Overview
One of the examples I often give for the challenges facing the implementation of technology in the classroom is a listening activity that I have used for many years. I prepare two short (30 sec) audio clips of news or some other natural speech, along with a transcript for each. After explaining the activity, I put students into two groups and give each group one of the transcripts and a pair of scissors and tell them to cut out 15 words to make a fill-in-the-blanks listening exercise for the other group. If at all possible, I avoid any discussion of what makes words or word groups easy to understand or difficult to understand, in order to maximize the impact of any realizations the students might have. When they are done, they exchange cut-up passages and I play each passage once. After that, the groups try to fill in the blanks and then I play the passages again. Finally, each group reads the passage with the blanks they have filled in, and the other group checks to see how many mistakes they made. If there is not enough time, I just show the answers. We discuss what was the best strategy for choosing blanks and what was difficult about understanding the passage. The goal is to get them to understand that content words are easy to understand if they are known, but function words are only easy to understand if listeners know how the they fit into grammatical constructions. After all the answers are in, I play the clips once more, just to consolidate the experience. To finish off the exercise, I pose a few reflection questions: What does this tell you about listening (difficulty, improving, anything)? Can you think of a way to use this technique to work on improving your listening proficiency on your own?
The object of the activity is for them to try to figure out what is difficult to hear in natural speech (function words and reduced forms). Translating this to a high-tech version seems like it would very straightforward, but I have run into several difficulties. First, integrating the activity with group membership is very simple using paper in a classroom: I decide groups on the spot, grouping people who are close to each other, but making sure that the members of any one group do not share a common language. It is usually quite difficult to do this beforehand, because it is not uncommon for one or two students to be absent, thus throwing off any plans I might have made. Using the Materials or Assignments in CourseWork (Resources or Tests and Quizzes in Sakai) is ruled out from the beginning, because any documents uploaded are visible to all members. The Drop Box is a good (almost low-tech) way to do it, but it requires putting a copy of the document into each and every student's drop box, keeping track of who is in what group. Then the "switch", where groups exchange the cut-out fill-in-the-blanks problems they have created, is trivial with paper in a classroom, but online, it requires distributing the group-created problems one by one again. For the audio playback, the students have more control if it is online, but allowing only one pass at a time through the passage really emphasizes the characteristics of natural speech that make it difficult. Unfortunately, while a teacher can control this trivially with a cassette player in front of a class, it is almost impossible to control over the on computers with individual users.
What all of this shows is both the centrality of instructor control in classroom activities and the difficulty of implementing that in current learning management systems. In a classroom, membership is decided by having a group of people sit near each other and giving them a unique copy of a paper transcript. Media is consumed as a group, with the instructor controlling every aspect of its delivery. One area where the online environment remains superior is in the creation of an artifact: With the paper and scissors version, there is only one copy of the fill-in-the-blanks problem per group, making it difficult for students to review what happened individually.
Several years ago, I did something similar to the drop-box option in our language lab, thinking that I had finally worked out a way to accomplish this holy grail of in-class activities. However, to my surprise, I found that, while it was possible to kluge my way into running the activity, the room was silent for most of the class period. Each student was on a separate computer, reading the transcript and listening to the audio file with their headsets on, completely removing almost all need for them to work together, or even talk to each other. This experience showed me the individual nature of student-computer interactions, which runs against the communicative aims of the language classroom. The solitude starts with the first login, which leads to a private page and then files distributed to individuals. This dilemma could be reduced by somehow providing the resource to a page that is shared by all members of that ad hoc group, and viewed on a single, shared screen. Essentially, it is a hardware requirement, and perhaps one could argue that it is beyond the scope of learning management systems. However, if we really want to take advantage of the tools that technology has provided, and address the needs of teachers and students today and in the future, I would argue that we have to think about how to make all of the parts of the system work together: hardware, software, physical space, teacher practices, and learner training.