I’m putting together a new talk for a couple of conferences later this year, and I’m looking for some opinions. Here are the details of the talk:
TITLE: A History of Technology in Teaching
ABSTRACT: Having worked with technologies in teaching and teacher training since 1990 I have seen a wide range of advances and new technologies come and go over the years. In this talk I will look at the history of these technologies over the past twenty years and examine where we are today. What have we learnt from the past, which technologies survive today and where is technology going in the future?
So, here are the questions:
- What would you include in a history like this?
- What would be your high points?
- What would be your low points?
- What have you learnt about EdTech?
- What have we learnt about EdTech?
- What would be your recommendations?
- What would be your predictions?
I look forward to your views – and thanks in advance for any input!
I’d like you to look at the (non?) evolution of English resources on the internet.
Also, the way that coursebooks have progressively been supplementing the book with tech add-ons with particular reference to bad strategies which saw this as something that just had to be done without any thought about if the tech was effective or adding anything to the course.
You could perhaps look into the role that social networks have had in transforming communication and consider the future implications for the English language within such environments.
I’m sure I’ll think of more, but that should be enough to get you started.
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 13th, 2011 at 11:45 am
Adam,
Thanks for getting the ball rolling on this, with some very valuable suggestions. I’m definitely with you on the published materials front (though things are slowly improving), and of course will be looking at social networking and Twitter as I get to the end (today) point of the talk. If you think of anymore, please come back and add to the discussion.
Gavin
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Brendan Wightman Reply:
June 13th, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Regarding the poor quality of a lot of the published electronic “bolt ons”, I’d be keen to hear a holistic appraisal. The vast majority of schools insist on a CD-ROM to accompany the course book before they adopt it, but actually never use it. This puts publishers in a difficult position – if you spend a lot of money developing a quality CD-ROM, it makes almost no difference to sales, and the work goes unnoticed. Apart from being completely demoralising for everyone who has worked on the project, it is also financially foolish.
I often point out to teachers that behaving as if you don’t care about a component or its quality is a dangerous message to send out to commercial organisations. Teachers have to take some responsibility – they need to scrutinise electronic components and respond to their quality. It’s a two-way street.
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 13th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Brendan,
Thanks for joining in – and of course, you’re right, a lot of this is market driven and rarely forms a central part to the thinking behind a course, with the odd notable exception. My only addition would be to say that I think publishers tend to be rather more ‘reactive’ than ‘proactive’ in terms of EdTech, but again, with the help of people like you, I think this is changing.
Gavin
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I would look at the evolution of ‘interactive’ edtech from being just a term bandied about to refer to point and click activities to the truly interactive software, web 2.0 resources and apps that actually allow student-generated content and prompt deeper thinking.
One thing that also interests me with regards to web 2.0 is the fact that many sites and programmes developed for other purposes have been ‘hijacked’ by educators and language teachers (e.g. Wordle, Xtranormal, Twitter) – is this the way forward rather than specifically-designed software packages?
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 13th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Dave,
Thanks for the input. Web 2.0 is obviously an important turning point in ease-of-use and creativity, so that’s going to figure highly. Good point about ‘hijacking’ – Nik Peachey makes a similar point, and I’ve always been more of a fan of ‘tools’ rather than ‘ELT tools’.
Thanks again,
Gavin
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Hi Gav,
Sorry for the near-grumpy sounding post above – was only trying to point out that at some level the teaching community has to embrace, or at least take seriously, technology as a tool before it can take off.
I’d be interested to hear something about language labs, and how many of the intended strategies for exploiting audio replay and recording technologies are being revisited now, but with (I believe) a greater chance of success. This is (amongst other things) about access and learner control.
Also, I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by our legacy cultures and how these impact on technology use. Web 2.0 and the attendant tools have presented the world of education with previously undreamed of options to motivate, create share and inspire, and yet so few teachers are taking advantage of the possibilities.
If we go back far enough, we can see a rich oral culture that pre-dates literacy. However, in the massive growth of print materials, which embedded themselves in our educational environments (and brought with them many wonderful advantages), have we lost something of the communicative power that once underpinned the oral tradition? So many educational cultures are non dialogical – instruction is often transmissional and/or read and report in writing. This makes me wonder if we need to go back and re-address the importance of creativity and communication before we can ever expect to appreciate what Web 2.0 can offer.
I also think that most teachers haven’t really considered the purposes and historical impact of “old” media – from memory and speech through to manuscripts, print and the audio-visual cultures that really exploded in the second half of the 20th century. We often lack a context in which to place, identify and understand the rapidly changing world of new media.
I’ll look forward to hearing your presentation – it’s an important area to explore, and the right time to do it.
Brendan
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 13th, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Welcome back!
You’re right that it’s easy to criticise these things without engaging with them and with the people who produce them, and without any training or experience in the world of tech – none of us has done very well (as a larger profession) in terms of that dialogue, to date, I think.
Some great suggestions in this comment – access and learner control should figure in the talk, as well as the lack of uptake in what are – these days – creative tools which are built on simple concepts of knowledge sharing, creativity, production and cultural exchange. For all that these things are deemed be good in terms of language learning, very few teachers embrace the possibilities that tech affords them in these areas.
Thanks for all your suggestions.
Gavin
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Just curious why technology seems to mean computers/internet? Or playing devil’s advocate maybe. Don’t pens and paper count as technological achievements any more?
I’d be interested in seeing if you can draw general conclusions about what things failed and why. I’d also be interested in seeing you write about the changes necessary in teachers and/or teacher training to embrace and make a success of the technology that has survived.
For example, 20 years ago, how many new qualified teachers could type? (I know there was a cottage industry in typing up PhD theses then that’s gone now for example.) How many can’t drive a keyboard these days?
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 14th, 2011 at 11:00 am
El,
I suppose I’ll need to refine my title and abstract! You’re right, of course, everything that we’ve taken into class has at some point been a piece of ‘new technology’ and has had an impact on what we do there. I am definitely interested in what failed and why – some of those ‘failures’ are simply things moving on or being reassessed (language labs spring to mind in that context, in the field of language learning), some are perhaps ideas ahead of their time…
Certainly training will play a part in the retrospective – things haven’t moved on hugely in that respect. I’d love to know how many new graduates are not as ‘tech savvy’ as we assume them to be.
Gavin
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My involvement with teaching technologies goes back to the 1964-65 when I was at teacher training college and learned about wondrous inventions such as the film strip projector, the reel-to-reel tape recorder and the language lab. But it was not until 1968 that I had the chance to make practical use of a language lab – in my first teaching post in a secondary school in mid-Devon.
In 1976 I made my first contact with computers, and by the early 1980s I was using computers as an aid to teaching German at Ealing College of HE, London. I wrote my first article on using ICT in language learning and teaching in 1980 and my first book (together with my colleague, John Higgins) in 1982.
More recently, I have attempted to document the history of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) several times, including two articles in printed encyclopaedias published by Routledge and by Elsevier.
There is a brief History of CALL in Section Module 1.4 at the ICT4LT site (which I edit):
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-4.htm#historyofcall
See also:
Davies G. (1997) “Lessons from the past, lessons for the future: 20 years of CALL”. In Korsvold A-K. & Rüschoff B. (eds.) New technologies in language learning and teaching, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Also on the Web in a revised edition (2009) at: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/coegdd1.htm
Davies G. (2003) “Computer Assisted Language Learning: Where are we now and where are we going?” Published by Futurelab: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/docs/Futurelab_CALL_Article.htm
Davies G. (2005) “Computer Assisted Language Learning: Where are we now and where are we going?” Keynote paper originally presented at the UCALL Conference, University of Ulster, Coleraine, June 2005. Regularly revised: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/docs/UCALL_Keynote.htm
My keynote at the EUROCALL 2010 conference in Bordeaux was on the same theme: “Where are we now, we have we been, and where are we going?”
The video can be viewed here:
http://iufm.u-bordeaux4.fr/ressources/recherche/eurocall2010_conf1
The PowerPoint slideshow can be viewed here:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/Graham_EUROCALL_2010_Keynote.ppt
And now I’ve just been commissioned to write yet another article on the History of CALL for a printed book. It’s getting repetitive!
I think the greatest invention in my lifetime was the humble reel-to-reel tape recorder. This made it possible to hear one’s own voice, the sine qua non of learning a new language. IMHO. It was not until the early 1990s that multimedia PCs caught up with what the tape recorders of the 1950s could do, and it took a lot longer for the Web to catch up.
Graham Davies
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 14th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
Graham,
Thanks for all the links – you seem to have spent your life writing reviews of the history of CALL! I won’t be CALLing it CALL, though – I have always hated that term with a vengeance
I think now is a good time to sit back and think about it – at least for me. I’ll only be concentrating on devices with chips in them, rather than older technologies such as reel-to-reels, etc., as that’s the time I’ve worked in. My career in EdTech has taken me from a 20MB hard drive on my first proper PC to a 64GB iPad 2 – big changes!
I hope to bring something new to the dicsussion and to add in more on social networks, online training, learning communities and all the rest.
Any review of this nature will, I think, be partially partisan – I’ll compare mine to yours after it’s done!
Gavin
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Graham Davies Reply:
June 14th, 2011 at 8:02 pm
Yes, the acronym CALL looks very dated now. A group of us were recently trying to determine when it first appeared. I traced it back to 1980, originating in the UK among a group of early adopters. By 1982 it was in fairly widespread use in the UK and then TESOL adopted it for its CALL Interest Section (CALL-IS) in 1983. CALICO favoured CALI (Instruction rather than Learning) at first, but now they have swung over to CALL – without changing their name.
It probably made sense to use the term CALL up until the early 1990s, when it tended to apply to programs that offered interactive exercises, but then the Web arrived on the scene and Mike Levy widened its definition in his 1997 book on CALL (OUP) to “the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning”. But now, with the advent of social networking, use of mobile devices, MUVEs etc, the term CALL is looking somewhat obsolete, even though the number of professional associations that incorporate it into their names continues to grow. The Bax debate on “normalisation” is quite interesting – he still uses the term CALL.
My first computer, a Commodore PET which I bought in 1980, had 32K of RAM with mass storage on audiocassette tapes! Later on I added a dual floppy drive, and I word-processed my first book on it in 1982.
Regards
Graham
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Hello stranger
Wow – great memories…
Interesting questions
• What would you include in a history like this?
1. The web and its world wide communication capability that has inspired so many people
2. Mobile devices – laptops, ipac, ipod, netbook, phones, tablets
3. Easy media tools – Flip, Easispeak etc
4. Web 2.0 – simple software for anyone to use!
• What would be your high points?
1. Getting access to the web in school, followed very quickly by getting it at home – a sudden opening to a world of information and the opportunity to publish content
2. Laptop computers – what a breakthrough!! I bought my first one about ’97 could take it anywhere – it was amazing… and heavy!
2. My first mobile phone – could keep track of 4 teens… at least they could get me when they needed the taxi service…
4. A “tiny” camcorder that I could carry round – in its own padded carry case – hmm never mind thought it was good at the time
5. I was very thrilled – having four kids at home, when I got a dial up account at a fixed rate per month.
6. My iPaq – synchronised calendars – wow amazing
7. Broadband – goes without saying!
8. My internet capable mobile phone – the start of being always connected.
Most recently – the scope via apps on iphone, ipad, tiny netbook – dongles etc, I take it all for granted and feel lost if I can’t get access for any reason.
9. Easy access to media tools, video cameras and mics that can be carried round in my pocket and record an hour’s audio or video before being downloaded to a computer.
10. Software that simply stitches together sound effects, audio files, movies and still images easy enough for young children to cope with, also things like Google docs and Dropbox for collaborative work
• What would be your low points?
1. Government directives such as giving all parents access to all school data forcing schools to go the Learning Platform route – in theory they are fantastic but everything they do is not necessarily what every teacher needs and there are so many Web 2.0 tools that offer to do little bits of what they need freely so that teachers can pick and choose what they use and when.
2. Still finding kit unused due to a lack of teacher training.
3. Many teachers still coming out of Uni that do not know how to use computers with kids
• What have you learnt about EdTech?
Every teacher wants something slightly different and to be able to provide access to exactly what they want when they want it is a productive way forward.
• What have we learnt about EdTech?
Teachers are only going to use what they find inspiring, easy and useful – very often there is a single hook that will grab a teacher and when that happens they need training then support on that technology. It may be something different every year but until they are ready are unlikely to use it.
• What would be your recommendations?
To furnish a school with good quality open access wifi. Encourage BYOD. Buy a few really powerful big computers for video projects etc and loads of small devices to suit various needs – iPads, ipod Touches and DSis or similar for games based learning, internet access and collaborative working, cameras, video, audio, apps…
• What would be your predictions?
All pupils will be using their own devices in less than five years.
Walls of classrooms will be interactive collaborative work spaces.
Did you notice the pink pigs?
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 16th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Carol,
Many thanks for the detailed comment – loads of useful stuff I can include there. How’s the Macbook Air going?
G
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Great thanks – it would be my favourite device if it had a little longer battery life.
Carol
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Hi there,
This is an interesting project, and I just wanted to pick up on Brendan’s earlier point about including digital language labs in your study.
In 2008-2009 we ran a project at Queen Mary to explore ways teachers use digital multimedia language labs in their teaching practice. You can read the findings here:
http://cemll.ulster.ac.uk/admin/documents/docs/Queen_MaryCEMLL_Final%20Report.pdf
Robert Vanderplank (2010), of Oxford University Language Centre, has also written an excellent article reviewing the use of language labs, television and video in language learning over the last ten years:
http://www.peterbeech.com/LING1014/resources/Vanderplank.pdf
I’ll have a go at answering your questions:
What would you include in a history like this?
I think it would be interesting to explore the ways in which human and computer interaction has evolved and changed, from the phenomenon of the human communicating with the machine (e.g. the Wida Storyboard type of activity), to the human communicating through the machine (e.g. IM, chatrooms, Blogs, Facebook etc.); and also the impact of mobile technology on our access to people and information. In short, what has changed and what remains relatively unchanged in the way we use technology in our teaching?
What would be your high points?
Getting connected to the Internet – I can’t remember the exact date, but it was in the late nineties.
What would be your low points?
Any of those times when things go very wrong – e.g. Viruses destroying one’s data, or a total loss of Internet connection (which, it must be said, can severely hinder one’s work).
What have you learnt about EdTech?
That the education has to come before the technology (i.e. we identify the educational goal first and then see how the technology can help us to achieve that goal). It’s an established principle really, and I think it’s obvious to most teachers, but I’m also aware that we can still fall into the trap of letting the technology lead the way. I’ve become more critical of technology.
What have we learnt about EdTech?
I’m not sure about this one.
What would be your recommendations?
That we maintain a critical awareness of the ways technology affects our lives and educational practice.
What would be your predictions?
Smaller, thinner, lighter and more powerful handheld computers. But only owned by those that can afford them. Many people in the world don’t have access to the technologies that we have, and I think that differential will be with us for quite a long time yet.
I hope this helps you in your research and I’ll be interested to read your findings.
All the best,
Martin
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 11:32 am
Martin,
Many thanks for the links to the rsearch and for your own personal views. I’d echo most of what you say… I don’t think those of us who use tech have ever been particularly uncritical of it, but perhaps we haven’t voiced our thought processes openly enough and have therefore given that impression.
Every time I speak about something new at a conference I get the impression that the ‘tech sceptics’ think I alighted on it the week before and got so bowled over by it that now I’m forcing it down everyone’s throat, when in fact it’s usually a good year after discovering something that I feel I’ve learnt enough about it to be able to share it in a productive way.
Gavin
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Oh, I like the term “CALL,” although I admit it isn’t perfect or all-inclusive.
See Levy M. & Hubbard P. (2005) Why call CALL “CALL? Computer Assisted Language Learning “18, 3: 143-149.
Claire
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Gavin Dudeney Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Claire,
Thanks for this. I do know that article – and I think CALL may well have been right for a certain era – but I don’t think it cuts it now (nor has done for quite some time). A lot of EdTech is not about computers anymore, and the word ‘assisted’ makes it sound like some kind of e-crutch. I definitely think the name has seen better days.
Gavin
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Claire Bradin Siskin Reply:
June 24th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
Gavin,
Your points are well taken. One thing that the name “CALL” has going for it is that we have only recently gotten to the point where people know what CALL stands for and maybe even take it seriously.
But that’s the case for many aspects of CALL — just as one particular tool or aspect gains acceptance, we seem to move on to something else. We’ve all seen that cycle over and over. Current example: cell (mobile) phones are seen as so threatening to some educators, while others advocate their use in language learning. It wasn’t so long ago that word processing was seen as a threat!
I find this unfortunate pattern much more worrying than whatever label we happen to be using at any given time.
Claire
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We don’t say ‘CD player assisted learning’ or even ‘projector assisted’ as they have become normal so too have laptops, desktops and ever so more mobiles, notebooks etc. We just have teaching which calls on any tool needed.
Was there ever this much debate about using tape players? Some old crusties probably argued for delivering monologues in dodgy accents. How about for the TV and video? It seems that tech was ok when it could be safely turned off and hidden but now that it is everywhere the techophobes are worried. As one teacher said when his school brought in blended learning “what am I going to do?”.
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