Teacher's Corner

This is not my final post yet...

2007-02-08T19:16:24Z

Dear students,

Our course is formally over, and I guess you're waiting for the results... and certificates. I am currently preparing the documents for the institute administration and I think it might take up to two weeks for the certificates to be issued.

Thank you for your patience.

Week 12. Final self-reflection essay

2007-01-25T18:49:23Z

Wow! We are approaching the final week of our course. While some of you are still preparing reviews of the projects developed by your colleagues, it's time to start thinking about the final assignments.

So, by the end of the next week you are to write the second self-reflective essay. Perhaps, before writing, it is worth looking at your first essay that you wrote during Week 1. Have your understandings about the role of internet technologies in language teaching changed during our course? What new perspectives for ICT in teaching can you see now? What course readings and activities did you find most(least) useful and challenging? What kind of internet tools/activities are you going to try with your students? I would also like to know if your attitude to distance learning has changed as a result of the course.

I will also send you a formal anonimous course evaluation form that you are to send to the head of the Institute of Professional Development and Retraning. Details will be given in just a few days.

And finally, I'll do my best to review all your blog entries that I haven't yet within a week.

Week 11. Review of a final project, just a reminder

2007-01-25T18:28:36Z

Just to remind you some lines from the syllabus, please try to evaluate your peers' projects against the criteria of authenticity and suitability for a chosen audience.

Week 10. Signing up for reviewing a final project

2007-01-18T18:50:37Z

Hi all,

It's time to sign up for reviewing a final project developed by your peers. Please go to our wiki and choose a project to review. Shorts descriptions of all projects have been published recently by groups in their LJs and I hope full descriptions will appear by the end of this week.

I need to inform you that I had email and chat communications with Group 1 members recently to discuss their progress. As a result, unfortunately, Group 1 has been dismissed. We decided that Tatiana Yamskikh and Irina Filippova are preparing their individual final projects. Irine Yunusova is joining Group 2.

ICQ chat

2007-01-10T06:06:47Z

Well, in addition to my previous posting, I think we can chat via ICQ, if some of you prefer. I've just added some time slots for the next week.

Skype Chat

2007-01-09T19:46:05Z

Hi all,

Hope everybody is here again. I've noticed that some of you have already posted some information about your projects. Please allow me several days to review them (as well as tons of your blog entries I haven't commented on yet - shame on me!).

Meanwhile, as we are in the last third of our course, I decided to arrange some individual Skype chats with you. They are optional, so if you feel you would like to discuss anything related to our course, please visit our wiki and put down your name and Skype name in the table. There are six 20-minute slots available this week and I'll try to arrange more slots at different times for the next week. By the way, you can tell me what time would be convenient for you, but, please, provide me with some time ranges, not exact times.

I'm thinking about arranging some ICQ chats for those who cannot use Skype for technical or other reasons. Please let me know if you are interested.

Finally, my Skype name will be alex_the_teacher . Hope to hear some of you soon.

43 things

2006-12-29T08:48:52Z

I have recently come across an interesting website, 43 things, where, upon opening an account, you can put down 43 things that you want to do in your life and then share your progress with other people with similar dreams. It is like a blog, actually. Now they are collecting resolutions for 2007. Want to know what the most popular resolution is? It is "Read 50 books in 2007"! How do you like it.

Well, if you find the website interesting, just go forward and think of your 43 things..! Anyway, how can we use this website in our work? A question to think about.. :)

Happy New Year!

2006-12-29T08:34:57Z

Dear friends and colleagues,

Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas!

May the New Year bring you Happiness, Love, Joy, Satisfaction, Money, Bright Students, Interesting Work, etc.! :)

Alexey Andreev
course instructor

P.S. We are taking a break from January 1 to January 7. Week 9 will begin on January 8 as noticed in the syllabus. Have wonderful holidays!

Week 7. Evaluation of existing internet-based activities

2006-12-20T09:52:00Z

Hi all, According to our plan, by the end of Week 7 (let's say it ends next Wednesday, December 27), you are to submit a written evaluation of three existing internet-based activities. This is one of the main assignments of our course, a well-done evaluation will add 10 of 100 points to your final grade.

You are free to find the activites to evaluate in books, journals, or on the web. You may consider some sources that you have already used during our course:

WebQuest Page at San Diego State University
Teacher's Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet
any other activity described somewhere on the Web. By the way, if you find a good website with activities for language learners why not to share the link with other participants in a comment to this entry.

Please try to find the activities that use various internet tools (e-mail, chats, web, blogs, etc). I mean they should not all be webquests primarily oriented to reading skills.

Unlike your usual weekly journal entries, I expect your evaluations to be formal writings. For each activity evaluation you need to include:

Name of the activity
Sourse (webpage URL, book title, author, etc).
Audience it is designed for (age, level, etc).
Brief description of the activity.
What skills/competences it is intended to develop.
Suitability evaluation - is it suitable for the audience it is designed (I mean, if the authors say that it is for 5-graders of intermediate level, does it look like that? If the audience is determined by you, you can skip this part of evaluation).
Authenticity evaluation - does it provide an opportunity for a learner to receive some authentic language input? Does it engage students into activites or put them in (simulated) situations similar to those in the out-of-school context?

The length of each of three evaluations should be about 1,500-2,000 signs (you can measure it in the Word statistics).

A question mainly for students from Novosibirsk

2006-12-18T19:27:17Z

Dear colleagues,

Are we having a NATE Winter School next January that has usually been held at the Technical University? I haven't seen any announcements. It could be a good opportunity for us to meet. :)

Week 6. More on using chats in the classroom

2006-12-14T20:46:28Z

Dear students, Here is a review of some papers on using chats in language teachings. Unfortunately, most of the articles mentioned are not available online, but I hope you will find this digest useful.

* * *
Tools supporting writing and speaking through writing. Chats and instant messaging

The technologies we discussed earlier, supported asynchronous communication, when participants were not required to be online simultaneously. Let us now take a look at the tools for synchronous text interaction. Although instant messaging services such as ICQ or Yahoo! Messenger appeared as tools for one-to-one real-time communication, their recent versions are configured to allow conversation among three and more people, thus making them similar to chat services like web chatrooms that have always been multi-user tools. Perhaps, the only essential difference between them is that by default web-based chats were open for anyone while one can join an ongoing IM conversation by invitation only. This difference, however, does not seem to influence linguistic peculiarities of the interaction, so in this section the word “chat” will be applied to any form of synchronous textual communication.

It was noticed above that, being written by form, chat has certain features bringing it closer to spoken language. Some scholars suggest that writing competence of this kind might be transferable to oral competence. Chun (1994) made this suggestion based on high frequency of cohesive linguistic references and expressions in chat that are typical for spoken conversation. Discussing the advantages of chat compared to face-to-face class communication he finds that in chat, learners interact directly with each other as opposed to dominating student-teacher interaction in a traditional classroom. During online sessions, students are more active in starting a conversation, expanding on topics as well as demonstrating sociolinguistic competence in greeting, leave taking, apologizing, etc.

Kern (1995) agrees with Chun about larger language output produced by students in chat than in usual oral discussion. Comparing the characteristics of discourse produced by two groups of French learners during online chats and oral discussions on the same topics, he found that in chats students made twice as many turns and two to four times as many sentences than in spoken conversations. During online interactions they also used a greater variety of discourse functions and morphosyntactic features, thus showing a higher level of language sophistication. Kern’s thesis is supported by Payne and Whitney (2002) reporting on the study of a group of Spanish learners who, after participating in a hybrid course in which half of the class time was spent in online synchronous discussions, showed higher oral proficiency than the control group that received only face-to-face instruction.

Tudini (2003) investigated the effects of involving learners into chat sessions with L1 speakers. Intermediate students of Italian participated in dyadic communications with native Italian interlocutors without any teacher support or intervention. Analysis of chat transcripts revealed that native speakers offered students some conversation practice that included an important component, namely, negotiation of meaning. Statistically, negotiation of meaning occurred in 9 per cent of turns. Chat sessions also promoted greater attention to errors and form, and modification of language. Research findings led Tudini to the conclusion that chat environment is likely to be conductive to SLA by distance learners (p. 157).

Kern (1995) and Tudini (2003) agree in that in spite of certain advantages, online chat cannot substitute for normal classroom discussions. Kern (1995) points out that grammatical accuracy suffers due to the fast pace of communication, leading to reading “defective” language. Therefore, discussions about effectiveness of chats should be put into the context of teaching goals. It is not likely that chat can be a good tool to develop formal accuracy, style, or global coherence. Still it can be a means to support student initiative and responsiveness as well as status equalization.

References
Chun, D. (1994). Using computer networking to facilitate the acquisition of interactive competence. System, 22(1), 17-31.

Kern, R. (1995). Restructuring classroom interaction with networked computers: Effects on quantity and characteristics of language production. The Modern Language Journal, 79(4), 457-476.

Payne, J. & Witney, P. (2002). Developing L2 oral proficiency through synchronous CMC: Output, working memory, and interlanguage development. CALICO Journal, 20(1), 7-32.

Tudini, V. (2003). Using native speakers in chat. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 141-159.

Week 6. Important. Reading Change

2006-12-13T20:04:52Z

Alas, I have to say that, again, one of the readings is not available, namely a chapter from the book by David Crystal Language and the Internet. But never mind, I found a substitute for you. It's an article "Computer-Mediated Discourse" by Susan Herring, who is, in my opinion, one of the most fruitful researchers on the linguistic features of the Netspeak.While reading, please pay attention to her discussions on presence of the features of written and spoken discourse in CMC.

Week 6. An online chat

2006-12-13T19:37:05Z

Dear students,

We are starting to introduce some synchronous group work when you need to do things simultaneously. I am glad that by now 14 students have signed in for a group, and we have 4 groups so far. For Week 6, the synchronous work is going to be an online chat in which you need to

1)discuss advantages and disadvantages of synchronous chats compared to asynchronous discussion boards,
and
2) develop ideas for you final projects.

The details are given in the syllabus.

You can use any chat service you like. Perhaps, some of you are registered with ICQ - the most popular instant messaging (IM) service. If you don't have an account, you can easily create one, download the software from the web, and use it. You might want to use a web version of ICQ, when it's not necessary to download the software or when you do not have privileges to install new software on your office computer. An example of a Web ICQ service can be found here. Please e-mail me immediately if you have problems with installing and/or using ICQ software. You can also write about it in your blog, so that some other students will be able to help you earlier.

Alternatively, you may agree to use some other messaging services, for example, Yahoo! Messenger.

You need to agree about the date and time when your group can meet in the virtual space. Perhaps you'll need to e-mail your suggestions to each other, or use your blogs, or create your own wiki at Wikispaces to discuss the matter. Please send me an e-mail, when you make up your mind, and if I am not busy, I'll join you in the chat. But first of all, the time should be convenient for all group members, not for me.

As the deadline for the group formation was extended, I think we need to extend it for the chat too. So, please arrange your chat no later than next Wednesday, December 20.
You need to copy the script of your chat to one of group members' blog and analyze it from grammar and spelling viewpoint.

Group formation

2006-12-08T22:11:39Z

Hi all,

You have been blogging and reading other students' LJs for quite a while so far, and I hope it was a chance for you to know each other better. Now the time came for us to form groups to start online collaboration on our final projects.

I have created a wiki (remember, it's a space where everybody can edit everything) for you to sign in for one of the groups. You'll see a wiki is as easy as a word processor. Please go to alextheteacher.wikispaces.com, click on the "Edit this page" button and put down your name, LJ name, and your university in one of the cells of the table. Don't forget to press the "Save" button when you finish. Please make sure that students from the same university are in different groups - I think it's important for you to experience some real online collaboration when you start working on the final projects.

Perhaps you'll need to contact each other before you join the same group. I am about to publish the list of your e-mails in my LJ to make it easier. It will be a "friend-only" entry and you'll need to log in to read it.
Just to remind you, the deadline for the group formation is extended until Wednesday, December 13.

Some changes in our schedule

2006-12-08T21:29:55Z

Dear students,

I am awfully awfully awfully sorry not to keep you posted about this week's activities. The thing is that I am still in transit - now I am in Kaliningrad. While my stay in Moscow was business-related - not teaching-related though (I do some PR work for the administration of the science town of Koltsovo near Novosibirsk), my trip to Kaliningrad is more about fun - I am visiting my sister and her family here. Well, Kaliningrad is a nice city, but the internet available through the telephone network is extremely slow. I have to limit myself to downloading only the texts and not even images.

Because of this, I have to make some changes in the course schedule. The deadlines for Wikipedia assignments and group formation are extended until next Wednesday, December 13. The readings and two blog entries are still due this week, as noticed in the syllabus. I will create a wiki for the group formation and let you know asap.

I will resume commenting on your blog entries Monday, December 11.

Thank you for your patience again.

Business trip

2006-12-04T21:41:06Z

Dear students,

At present, I'm in Moscow and unfortunately I have only sporadic access to the Internet. For this reason, this week it might take longer than usual for me to respond to your questions, emails, and journal entries, but please don't think I have forgotten about you. I'll try to publish the instructions about Wikipedia and group formation within two days.

Hope for your understanding and thank you for your patience.

Would you like to talk to a robot?

2006-12-01T19:33:34Z

Well, I have finally read all your essays as of December 1 and put my comments. Waiting for you Week 4 writings.

Meanwhile, I checked the latest issue of Language Learning and Technology. By the way we are reading some articles from this journal in Week 5 and later. I think, it's an interesting publication. They welcome contributions from teachers and researchers worldwide; it's a peer-reviewed and, fortunately, free journal.

I usually read their "Emerging Technologies" section in which they discuss some really new tools that appear in the net and how they can be applied to language teaching. This time the article is about 'chatterbots' or just 'bots' - computer programs designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with a human. You type a question in plain English, the bot replies, you respond to it's reply, and so on.. Would you like to try? Here are a couple of bots mentioned in the article:

A.L.I.C.E. - Artificial Intelligence Foundation. Follow the link "Free Live Chat: with the award winning A. I. chat robot A. L. I. C. E." on the top of the page.

Dave E.S.L Bot. Specially for language learners. Unfortunately, this bot does not chat for free :)

Jabberwacky. Another bot that can learn from your interaction with him.

The article says bots can be used when students don't have an opportunity to talk to a native speaker, and it can be especially useful for some accomplished students, not for beginners. What do you think?

Week 4. Webquests

2006-11-30T20:03:39Z

So, we are starting to discuss specific ideas about integrating the internet in our language programs. And we are beginning with some activities that can help in developing reading skills.

One of the obvious ways to incorporate web into a reading lesson is to treat it as a virtually bottomless pool of authentic texts in the target language on any conceivable topic. Some of you mentioned this in your applications and introductions. While I don't want to discourage you from using up-to-date materials on the web for reading, one should notice that if they are essentially treated like stories from textbooks or newspapers, one can hardly design an approach significantly different from using offline texts. Such activities may be authentic as we defined earlier, but we are not going to talk much about them because of a low level of interactivity they provide.

Instead, I suggest we focus on one type of internet-based activity that can promote developing reading skills, namely, webquests. Invented by Bernie Dodge, webquests are inquiry-oriented activities in which most or all of the data students interact with come from online sources.

Traditional format of a webquest includes
(1) an introduction to set the context and give background information,
(2) a motivating task,
(3) a list of resources (usually websites) necessary to complete the task, (4) a clearly described process that learners should go through to accomplish the task, and
(5) conclusion reminding students of what they have learned.

Some scholars say that using webquests fits in constructivist teaching as students are offered an authentic task and real resources to work with and finally become experts in a particular aspect of the topic (you can read the article Why WebQuests? by Tom March, 1998). In one of the assigned readings for this week, Koenraad and Westhoff, looking at webquests from the perspective of the SLA theory, list some features of a well-designed linguistic webquest: it should elicit the activities that exposure learners to a rich input, provide both content-oriented and form-oriented processing, push output, and develop a repertoire of strategies to compensate always existing gaps in language knowledge. An ideal SLA webquest is conceived with a product in mind (such as a report, webpage, project proposal, etc) which is evaluated against explicit criteria. Finally, the presentation of the product should be important for a real or make-believe "recipient."

* * *
As part of your assignments for this week you should browse the WebQuest page at http://webquest.sdsu.edu for the webquests that are designed for language learners (if you know some other WebQuest sites, feel free to explore them). Select one webquest that you think might be useful for language learners and do it. Do you think it provides an opportunity for authentic language learning? Put a brief reflection in your blog.

Please refer to the syllabus for the other assignments.

Week 4. Comments on readings and assignments

2006-11-30T19:23:46Z

Hello again, my dear students,

We are now in the mid of Week 4, so it's time again to do some reading, thinking and writing.

So, after we came to a conclusion that computers do not perform miracles without us, teachers (Week 2), and that authentic activities, in which students face "real life" tasks, are likely to bring better results (Week 3), it's time to launch the discussions about particular internet tools and how we can create authentic activities with them.

And sure we will! But wait a moment! Imagine you want to use e-mail or chat in your teaching. Or maybe you are fascinated by the opportunities offered by Skype™, a program that allows users to talk online using a mic and a headset. What could they be used for? What language skills can you develop using e-mail or ICQ or Skype?

You might, perhaps, say that, because e-mail and chat are about producing and understanding texts, they support reading and writing, while Skype, which is about sound, might help in gaining competence in listening and speaking. Does it make sense?

It is true, e-mail originally appeared as a tool for exchanging textual messages; however, but nowadays it is common to attach to the message or insert into it an image, or a sound file. So you may ask your students to record themselves and e-mail their recordings for you to check their pronunciation. At the same time most voice-over-IP programs such as Skype™ allow users to have two concurrent sessions: voice interaction and text exchange. Communication via Skype™ can be asymmetrical: while one participant speaks into the microphone, the other, who might not have a microphone, replies by typing.

As for chats, they have some definite features of written communication: it is space-bound, there is a time lag between production and reception, and the recipient cannot reply to the message while being typed by the sender. At the same time, some peculiarities put this form of computer-mediated communication (CMC) closer to spoken language: it is time-limited, very dynamic and immediate response is often expected or required (A good book on the topic, Language and the Internet was written by David Crystal, 2001). As a result we have textual communication in which traditional writing norms are neglected: typos are often not corrected, genre-specific abbreviations are used widely, and capitalization is abandoned or used rather randomly. As this and other forms of CMC incorporate features of both oral and written discourse, some scholars conclude that we see the rise of a new written style that is close to spoken and reminds the transcribed speech (you may be interested to read the article "Why Email Looks Like Speech?" by Naomi Baron from American University, Washington DC). In these circumstances, it would not be reasonable to assert that integrating chat into a language lesson would help develop writing skills, at least, writing skills only.

The examples above illustrate an increasingly multimodal character of CMC in which meaning is made not only through text, but also through visual, audio, and spatial forms of representation. Gunther Kress, Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London notices in his book "Literacy in the New Media Age" that the advent of new electronic media has actually de-emphasized textual mode of communication while the role of other modes, especially visual, has elevated from supplementary to central. Multimodality expands the notions of reading and writing to that of multiliteracy. It is not enough to decode and comprehend alphabetic texts in order to "read" a webpage – one needs to understand the meaning of its constituent elements: text, graphics, icons, etc. Some of them may be pertinent to the "reading" task while the others have only peripheral meaning (see Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, Toward a theory of new literacies, 2004 - one of the readings for this week).

For a language teacher, one consequence that can be drawn from this discussion is that a particular internet tool cannot be strongly associated with the specific language skill(s) it is "designed" to develop. Virtually, nothing can prevent a teacher to involve their students in an e-mail exchange with language learners from another country in which they will exchange not text messages but sound files with their voice recording. Nor would it be reasonable to ban students from sending text documents while speaking over internet phone. Still, for every internet technology exists a prototypical, traditional way of use that is exploited most intensively. Admitting this not clear-cut correspondence between internet technologies and language skills, I present the following tentative classification of internet technologies in terms of their possible application in the classroom:

•tools supporting reading – World Wide Web;
•tools supporting reading and writing – e-mail, discussion board, blog, wiki;
•tools supporting writing and speaking through writing – chat, instant messaging;
•tools supporting speaking and listening – voice e-mail, voice-over-IP, audio conference, video conference, podcasts.

We will use this classification to discuss various practices of applying these technologies to language teaching tasks. Meanwhile, we need to make another inference from multimodal nature of the internet and CMC. As reading a web document, due to its multimodality, may differ considerably from reading a text-only book, a new literacy skill will be required. Actually, the whole set of new literacies are essential for effective work in the cyberspace. For example, the abilities to:

•use a search engine to locate information quickly;
•evaluate the reliability of information on a webpage;
•predict what information may be found behind a hyperlink,
to name only a few (Leu et al., 2004). The instructors who manage to interweave developing the new literacies into learning activities will assist their students well in training them to participate in the Information Age society.

More on constructivism

2006-11-28T19:18:01Z

In case you're interested and not tired of constructivism-objectivism discussion, here's a paper on constructivism in Russian by M.Choshanov, Doctor of Pedagogy.

http://testolog.narod.ru/Other13.html

Week 3. Comments on week's readings and assignments

2006-11-22T18:48:51Z

Dear students,

I am still reading and commenting your Week 2 essays, so if you haven't got any response from me, soon you will.

Anyway, we are in the middle of Week 3 and I hope you have received two e-mails from me with the articles for this week. If you haven't, please contact me immediately and I'll re-send them. Unfortunately, they are not available online.

Both readings are taken from the book Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction: A conversation published in 1992. Quite long ago, isn't it? You will not find any references to the internet in the articles, though there are some discussions on instructional technology as a whole. Why do I suggest them to you?

Last week we discussed if computers and ICTs enhance learning, and I hope we came to an understanding that mere presence of computers in the classroom does not guarantee any better academic achievements of students. I mentioned it in some comments, but I would like to say it again that I like the place in Fulton's article where she writes that to ask if technology works is almost the same as to say, "Do textbooks work?" It will work in some learning contexts with some students and some teachers, but might not work with others.

So, computers and internet technologies are just new though powerful tools, which may be successful only if used properly. Assuming this, we need to identify what constitutes this right approach to using computers and in what aspects they are likely to support learning. And here comes in the constructivist theory of learning.

Proponents of broad use of ICTs argue that, if applied wisely, they could support the constructivist learning paradigm which is in better agreement with the latest findings on the nature of human cognitive processes than the "traditional" objectivist theory [Bransford, Brown & Cocking, How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school.,2000]. You can read a brief description of the objectivist and constructivist theories in the article by Duffy and Jonassen. Objectivism presupposes that knowledge exists independently of the learner and instruction. The world, with its objects, their properties and relations is also separated from the learner as the observer.

Constructivism differs from objectivism in the fundamental assumption that meaning is imposed on the world by us. It says that we construct knowledge, first from scratch and then by adding new ideas to the existing basis. The whole reality becomes the outcome of the knowledge construction. In this frame, the instruction is aimed at developing learner's skills to construct/reconstruct understanding in response to a specific situation.

To prepare learners to construct knowledge and ideas in the out-of-school context, learning tasks should keep the essence of the challenges they are about to face outside of school. When the class activities are based on what real people do in a specific knowledge domain, learners will develop a sense that their work is important and be better motivated for making discoveries. Assessment in constructivist teaching is also based on learners' performance in addressing real-world problems (the article by Bednar, Cunningham, Duffy & Perry).

Doesn't it all sound familiar? I mean, since the time the communicative approach started gaining its popularity in language teaching, every textbook on ELT methods speaks on the importance of meaningful tasks and activating students' prior knowledge before virtually every listening or reading activity, even though the word "constructivism" itself is not necessarily mentioned. Actually, I don't remember we discussed constructivism in the course of the theory of pedagogy at my university. By the way, what about you?

Well, back to computers and the internet. According some scholars, ICT supports four crucial features of effective learning identified by cognitive science:

active engagement of students in constructing knowledge;
learning through group participation;
frequent interaction and feedback provided;
connection of learning to the real-world context.

[from Roschelle J. M., Pea R. D., Hoadley M., Gordin D. N., Means B. M. (2000). Changing how and what children learn in school with computer-based technologies. The Future of Children, 10(2), 76-101.]

For a language teacher it means that the internet environment provides a place for learning tasks that cannot be realized in a traditional face-to-face classroom. A creative instructor will discern in the internet more than an immense repository of texts, recordings and videos in the target language – in this case it would be no better than books, tapes and video cassettes. It is high-level interactivity that adds value to the classroom learning experience. By high-level interactivity we assume the interactivity that goes beyond providing automatic feedback for grammar or vocabulary drilling exercises (a feature of good training CD-ROMs) and gives learners the opportunity to participate in meaningful exchanges through authentic information gaps.

Starting next week, we are going to discuss how to use various internet tools for language teaching in an authentic way. Meanwhile I suggest that after doing the readings, you will reflect on your experience as a teacher and a student. Recall your school and/or college days. What was the teaching like? Was it closer to objectivist or constructivist paradigm? What were typical computer-based assignments, if you had any? What are typical computer-based assignments that you offer to your students, if any? Do you use computers at school and at home differently in terms of purpose and nature of tasks? Could you give examples of authentic and unauthentic computer-based activities in the language classroom? Рlease, put down your reflections in your blog.

Check your accent

2006-11-21T17:27:27Z

I have come across an online test for American accent. Not sure it's really reliable, but here are my results. Perhaps you also can have some fun doing it.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
The Inland North
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Housekeeping

2006-11-19T17:38:23Z

Dear students,

I have to remind you that you need to list ALL the other course participants and me as your LiveJournal friends, so that you could read each other's entries in your friend page. It is especially important because some of you decided to publish their essays in the "friends-only" mode. We have 19 students, so you need to have 19 LJ friends (18 students other than you + me). You can find the complete list of students in my LJ.

To list somebody as a LJ friend you need to log into your LJ, then visit that person's blog and use the link "Add *name* as a friend" on the top of the page.

Please, "friend" each other asap.

A statement

2006-11-19T17:10:47Z

My dear students,

I knew it would happen sooner or later. I need to tell you that I have another blog, which is in Russian and which is not related to our course. It is alex-andreev.livejournal.com . I started it in 2004 when I came to the USA for study to keep my friends posted about what was happening around me, what I did and what places I visited.

Now, when I have two blogs, I am constantly forgetting to switch between my "identities": to log out as alex_andreev and log in as alextheteacher before writing comments to your LJ entries. Some of you have noticed that you received comments from alex_andreev that were later deleted and then the same comment appeared as written by alextheteacher.

So, you are welcome to read my other blog (hope you will find it entertaining), and be informed that when you receive a comment from alex_andreev, it is actually the same person as alextheteacher :)

Week 2. Comments on week's assignments

2006-11-14T21:41:04Z

Hi all,

I hope that after the first week of our course most of you feel quite safe in a new environment, so starting this week, I will publish my comments on the assignments in my blog and resort to e-mail only when I need to contact you individually. Is it OK?

Now, as some of you have already started the readings for the second week, I would like to explain why I selected them for your attention.

For this week, I would like you to concentrate on the question: Do computers really enhance learning? I believe that you would not participate in the course if your answer were negative, and your last week's essays demonstrated clearly that you are supporters of very broad usage of computers and internet technologies in teaching.

However, let me play devil's advocate for a while. Computers are expensive. The purchase of a personal computer or a laptop is a big event for most school and university teachers in Russia. And setting up a computer lab is a big event for a university. But do we have any scientific evidence that using computer technologies leads to better learning? That students really study better when we teach them in computer labs rather than in plain classrooms with good old textbooks or maybe bring our own materials (ok, they may have been downloaded from the internet)? Have you heard of any pedagogical experiment that compared students' academic achievements in groups that used internet to those who didn't? Or, do we use internet and buy computer labs just because they are "in"? But if their usage does not guarantee better academic results, shouldn't the money have been spent on other purposes, say, higher instructors' salaries?

The readings I suggest for Week 2 provide different views on this subject.

Kathelin Fulton admits that the issue is a very complicated one and suggests several caveats that should be taken into account while considering research on the effectiveness of educational technologies.

Thomas Glennan and Arthur Melmed consider some evidence from technology-rich schools in the U.S. By the way, I don't think you need to read the whole publication: just skim Chapter 1 (introduction) and Chapter 5 (Conclusion) and read Chapter 2, especially its section entitled "The effectiveness of educational technology".

Finally, Todd Oppenheimer's book. Oppenheimer suggests that using computers in U.S. schools in the way they are currently used brings more harm than benefits. As I noticed yesterday, it's a pity we cannot browse the introduction to this book, but the book website provides some excerpts and interesting related materials, which, I am sure, will not leave you indifferent.

After doing the readings, please write your comments on them. Who are you with? Can you see any rationale in a different viewpoint? What value do internet technologies add to face-to-face teaching? And finally, are you still sure we need those damned computers in our classrooms? :)