This morning (Saturday), I attended the symposium on new trends in telecollaboration by Melinda Dooly, Mirjam Hauck, Sarah Guth and Francesca Helma. It was a very well structured symposium, the contributions seemed to build nicely on each other. Whereas Mirjam concentrated on current research trends on multimodal competences and Melinda focused on teachers preparations and skills needed to carry out telecollaboration exchanges, Sarah and Francesca explored the dimensions involved in telecollaboration. These are the operational dimension (attitudes, beliefs, technical), the cultural one (mainly based on Byrams “savoirs”) and the critical (thinking) dimension. Teachers who are motivated to incorporate telecollaboration projects in their teaching need to be aware of these multiple dimensions and need to take them into account when thinking of meaningful tasks for the exchange. Studies showed that otherwise such exchqanges can quickly result in stereotypes being reinforced during the exchange rather than overcome.
Sarah and Francesca managed to put their fingers right at the burning issues of the new generation of telecollaboration in language teaching and learning. For me, it was the most inspiring presentation of Eurocall2009 so far. I am very much waiting for their book, due to come out soon.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment