren’t you looking for ways to have your students use those laptops for legitimate classroom purposes?

We have all ostensibly made the jump from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side”, but I wonder, because some faculty seem to lack the impulse control to stay away from the notion that they are the sage/gatekeeper/dispenser of the wonders of the discipline, and this urge to ban technology from classes is a glaring example of that. If you don’t merit your students’ interest, you certainly won’t get it by banning their laptops.

That brain-dump having been executed, I truly want to see how all of you feel about this, especially those who favor a ban, because I truly want to understand what I apparently don’t now.

I’m begging for your comments!

<applause>It is about time someone came out and said this here!</applause>

While I might take issue with not emphasizing strongly enough the need to develop new (rather that to apply “old”) frameworks, concepts and theory, there is an urgent need for CALL researchers and practitioners to deeply understand CALL history, and for the profession to  take itself seriously by making its past easily accessible and searchable online via metadata.

I know that IALLT is doing something about this. Is CALICO? EUROCALL? Anybody else?

Tags: CALICOMetadata Nina Garrett

So I’m asking the question: Which discipline(s) inform the field we lovingly refer to as CALL (or TELL)?

My $0.02…What some in the profession fail to see is that TELL, which will eventually assimilate CALL as the dominate nomenclature for what “we do” (resistance is futile…), if it wishes to succeed in its assertion that it is a field unto itself, must simultaneously distinguish itself from applied linguistics, instructional technology, educational psychology and LIS while claiming all four (and perhaps others) as “alma maters”….NO MORE TURF WARS, FOLKS.

Discuss……

Tags: DougCALL TELL Applied Linguistics

After intially hearing the news on Twitter, I was frantically searching the ‘Net for some news about Marc Prensky, who apparently may have suffered a stroke during his keynote at the NJECC conference (I hope he is well…) when I stumbled across his one of his most recent articles, from which I paraphrase and quote to make a point about “literacy” and “education” before I give you the full citation (unless you’re one of those types that just can’t wait and have to click here first…)

In the Middle Ages, (Prensky writes)”if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldn’t do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person — a scribe — who knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode it — unless, of course, you were ‘well educated’, that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate.”

This notion of literacy (“the ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language”) has now persisted for centuries. But we tend to forget that it is based on a print culture that supplanted an oral culture that assumed a different notion and definition of literacy. Did anyone really think that the print culture was the end-of-the-line gold standard that would not at some point be supplanted by another culture (and a new notion and definition of literacy) as society evolved?

Back to Prensky: “I believe the single skill that will, above all others, distinguish a literate person is programming literacy, the ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible one wants it to do — to bend digital technology to one’s needs, purposes, and will, just as in the present we bend words and images. …As programming becomes more important, it will leave the back room and become a key skill and attribute of our top intellectual and social classes, just as reading and writing did in the past.”

Prensky argues that programming is the new literacy. I agree…if you do not learn how to master technology, you will soon find yourself in the “illiterate” camp, both perceptually and perhaps even functionally as society evolves.

What do you think?

Prensky, M. “The True Twenty-first Century Literacy Is Programming”. In _Edutopia_, Feb 2008. (http://www.edutopia.org/programming)

Tags: DougPrensky literacy gaming

One thing the video discusses that I wanted to share is a tool named Sloodle — an Open Source project which combines the Moodle learning management system with the Second Life multiuser virtual environment. Just to give you one of several possible examples, an object in Second Life could be easily programmed to ask quiz questions of your students’ avatars who are visiting a site you had created. Their responses would be sent back to Moodle to be graded and stored. Take a look at the graphic below (from SJSU’s School of Library & Information Science MUVE Wiki) to see some of the other possible nexus between a MUVE and an LMS (ahem…Blackboard?….hello?):

Frankly, Tim looks like he has repackaged a tired and quite old model of learning, which has its roots in an instructional design model in which complex tasks are “reduced” (deconstructed, whatever) into simple elements. I wouldn’t even call this “learn but not master”, because this “method” actually makes the performance of complex tasks harder if not impossible. To paraphrase Grellet: the system of references, tasks and supportive information as well as the discourse indicators one relies on are often removed or at least significantly altered.

Now, Pete’s idea resonates with an idea I have come to love, which is Merriënboer’s 4C/ID model:

Practicing whole tasks based on real life competencies with an aim at integration and scaffolding (not chunking) of components. THIS is called learning a language, isn’t it?

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Tags: 4C/ID, Doug

I was thinking about all of this while plowing through some readings on John Keller’s ARCS Model for Learner Motivation (You know: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) when I came across a reference for one of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s books on Flow Theory, which I have started to read. Flow is the mental state in which students (to give an example) are truly fully immersed in what they are doing, experiencing energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of (in our case) language acquisition.

Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following dimensions of flow (not all needed to experience it, either):

*Clear goals, aligned with one’s skill set and abilities

*A high degree of concentration on a limited field

*A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness

*Distorted sense of time

*Direct and immediate feedback

*Balance between ability level and challenge

*A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

*The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so that action seems effortlessness.

*People become absorbed in their activity

Looking at this list, you have to wonder what TELL technologies are Flow-friendly. Not to pick on products in particular, but is Blackboard doing it for you? How about Sanako? Any thoughts on this?

Of course, I’m going to argue that games in general, and Second Life in particular could, as far as they are fashioned correctly.

However, as you look at this list, you also have to wonder which teachers are Flow-friendly. Are you? How?

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Tags: theory SecondLife Blackboard TELL

Or can I?

Veodia is a third-party tool that wasn’t built for Second Life, but it turns out that with a few clicks on their website, I’m able to stream live video onto a projector screen that I own in Second Life. The picture below taken in SL is of a live video stream from a laptop/webcam in my office into Second Life. My avatar, Rockytop Berchot, seems to be enjoying the show:

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Tags: secondlife, webcasting, video, veodia