Better late than never: Reflection on week 1's reading

Man, I can't believe I am part of the CALL revolution as both student and teacher. When I was a grade school student in Canada, my friends and I would rush to the library after school for Cross Country Canada, a so-called computer game that required players to navigate through Canada in a truck. Along the way, we had to complete missions like deliveries and pick-ups and deal with very human weaknesses like hunger and fatigue. I was obsessed with that game back then so it's amazing to discover that it's actually an example of Communicative CALL, a view that emphasizes problem solving using genuine and original utterances and allows students to complete a task without explicitly correcting their errors. In short, Communicative CALL stimulates students' discussion, writing, or critical thinking instead of forcing them to produce the right answer.

As an English teacher, I am fortunate to be part of the Integrative CALL era, where human-human interactions in authentic, computer-mediated discourse communities are possible based on advances in computer technology. Multimedia and Internet technology allow different applications such as reading, listening and speaking to be linked together in a single activities and instant messaging systems and file sharing networks enable real-time communication that was unheard of years ago. Teachers and students are now able to talk to each other without seeing one another.

Fortunately, I was not part of the "drill and kill" regime of the 60s and 70s that emphasized repeated drilling of grammatical and language items out of context. A good example would be fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice exercises. While I believe that all these technological advances are making communication easier, they could actually hinder teacher if instructors over-rely on the machines. I agree with Warschauer that computers are a medium in which pedagogical philosophies maybe implemented so it is the user and his or her practices that make these machines beneficial to teaching and learning. Never use a computer just for the sake of using a computer. PowerPoint becomes PowerPointless if you repeatedly use it for no apparent learning purpose. Instead of waiting for a super, Terminator-like computer/robot to help you, incorporate teaching techniques with existing software and hardware intelligently, like what I'm doing in the classroom as I communciate with my students regularly through MSN and the school discussion board.