Comment on the virtual session “Internet Communication”

I have to say that I enjoyed this week’s virtual session much more than last week’s session on “Internet Research“.  I gained valuable insight into new aspects of virtual communication and learned specific vocabulary that I was lacking in order to talk about this topic. I especially liked the part on asynchronous and synchronous communication because I have thought about ways to include these tools in class before. In my opinion, asynchronous communication activities should be a solid part of the foreign language curriculum. Having a pen pal in the country where the language you are learning is spoken is helpful in so many ways. Not only does it improve one’s written language skills and conveys personal insight into another culture, but it also shows the students that learning a language has a specific goal: communication with a foreigner. I feel that in our school system, the subjects taught are often too far removed from the real world. Hence, using the foreign language to communicate with a native speaker of the target language works as a strong motor of motivation for the students. Of course, means of synchronous communication (live chats and so on) sound like a good idea as well; however, I doubt that they are as easily practicable as asynchronous communication. It seems much more difficult to find a class abroad that is meeting at the same time your class is meeting in order to get together in a virtual real time environment with them – especially with different time zones or technical difficulties like the unavailability of the computer lab at a certain time of the day.

I was also a little surprised that the virtual session mentioned the possibility to communicate with experts on certain topics again and again. I am not convinced that this is a realistic option in our schools. Seeing how difficult it is to contact or even meet your own professor at university, I think that experts are in general too busy to chat with students at school. But I would love to be convinced of the contrary [<-- smiley!]

On the other hand, I loved the idea of virtual office hours. That would be sooooo helpful! I spend so much time going to office hours including going to the right building, finding the room, waiting in line to be with the teacher for approximately 2 minutes to have them nod about my structure for a term paper. As you can tell by my tone, I am not a big fan of this! A virtual office hour, however, could be accessed from wherever you are and waiting time could be used reasonably by doing something else online. Aw, I have a dream of progress now!

But to come back from my dream of virtual office hours to this week’s virtual session, I want to finish by mentioning that this week I missed useful examples of the contents again. I read so much about MOO’s now and still do not really understand what they are. I always thought that the big advantage of the VCT and VCL was that they would give a link to examples of what they are about. But in last week’s and this week’s session I was missing these examples. In the end, I might have found examples in the Utilization part but as that one is still not working, I am not sure. I think that the VCT course will improve immensely whenever the Utilization part is working too. It is just lacking the practical side of what we are learning very much :-( [<-- emoticon]

 

 

~ by inesrosenbaum on November 23, 2008.