First post - about this site

    This site is built to introduce a wide variety of powerful yet super user-friendly technological tools that can be applied to language teaching and learning practice, in order not only to facilitate language improvement of learners or the access to new teaching approaches by teachers, but through idea-sharing and video tutorials to encourage teachers to engage in technology enhanced activities that will support the development of language teaching in the context of possibilities greatly afforded by new technologies.

Why teachers

    As Motteram (2013: 178) pointed out, it is the attitude of teachers that plays a central role in making successful technology use in the classroom. To elaborate from the notion of ‘technical cultural artefacts’, Motteram cited Rick Kern’s argument in that the understanding of what a tool is used for is not only decided by its original affordance but also by our needs under certain conditions. An example given is although the vertical tradition of Chinese writing is due to its being written on vertical strips of bamboo in early times, the writing habit from left to right was due to the need for faster ways of writing. A current example could be that how a smartphone is used is actually not in a way expected by technicians who created it but users who use it for specific needs. The issue in teachers or broadly speaking the education here is that although there are quite a few technological tools that appear to have been normalised in our daily life but are not perceived by teachers as having adding value in teaching practice. This is true and reasons may not be simple, but a simple and rather important way would be to expose teachers to these tools, making them aware of the fact that they are actually super easy to use and share with each other the ideas about how these tools can be well applied to afford more possibilities for pedagogical realisation and improvement to meet needs of learners.

Why technologies, future education

    Instead of viewing this question from language teaching perspective, we would like to view from a broader perspective, our institutions of education, on why do we need to use technology to make a change of traditional way of education.

First question is where does our current common sense about education come from. This has recently been talked quite a lot about. As Davidson (2012) has stated, it is inherited from the last information age in the 19th century that came with the industrialisation. It is not difficult to understand that the education system is built on the basis of and to meet the means of production and serve the community. However, the edge of this system featuring timeliness, standardisation, specialisation, hierarchy etc. which might have been efficient in massive manufacturing factories has been more and more transparently exposed in a current social context that appears to require multiple perspectives and multiple knowledge to solve a problem. We can realise this quite well when we graduate from schools and go to job interviews, employers probably concern more about our creativity, collaboration and multi-tasking skills because this information booming era requires such skills, whereas what we have been reared and trained from our education is to have single focus on isolated specialised knowledge, which is actually not a natural state (multi-tasking is). Therefore, the institutions of education are not working. It is worth noticing that the fast-growing technology with its significant power is changing our daily life continuously but has not changed much in the obviously inefficient aspects of education. 

Technologies provide the affordance to make changes. And tracing the four information ages changed revolutionarily means of communication by new technologies from the invention of writing in ancient Greece four thousand years ago, the movable type invented by Chinese in 10th century, steam-powered press, machine-made paper and ink during the time of American revolution (birth of novels), to the Internet now, there has never been without huge amount of terrified people and complaints at the changing points like right now (Davidson, 2012). However, previous changes all have been proved by human history with no turning back. Technologies in this era is surly playing the same role as before. In education, this does not mean that teachers will one day be replaced by computer screens or robots, but it is the role of teachers that will make a change, such as the notion put by King (1993), 'from sage on the stage, to the guide on the side'. In order for teachers to adapt to such a change, starting to try new technologies is probably necessary.

"Institutions tend to preserve the problems they were created to solve." - Clay Shirky

"Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets  what is desperately necessary. " - Thomas Friedman 

References: 

Davidson, C. (2012). Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business  for the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Group.

King, A. (1993). From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side. College Teaching, v. 41. p30-35.

Motteram, G. (2013). ‘Developing and extending our understanding of language learning and technology’. Chapter 7 in Motteram, G. (ed.) Innovations in Learning Technologies for English Language Teaching. London: British Council.