What should be our professional stance as an educator and as an applied linguist?
Shown on the photo: Our dept chair- Isabel Chuo (speaking), on the panel from left: Dean- Dr. Bosco Lee, and Prof. Nakano
Invited guest speaker: Professor Nakano
I would consider Prof. Nakano's on-demand class system as an enlarged version of blended learning activities that I (and many webheads' educators)have done and still doing in my own classroom. The only difference, in my opinion, is the diversity of people who are participating and contributing their time and effort to this project. The list of universities is rather impressive. I wasn't relly surprised to see my sister's and brother's alma matter (De la Salle University) on the list. To take part in this project will somehow promote the school- so I understand why wen Zao wants to join this project. I have volunteered to participate and contribute my lecture materials and I am hoping that our dept. chair will call on me when the time comes.
The principle behind this distance learning project is rather simple and counts on the same blended learning theories (vygostky, gagne, etc) as the backbone of its pedagogical foundation. What Prof. Nakano described in her lecture is practically the same as to what webheads do. She made use of her own terms, i.e. on-demand internet course, or to what many CALL educators would classify as CMC (both synchronous and asynchronous). The platform they use is a combination of various virtual learning environment (VLEs) that webheads have been using, MOOs, Moodle, Yahoogroups, etc.
I was thrilled to know that many of the topics that they've used in their fora are the same with the topics and issues I covered in my Language and culture class.
I was given a few minutes to show Dr. Nakano my website and my projects and she was impressed (I would like to think that she was anyway ;-) ) She was optimistic about our school joining her project and I would be very much willing to participate in it.
aiden
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