One thing that stood out for me after reading this article is where the author stresses the importance of knowing
- the media (particularly its merits)
- the institutional needs or constraints (which includes the learners), and
- the design principles (which include the knowledge of teaching pedagogy and language learning theories)
when making design considerations for her multimedia courseware development project.
Put it simply, the three main factors that need to be considered in CALL development projects are the learner, the technology and the language learning theory. Thus, in contrast to what we read in another article written by Levy (1997) a few weeks back, there are, in fact, not only two choices to consider for the point of departure for CALL development (namely, theory and technology) but three (learners' needs as well). It makes sense to begin by analyzing the needs of our learners and this analysis should be both informed by our knowledge of what the technology do for the learners and grounded in second language acquisition theories.
Another point I'd like to mention, or rather, question about is that if courseware development involving multimedia is so labour intensive and time consuming, where does that leave us in our web projects? Liou's article was published in 1994; I'd like to know whether, sixteen years down the line, there exists an authoring package which takes far less time for novice programmers to master than IconAuthor takes. And what about those pre-manufactured 'templates' that help language teachers to implement their courseware materials easily? Are they more readily available nowadays?
Thanks for the insightful comments. Obviously, things have progressed a lot since the time this article was written. Authoring courseware has inevitably gotten easier in the intervening time. Often, the LMS that we use (e.g. Blackboard) will have a quiz or survey function built in, which can be used to create simple interactive tasks. However, interest in this simple interactivity is not particularly strong, and there is much more interest in the possibilities created through CMC and the many web2.0 tools available for sharing and collaboration. If there is a good, flexible web2.0 quiz generation tool out there, then I would like to know about it as well!
ReplyDeleteMe too! By the way, I would like to know, in the weeks and months to come, after the EN6482 course has finished, will our web projects remain available for us to access online, though blackboard or other means? I really like the look of our web site (no holding back there!) and I just wish there was a way to transfer all of the material to an external web site that my students could access because I think they would enjoy using it.
ReplyDeleteI also read this article that I think it is functional to arise English learners' interests by IVD in EFL classroom.
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