Disruptive technologies

photo from gandhiji40

Over the last few weeks I have had the chance to see the way technology is being received here in Greece in two very different areas. Just over two weeks ago I attended a conference on participatory journalism (blogging, citizen journalism etc) and its connection with more traditional media (click here) and currently I'm following an interesting SEETA online course on applying new technologies in the classroom held by Gavin Dudeney.

At first there seems to be little in common with teaching and journalism yet the interesting thing was seeing how the internet is starting to make itself felt in Greece and how that growing influence is being fiercely fought against by the old guard and its young supporters.

In the case of teaching the internet is marginal in Greek education. Although schools have been linked up to it for some years the quality of the infrastructure is so poor in most cases that it is practically non-existent. In addition the use of internet and IT in general has yet to break out of its computer lab ghetto. Quarantined, lest it infect the serious business of learning from books.

Similarly, EFL/ESL (teaching of English as a Foreign/Second language) classrooms have, for the main part, struggled successfully against the menace of technology to a such an extent that we still use audio and VHS cassettes. They have resisted the siren call of such diabolical distractions such as the CD and DVD.

Even when such heresies have been permitted every effort has been made to neutralise the effects by treating the new innovations as little more than an electronic book or a simple 80's style arcade game.

Wikis, Moodles, blogs, Ning, podcasts, vlogs, Second Life, Skypecasts are virtually unknown here in educational circles. When they somehow get raised in conversation or discussion they are roundly denounced as mere distractions, or worse. The critics trot out a collection of well - worn cliches that have been polished to perfection by an endless stream of moral panics seen on TV or published in newspapers. You know the ones; the internet isolates people, we need teachers not machines in the classroom, the internet is too dangerous for young people etc.

Hidden behind the obvious technophobia lies, I think I deeper, more worrying cause. The rise of the internet and the ability to not just access information but add our own thoughts and ideas to a global debate has as a consequence the questioning of the authority of the teacher and school book as sole arbiters of what is right and wrong in the classroom. With a few minutes on Google we can double check any claim made.

Of course there are still many who claim that on the net anyone is free to write anything and so we never sure of how accurate our sources are. True, but even school books are not without this problem Indeed the latest high school ones published here in Greece included whoppers such as the Second World War ended in 1949(!) and that one of Greece's leading writers, Stratis Tsirkas published work at the age of three (pushy parents, I guess).

A healthy skepticism towards all sources, including officially sanctioned ones is, however,a deeply subversive idea and especially so in educational systems which reward conformity, and view knowledge as a never changing list of facts to be remembered but not questioned.

I saw exactly the same attitudes displayed at the Participatory Journalism: Blog and New Media
conference held at the Aristotelion university here last month. The same ideas concerning validity of sources, the same fear that if you give people a chance to reply, they will, the same distrust of people in general. Underneath all the cliches the lurking terror that the professor's / journalist's role will be undermined and that their days of being able to monopolise debate are drawing to a close.

The interesting thing is that none of what they say matters. Like passengers on the Titanic arguing over who gets to dine at the captain's table they cannot stop what is about to happen. The changes brought on by the internet are already taking hold with those Greek teenagers who are going online now for the first time. They are the first generation of digital natives swimmingly effortlessly through a sea of data and information.

How long will the old guard be able to teach or report using the technology from the forties and ideas from the nineteenth century? In the end the next generation will exercise their power to simply tune them out.

Here is a TED Talk video by creativity expert, Ken Robinson which challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types.

Using L1 in the EFL/ESLClassroom

Classroom, originally uploaded by SM Photo.

As part of the SEETA (South East European Teacher's Association) moodle discussion on the uses of L1 in the EFL/ESL classroom, Penny Ur made a call for teaching ideas that allowed students to use their own language in the classroom but allowed them to learn English more effectively. At first this may seem like a contradiction in terms as the more students use English the better they become. However, to ask learners to totally abandon something as important as their mother tongue is neither practical nor desirable when teaching.

So here are some ideas to integrate both L1 and L2 in ways that encourage learning.

1 - Play Telephone. Give a short passage in English, either spoken or written to a student.They then translate it into their own language and then pass it on to the next student. This student then translates it into English and then passes onto the next person in line who translate it into their own language and so own and so forth until the message ends up back at the beginning with the teacher.

You could then discuss what happened to the message and why perhaps it changed in meaning.

2 Use comic strips (I talked about this exercise on my blog previously, click here to see). The basic idea is to get students to attempt to translate the humour in comic strips such as Doonesbury. Can it be done? Are the obstacles cultural, linguistic or is there something else?

Then ask them to translate a cartoon or comic from their own language into English. Check out Arkas as an example in Greek. If possible compare their examples with other official translations. Is it faithful to the original? Is it still funny? Can it be improved?

3 Watch a short part of a film on DVD without sound but with the subtitles in the students own language. The students then translate into English the dialogue, utterence by utterence. This could be down by students working on their own at first. Then they get into groups and compare their versions and agree on a common translation.

4 The students then watch the film (with or without English subtitles, depending on the level) and discuss why their versions are different. Is it a matter of right and wrong? Or are there other matters at issue such as the inability to translate between languages without losing some of the original meaning?

In this particular activity a badly translated movie is just as useful as a well translated one.

SEETA and Penny Ur

Today I took part in a very interesting forum discussion on the uses of L1 (mother tongue to those who are unfamiliar with EFL/ESL jargon) with Penny Ur, one of the biggest names in teaching English as a foreign language. Ur has challenged the prevailing wisdom that in the ideal language classroom everything should be in English.

"The only really valid argument, in my opinion, in favour of minimizing (not banishing) L1 use is that over-use of L1 lessens the time available for English use in the classroom. Obviously we want our students to have maximum exposure to English in our lessons. But this means limiting L1 use, not banishing it altogether. Insisting on keeping to English even when students don’t understand what is being said may lead to the message ‘it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand’, or the morale-lowering assumption by learners ‘I don’t understand English’."

It was also great to see EFL/ESL practitioners in Greece and the wider Eastern Mediterranean area embracing web 2.0 technologies such as moodles in order to come together and exchange ideas.

To take part in this debate and next Sunday's discussion click on the SEETA moodle. Register and enjoy.