In the virtual world you don't meet so you don't part. We will just be rearranging our network. Inhabitants of the WWW, we are just a-click-away from each another.
What a productive phase of life, rolling from one week to another, gathering knowledege and experience. Learning so many skills of technology and language, making international social contacts through each stretch well lived. At this moment, having moved beyond ten such stretches, I feel I have become a worthy netizen of the cyberspace. As I speak about the current course with web-based technology embedded in ELT and Linguistics, I want to bracket the course content into four sub-categories. Since each category works in conjunction with the other, it is difficult to measure their relative importance in an ELT professional or any other educationist's life. I learnt to use the following web-based resources as ones interdependent:
Forums: Nicenet, Delicious, Wikis (Jupitergrades and other pages), Blogs which served as platforms/ classrooms/ offices. Essential for any course. I have already started to use them in my PGCTE techer education classes. I can introduce college teachers to them.
Search Engines: Noodletools.com, google, etc which serve as vehicles of investigation threw open several resources like state govt documents, newspaper archives, libraries, etc. I used a few for my research project during the course and plan to use a few for my speech on Teachers Day on 5th September to begin with.
Modes: Websites which carry audio/video features for instance, Youtube or news features for instance various channels like discovery, ndtv.com, etc. Each a conduit of information of a specific type.
Templates and Formats: Webquests (Zunal), Rubrics (Rubistar) etc which have information in prescribed formats.
Generators of activities: Hot potatoes, Crossword Puzzles and many others we learnt in Week 8. Tools which helped us produce activities, lessons, projects. These should be very useful for my teacher trainees as they won't waste time reinventing the wheel but have access to tools which give them readymade material of their specific requirements.
Content and Labs: Like Randall's ESL Lab. They are again like resource centre of specific courses, skills and subskills. I have already started to use Jennifer's ESL Lab in the class.
If anything out of these had been left out, we would not have had the confidence to operate as ones fully equipped. Varieities within each sub category were always there and we did leave out some due to paucity of time. I do wish we had more time to practise the others we left out like ANVILL. I will always have regrets till I learn it and use it. All we need to do is adopt them and practise them with our students.
The topics taken up are not only useful but they also created a great impact. The Nicenet discussions are a witness to this fact. Large classes (pedagogy and class management), multiple intelligences (some psycholinguistic insights), learner autonomy (pedagogy and class management), new technology in teaching listening, speaking, reading, writing, LoTi to assess one's technological strengths, they all initiated or updated the learners. The presence of guests like Racquel, Jesse, Jeffe, experts and creators, added value to the interactions bringing in new dimensions. The fact that participants were from different parts of the world various politico-sociolinguistic perspectives emerged. It was good to find out about the peculiarities, the variables, which determine teaching and learning in different parts.
I feel like a child who says, 'it's nice' for everything and does not use critical faculty as he does not have one. But then given the amount of time, I don't see how anything else could have been added.
I only wished that if there had been a Pre-launch session, we could have familiarized ourselves with some reading material and technology. Also if there was a Post-course completion session, we could have consulted the teacher as we honed our skills. Also the entire website for the class should have been left open for us for about a week. Due to the hectic schedule it was difficult to download and save a few important files.
Overall, I feel truly in sync with the current times. I can carry a lot of learning to the students in distant areas through my teacher trainees who I have included in the dissemination of learnings from this course.
Robert deserves a special vote of thanks for bringing in not just his expertise and involvement but also that extraordinary zeal and spirit which motivated us to learn more and more.
Will meet again Online.
Sharda
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful final post. I will miss reading your reflections.
I do wonder a bit about your statement, that we don't meet so we don't part. It reminds me of a modern version of the saying "It is better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all." Except you are suggesting the opposite point, that we haven't met so we needn't be sad about parting.
For me, it is hard to believe we have not "met", though it is true we have not in the standard sense of the term. Still I would rather feel sad about parting, and acknowledge that we have "sort-of" all met in this class, even if the knowing each other has only been through virtual tools.
I know your point is different than the one I am making: you are saying that we never leave each other in the online world, since we are all interconnected on the internet. And that is true.
But in the end I will allow myself to feel a bit sad, and I will say we have met, and I will say we have parted...but I will also say we will meet again.
Take good care, please!
Robert