Thursday, February 16, 2006

Teaching using technology

I saw this article in the Guardian which got me thinking.

Wiring English into our technological world

The learner of the future debate: where once technology contributed to inequalities in language education, it is now evolving as a complex but unifying environment inviting communication for all

Mark Warschauer
Friday January 20, 2006
Guardian Weekly

I have a small family blog related to the development of my son, Danny, who has Down's syndrome. The blog receives relatively few visitors, mostly family members and friends. Imagine my surprise then when several Iranian medical students started visiting and posting comments. It turns out that an English class at Tehran University's Medical School had discovered the blog. The future doctors were posting comments as a way of honing their communicative skills in English while sharing ideas with the international community about health and human development. The medical students' comments - and my subsequent interaction with their instructor, Samaneh Oladi, who was writing her master's thesis on blogging and language learning in Iran - drove home to me how three stereotypical divides don't exist any more, or at least not in the ways we traditionally have perceived them.

Click here to read the rest of the article

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