Will keyboards become obsolete?

Here's an article about the I-pad, and how kids just being born now may only know touch technology and never type on a keyboard, just on a screen.

I wonder if typing all together will become obsolete and we'll end up orally dictating everything into computers with voice-recognition technology. I think that would take some getting used to, but I can just see my kids being shocked that I had to physically TYPE all my papers as a student, just as I am shocked that my mom had to use a typewriter, couldn't go back and insert or delete things, and had to use whiteout if she made even 1 typo.

Quest failure!

Hi everybody--

So I started playing WoW without the benefit of Jon's intro in class (missed you guys, but I was feeling super sick!) and while I got my first quest, I failed complete it! I was supposed to talk with the owner of an inn...and I found both the inn & owner but nothing I said to him could make him give me my small pumpkin or fresh water reward :( I am a WoW failure! (jk)

Joking aside, I can see why so many people like this game & totally enjoy how real it feels. Though there's an initial learning curve and though some of the vocab they would learn might be...um...specialized...I bet tons of people would like this better than sitting in a CLT classroom talking about their weekend.

Using Laptops to Spy on HS Students?

I heard this report on NPR today in the car about a federal lawsuit filed in Philadelphia by a high school student who claims the teachers at his school were spying on him remotely from the webcam in his school-issued laptop. They accused him of selling prescription drugs based on a picture from the webcam that was taken while he was in his bedroom (the 'drugs' were actually Mike & Ike candies and the school, of course, denies that they were spying).

I think it will be interesting to see what a court rules in this case...so often legislation lags behind technology.

Sooooo....

...after creating an account to see what LiveMocha was about and after losing about 3 hours of my life to it (but not wasted time!) I have learned that I understand a lot of written Portuguese (because of Spanish) and that LOTS of people want to practice English.

I like LiveMocha...it seems like you have to work on finding people that are serious about chatting & will actually answer you...and then you have to get over the hurdle and see if you actually WANT to talk to a given person (just like a cocktail party, except you can close the window on the boring ones) but after that I spent hours talking to a couple of people...which doesn't bode well for my work schedule, but it made me happy! :)

Livemocha

At a presentation at the SLAT Roundtable this weekend by Adrienne Gonzalez (I know some of you were there!) I learned about a new social networking site designed specifically for tandem language learning: Live Mocha.

You have a profile and can specify which language you speak as a native (and could presumably help with) and which language(s) you would like to practice. There are messaging & chat features, as well as the ability to do exercises & get native speaker feedback/correction.

I am totally bummed that this didn't exist (at least not that I knew of) when I was in high school learning Spanish & desperate for native speaker contact. I am way excited for the Web 2.0 language learners (and a little jealous too!)

When the Internet is not (so) Free

Since we are language teachers and must always keep an international perspective in mind, I wonder about using Internet technology to learn languages in countries where the Internet is censored.

In the US we tend to take for granted how powerful and free (as in freedom, not as in costless) the Internet is, but it is important to remember that not everyone has that experience. I remember hearing about the Western journalists who complained during the Beijing Olympics about Chinese Internet censorship.

Perhaps some of my classmates from China (or other countries where the Internet is censored) can comment on this. What websites are censored? Do you notice a difference in the experience of using the Internet in the US vs. China? Do you see this affecting language learning?

Consequences of Internet (pseudo) Anonymity

After reading the articles last week about chat and noticing, I started thinking about the physical distance aspect of Internet communication (that is, the fact that conversation partners are usually not face-to-face and may never have seen each other).

We've talked about how chat can lower students' anxiety levels when it comes to producing L2 speech and in some ways I think the relative anonymity of Internet communication can definitely make people open up and communicate more and on a more personal level than they might in a face-to-face interaction, especially for some personality types.

However, I also wonder what this kind of communication means for identity. It seems that a lot of digital natives have online personas that are sometimes very different from their live personalities--and it's not always good. Look at the comments under most YouTube videos and you'll see a lot of people being haters for hating's sake. Would they do the same if faced with the immediate consequences of the interlocutor's reaction?

I feel like online communication changes a lot about etiquette, but the deeper issue for me is more about re-defining what it means to be human & have language...is conversation still conversation if you can't see the person's face, look into their eyes, watch their expressions, hear their voice? Jin talked about losing her handwriting to computer fonts, and I feel that both penmanship and voices are unique, human markers that identify us and help our conversation partners (or pen pals) feel connected to an actual person. A lot of these things are involved in developing intercultural competence and I wonder if something will be lost when it's all digitized. What will the interpersonal communication rules be in the future?

The Token Technology Activity

I am teaching Spanish for Heritage Speakers this semester and our textbook brags about incorporating a ton of technology-based activities, which is great, since we're lucky enough to have class one day per week in the same computer lab where our ITL2TL class is held.

However, the more I get to know the textbook, the more I realize that the alleged 'technology based activities' are usually called " [insert cultural topic of the unit] en el ciberespacio" (ciberespacio = cyberspace) and the instructions can be summarized as follows: "type [insert cultural topic] into your favorite browser & see what comes up." To give a more concrete example, the students essentially Google things like 'chicano identity' and 'pachuco culture.' Experience (at least with my current group of students) has shown that this is pretty ineffective unless I add my own structure or spin.

I feel like a lot of textbooks just want to say they have a technology component but don't make any effort to address the fact that just googling something is ok, but it's not going to be very productive for the student if he/she doesn't have any kind of framework with which to analyze, organize, or filter the search results. In addition, as we all know, fake or inaccurate information abounds on the Internet, and as we've discussed in class, many of the students lack enough Internet literacy to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to websites.

The Internet is SUCH a powerful tool, and I'm all for the students discovering information on their own and helping to create their own course content, but just as you wouldn't pose a question like "what is chicano identity" to a beginning level language students without breaking it down into smaller units (because it's too open ended and not structured enough), we shouldn't be telling students to 'find information on the Internet' and leave it at that.

Have you guys had similar experiences teaching? Do you have any suggestions about making a structured, manageable activity that involves Internet search?

Are YOU a digital native?

In the Thorne & Payne article they say the term digital native: "includes people born during or after the mid 1980s and who are socialized in the use of the Internet from early ages" (p. 379)

I was born in 1984, raised in the Midwestern United States and started using the internet in about middle school. I consider myself a very competent user of basic computer & internet functions as well as cell phones, but I think I am on the tail end of the "digital immigrant" generations because I wasn't surrounded by computers from birth, didn't start texting until late college/early grad school, and in some ways can't identify with my current students who don't seem to know or remember a life that doesn't include a Blackberry or iPhone.

I want to know if YOU consider yourself a digital native and why or why not. What is the salient factor? Age? Can you behave as a near-digital-native if you were born before the 1980s? Does it depend on what country you grew up in? Your socioeconomic status? Education level?

Internet Tech in the Real Classroom

From this course, besides a better understanding of what is available to teachers when it comes to Internet technology, I hope to gain lots of practical strategies that I can incorporate into my own teaching to improve my students' language learning experience, and I also hope to learn ways to effectively use technology so it makes my life as an instructor less complicated (or at least not more complicated), though I realize there is often an initial learning curve.

I think Internet tech has the ability to make language courses much more interactive and might give every single student the opportunity to participate more that he/she might in a traditional classroom. However, to be honest, every time I try to incorporate technology into my class it ends up being an enormous amount of work for me---much more than I expect. The preparation, anticipating possible tech failures and planning for them, training myself, training students, dealing with connection/compatibility/input issues...

I know that in a lot of our courses we study ways to make classrooms better, but sometimes I feel like we're assuming this ideal kind of classroom situation, which is only helpful to a certain point. I hope in this class we can stay innovative and forward-thinking while keeping one eye on the reality of most teachers who definitely want to do what's best for their students but who really can't handle much more work than they already have. I'm really excited to see what's out there!! :)