The technology article that I read was about the Amazon Kindle now offering books in other languages. They have the fonts to support the foreign characters and still allow the reader to annotate and highlight within the text. Notes in the margins can be edited, as well as the text shared between users. I think this is a great way to learn in general, if technology is something you prefer. It's a good way to save paper and money and now that they are offering this in other languages, it is even more applicable to different subject areas. I, however, prefer paper books still. I'm all for technology bringing people closer together, even when they are far away, but for reading and learning, I prefer paper.
For learning languages in a classroom, I think blogs and wikis can have their uses. If, like this class, you only meet once per week, it can be beneficial to continue conversations and debates outside of class. On the other hand, it does not give you the one-on-one or group experience that learning a language requires. Even the semi-online courses that may be offered over the summer cannot always reach this face-to-face goal. Even with technologies and tools that let you record your voice, the students cannot see your entire body and the movements you make when you speak. Even videoing yourself does not fully capture everything, and it's still too artificial. I believe person-to-person contact is the best way to learn a language.
This video kinda creeped me out, to be honest. The woman said at the end that "it's a really great place to be" and that they should "spend time here in Englishcity." This makes it sound like they will actually be going to this city, when, in reality, they will be in their bedroom in their pajamas. Also, as I said before about the video an audio recordings, there is no way to see fully all the body movements that go along with speech. This computer generated city is the exact same thing. The people that you see interacting don't move their lips the way they should, nor do they do more than just swing their arms back and forth when they talk--highly unrealistic. I do think it's great that there are real teachers helping out with this program, but it still seems to be fairly rudimentary at best.
I agree that learning and teaching a foreign language requires genuine human interaction and that technology will never be able to replace that. However, I do feel that technology can play a role as support material. I know that in a class of 20 students, it can be hard to practice a lot of speaking and getting individual feedback can be even more challenging. That is were things like AudioBoo or any voice recording can be beneficial. Students can be assigned a voice recording as homework and the teacher can go through each one individually and make corrections and recommend practicing. As for Second Life, it was kind of creepy in general.
ReplyDeleteI prefer paper, as well, when it comes to reading. But I am slowly getting used to reading some books online and using online resources for reading articles, etc. When it comes to reading a longer book, I enjoy reading an actually book way better than an e-book. I feel the same way about supplementing class time with blogs/wikis, like we do for this class since we only meet once a week. It makes us, as students, like about what we have discussed in class and we get to further elaborate on important topics. I didn't think the video was creepy, but I understand if both of you did. Using an avatar like this is not creepy, but the idea of living in a virtual world is beyond creepy and I guess Second Life makes people ask, what is to come? We, hopefully, will never live in a fully virtual world, but it would be hard to deny that we live in a blended world of online and "off-line" experiences.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the video had a creepy quality to it, because the virtual city was being treated like a real, physical place that they enjoyed being, rather than described as being just a video game, which it is. While this setting is great for introverts because they get to hide behind a digital face, it does lose the human element, especially in facial expressions and body language.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the largest problems that came out of virtual city is the inability to watch the speakers mouth. There are many phonemes in other languages that are not in our own phonemic inventory and thus take a while to learn how to produce. Many times we need to be able to see what people are doing with their mouth to make sure they are producing the sounds correctly. What I do think was good about English City was that it can be a really useful extension of a language class. Now that I think about it, how do they know that they have real teachers helping out? I suppose there's always the chance that someone could be messing around and purposefully teaching people things wrong!
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