I’m a bit late in joining but I’ll start here since I think it’ll let me answer a few questions that can help guide my participation in this MOOC of sorts.

What matters to me?

What matters most to be about TEL is that the technology should enhance, facilitate and quicken learning wherever possible. By this I mean that technology used for learning/teaching should facilitate how lecturers/teachers/tutors convey and create information with learners in an efficient, and if possibly, instantaneous manner.

What issues concern me?

Issues that concern me are at least for now twofold. First, it is ensuring that learners who come equipped with technology (e.g. with touch devices and laptops) are not viewed by teachers as being already ‘in the know’ and tech savvy individuals. From my experience of teaching and learning, I have found that although today’s learners may have these devices this does not meant that they are fully able to do ‘simple’ things as the following:

setting up their university e-mail account
communicating via e-mail (e.g. reading, responding appropriately, sorting through and prioritizing messages)
participating in an online discussion or forum (e.g. such as those in Moodle or on a WordPress-type site)
sharing documents and collaborate on documents in a simultaneous, dynamic manner (e.g. working on a project using Google Drive/Docs with others).

I say ‘simple’ because these are simple to me. I say ‘simple’ because sometimes some colleagues can assume that ownership of a device correlates directly to how tech savvy someone is. To sum up, bridging the gap of understanding between what teachers assume learners can do and what learners can really do concerns me.

Another issue that concerns me is the value of TEL in higher ed, especially within my own field of teaching English for academic purposes. I feel that some of my peers across the field hold views that effectively stunt the uptake of the use of TEL in and outside the classroom. There are concerns that TEL takes out the personal side of teaching and a related view is that TEL allegedly takes the teacher out of the equation. 

Perhaps TEL will cause the teacher to become more of a facilitator of information and less of a lecturer or director. I feel that this is, in fact, a good step in the right direction. I believe this because I believe that learners (especially those studying English as a foreign language and/or for academic purposes of studying at an English-medium university) require autonomy and greater responsibility with their learning. TEL can assist such learners in a variety of positive ways that can allow them to progress quickly with their English language studies both inside and outside the classroom – if teachers are willing to support this process without overly skeptical judgement or prejudice. Indeed, TEL can help teachers focus on learning and teaching rather while helping with the little things such as the administrative tasks that can take up a lot of time in themselves.

My previous experiences with TEL

As a student I remember using Blackboard as a part of learning Spanish as a foreign language. What we had to do was watch videos on the computer via Blackboard and then answer a series of multiple choice questions after each video segment. We had to do this a two or three times weekly (these times formed part of the ‘lab’ part of learning a language – going to the language lab and studying what was given to us). I found it engaging, interesting and worthwhile since it gave me both practice and feedback as a learner of another language.

Later as a PG student at one British university I also had a chance to experience Moodle, but unfortunately I experienced the ‘scroll of death’ and the wasteland of repository. There was no interaction in terms of teaching and learning at all, but there were a lot of documents uploaded!

As a teacher I had initially made use of videos – extracting language from TV shows and showing students shorter or longer clips to a similar effect. Later when Google Docs came along I experimented with its capabilities, and I found them very useful and worthwhile for a number of reasons. Its collaborative aspects especially interest me as I have seen how learners and staff can respond with excitement to the potential uses that it offers.

Exchanging information

I try to keep abreast of information by subscribing to various listservs. I also tweet in a professional capacity and whenever I attend events I try to sum up the key thoughts in tweets that others might find useful. For my creative side I use Instagram because its purpose, within its name, is to catch a moment and display it.