A post for ED259
Welcome all to my old and decrepit teaching website. I'm very embarrassed by it, so enjoy! I find it slightly ironic that first time in more than a year that I am returning to this site is to discuss technology. I'm not a tech-savvy person so don't judge me on the quality of this page. Anyhow, coming off of last week's reading, I was mostly preoccupied with this idea of culture and the role that technology plays in educating people about culture and communicating across cultures. There was a lot of discussion on the sharing of culture and coming to an understanding. One of my classmates at Georgetown published an article on telecollaboration exchanges between Georgetown undergraduates and college students in Japan. She looked at learner beliefs and as they relate to corrective feedback and uptake and found that as students continued through this exchange, their preference for corrective feedback evolved with the negotiation of face and identity; in other words they learned to match their feedback styles to the method their partner found most comfortable. This accommodation also seemed to allow for increased uptake (shameless plug of friend's article:) Akiyama, Y. (2017). Learner beliefs and corrective feedback in telecollaboration: A longitudinal investigation. System, 64, 58-73. I like the idea that through telecollaboration we can communicate with those outside of our own culture and therefore improve students' awareness and openness to other cultures.While I find this to be a very worthy endeavor, for my own teaching I would like to know how to effectively employ technology as a means address the needs of students from minority/oppressed populations. This study and the Cultura model are quite interesting as the format/tasks allow for some thought-provoking exploration about various ideologies that would certainly be engaging for practicing one's L2 and communicative competence with the target community. However, to a certain extent the participant of those exchanges seem to be of relatively privileged background, and I wonder how different these exchanges might look with a different population where issues of power might shape those interactions quite differently. In the case that you have a large number of students too, and these conversations are not mediated by the instructor, I would worry about those expected instances of miscommunication, but also within the idea of culture-sharing, a possible reifying of negative stereotypes. I've also previously mentioned that I'm interested as well in learning means of providing access to technology to all students (the answer is money). This is what I'm thinking for now. What are your thoughts?