Question: What types of advancing technology provisions are available in your field to better enable you to enhance learning opportunity for your students? Your task associated with this topic is to review the the contents of this topic, look into the links included in the text of the contents and provide a reply to the two question items that appear at the end of the article itself. The challenge is to update contents, augment it with latest in your area or field of specialization, and generally refresh it for use in areas that would be familiar to you and provide a basis from which you can explore other possibilities for the use of learning technology in your field. What are the learning features and information sources needed to enhance learning in your field?
Speaking directly to the situation of foreign language instructors in Korea and other nations, there is a dire need for even the most rudimentary training. Instructors who come are almost always untrained teachers with little or no experience teaching any subject or skill, let alone a language in a foreign language. Instructors rely on their own memories of their experiences learning foreign languages, if they did at all, and cobble together ideas of best-practice from the under-qualified instructors in their immediate environment. For teachers who do spend time and money pursing training, trainers are often peers with little experience or training, although some specialists are available. This situation is evident in a visit to the national conference for English teachers here in Korea.
What needs to be done for the field? In many ways, there are problems with motivation and perceived need. For “teachers” and employers alike, there is not a perceived need to actually teach; it is enough to have a visible “native speaker” (as though these people were authorities on their own language and how to learn it, simply because they can communicate in it and may or may not have mastery) in the same room as the learner. To be fair, some teachers take their role seriously and pursue learning at every opportunity. These teachers may at some point work toward certification or higher education in the field, but for too many it is merely enough to get through the 12-month contract, get paid, and get out.
For those who wish to become competent but who are unable or uninterested in pursing official certification, there is little in terms of competent training resources available. Most of what is free is merely anecdotal how-tos by others in the same circumstances, that is, novices evaluating their own performance. A clear need is for easily accessible training for novices interested in developing their skills. Official sources often require time away from work, the classroom, and therefore a source of income, placing a barrier between potential trainee and the training.
When it comes to teaching students, however, resources abound. Korea is interested in moving toward the highest forms of widely available technology for use in the classroom. While the universities are slower to adopt technologies such as interactive white boards (IWB), both public and private schools are quickly adopting IWBs, ebooks and other technologies in the interest of better education for students. The level of training that educators receive, however, on how to use and best implement these new technologies (and even more elementary- are they helpful?) is unclear.
The greatest technology, which is not widely available, is the technology of better pedagogy. Korean instruction is still largely stuck in a DI model, which some claim is a holdover of Confucian authoritarian structures. If this is true, there are core cultural barriers to change. Without cultural changes, or a shift in mindset, the greatest technological advances may be stymied by lagging pedagogy.
Resources worth using later from the readings:
Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply &Questions to Ask UC Berkeley – Teaching Library Internet Workshops: A good primer on evaluating the authority of web pages and their content, including Internet-specific skills such as URL truncation
Internet Dectective: Wise up to the web – Good resource for students preparing for/new to college regarding Internet research and authoritative websites.
