Nina Garrett, CALL doyenne par excellence, has (yet again) hit a home run with her call for practitioners and publications to “establish a disciplinary track-record that will allow old-timers and newcomers alike to understand how language pedagogy has and has not changed with changing technologies and how earlier materials and research can be recognized as basic to current theory, practice, and research.”  She gave great examples of how researchers and developers have in essence, been delivering “the same pedagogy as materials in earlier formats” because they were “unaware of similarities in pedagogical purpose or of the research conducted earlier” leading to “a kind of ‘reinvention of the wheel’ that undermines the seriousness of CALL”.

<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

I went to a very informative session this morning entitled “A Quality Analysis of CALL Journals“. One of the quickly apparent “givens” of the participants and attendees (hélas!) is that the CALL discipline is a subset of Applied Linguistics.

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

If you’re interested in following the goings-on at CALICO w/ IALLT 2008, there are several options:

1) The #iallt tweme, both at Hashtags and Twemes
2) Felix, Barbara, Doug and I will might be taking turns live-blogging here on the site.
3) The IALLT Learning Ning.

Are you at CALICO w/ IALLT and taking notes somewhere? Let us know so we can add you!

It’s funny how you stumble across things sometimes….

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