I have sent another blog posting which I hope will be of interest to readers.

Luke

I suppose I was being a bit facetious when I talked about my mobile phone activity. But if you don’t mind me saying, in the acedemic sense, we all shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making generic statements about things like ‘using technology’.

The fact is I find this debate about technology versus Dogme slightly bizarre. I’ve been, in some people’s words, a Dogme-ist for the last two years and have seen the mind-blowing results of motivating students through focusing on what truly matters, the interests and lives of the students.

But in the end, it’s like as you once said, Scott, it’s about not letting the tail wag the dog. I don’t necessarily think that technology is ‘better’ or that we should get too obsessed about trying to use it,as such. In fact, I hardly use it unless it proves to be the most convenient or motivating way ahead.

Take this for example, I once had a Dogme lesson where my students were talking about going to musicals in London, and it turned into a task where they were planning a class trip to a musical. I got them to use their mobiles to call the short-listed theatres to get information about show times and prices, and availability of seats, and the students were totally elated by having just spoken to native speakers and having understood them. In your definition, Scott, that’s using technology. Nevertheless, I believe it totally followed Dogme principles and was consistent with keeping the learners’ needs at the core of the lesson.

In another instance, I got students to use the recording device they all seemed to have on their mobile phones to record themselves speaking in groups, so as to become aware of how they sound to others in English. It turned into a lesson about phonological chunking and prominence, and was totally a revelation for the learners.

I think technology is simply too broad a term and we can’t be dogmatic about things and categorically say that all use of technology would interfere with Dogme-style teaching and the authentic participation of our learners. And the term ‘technology’ is getting broader and broader exponentially as we speak. At which point does technology become part of what’s normal in the classroom like those lights that we switch on?

Ironically, Dogme is one of the most undogmatic methods I’ve ever known and the reason why I’ve embraced it is because it allows the teacher to truly be there for the students. To a teacher who is new to Dogme and experimenting with it, I’d say ‘Walk into the classroom with nothing but a marker and see by how much your students could be a resource to you. Feel empowered by the freedom from materials and technology.’

But to say that all technology is at loggerheads with Dogme…just seems…too dogmatic…

Happy to move on if you’ll drop this ridiculous ‘it’s all faffing and porn’ thing. I think we’d all be happy to move on, frankly. But not when it means glossing over absurd generalisations about technology in the late nineties.

Greetings from Bangkok, where it is impossibly early and I’m impossibly tired.

Gavin

Nice post. I agree that we talk about technology as if it were a single monolithic entity, thereby obscuring the fact that a) all teaching aids are, in a (very broad) sense, forms of technology and b) there are some technological aids that are “better” than others, where “better” stands for anything from cheaper, more reliable, more accessible, more versatile, more pedagogically effective, less obtrusive, less likely to interfere in the teaching/learning process, less fallible, more ecological, more manageable, less likely to become obsolescent etc etc.

As for your mobile phone activity, neat as it is, this doesn’t to me constitute “using technology”, so much as simply “talking about technology”. If the students then went on to make calls to local businesses in order to compare prices or place orders, or if they composed and sent SMS messages to their nearest and dearest, and then shared and compared replies, that would be using technology – in the technical sense!

A great posting – thanks. I liked the mobile phone activity a lot.

As I suspected, Scott, you failed to acknowledge that whilst your kids were surfing for porn in the late nineties some of us were doing something useful with technology. If you’d like to find out more about those projects you can read them in the first edition of The Internet in the Language Classroom, published way back in the dark ages in 2000, pre-dogme…

And if I can be of any help with your ‘faffing’ problem or with helping your learners get beyond online porn to something truly creative and communicative, you know where to find me.

Best,

Gavin

Are we talking about putting our learners in front of individual PCs and giving them tasks to do on them?
Are we talking about using the IWB to simple find an image to explain the meaning of the word?
Are we talking about using the internet in the classroom to show the learners that they can use concordances to find out if native speakers actually use the collocation ‘to boost my English grammar’?
Are we talking about turning on the lights in the classroom? (Ok, I’m going a bit far here, but you know what I mean.)

I once got my learners to pull out their mobile phones in an on-the-spot Dogme-style lesson to compare the features and applications they had on them and practised the structures ‘not as+adj+as’. Is that ‘using’ technology?

I think perhaps the whole point of Dogme is to not let materials (or technology, for that matter) take over what is important in the English classroom, i.e. the learners.

Yes, Gavin, Dogme is perhaps as old as the hills…a colleague of mine has been using a similar methodology for the last 20 years and calls it ‘Authentic Participation’. But that’s exactly what it is. The learners are the richest resource we can find, and that’s what this is all about.

As for Nick’s comment about how we cannot always cater to our students needs and wants, I have to agree with Gavin on this one. Within reason. with balance and sensitivity, and even by explicitly telling students why we are doing what we do, we can still cater to what motivates them most. Personally, if I may, I would like to suggest a re-writing of the last vow of chastity…that all teachers should be evaluated on one criteria…that they are curious about their students.

At the end of the day, would we prefer to order a meal from a set menu or have the chef (who knows our taste personally) prepare it a la carte specially for us? And if the chef is going to need some new-fangled gadget to make the preparation of our meal tastier and more efficient, then why not? As long as our chef isn’t all caught up with his new gadget and forgetting what is important…our stomachs…
(OK, that was a terrible analogy…sorry…)

Oops. Attempt at humour fail.

I suspect that rather than trying to engage with my argument that even back then some of us were doing interesting things with technology whilst others were simply allowing their kids to run riot on Internet nakedness whilst they read their own email, you may well concentrate on my rather unfortunate use of ‘pron’ when I meant ‘porn’ (see paragraph 2, above). This is, of course, highly amusing for all we ELT people…

But let’s assume we’ve had that joke and it was all jolly amusing and that will leave you free to think about why my kids were doing these international, cultural, creative projects (admittedly only text based, but that was the limit then – today it could be voice, video…) and yours were surfing the skin sites…

It’s just more of the same: you faff, plenty of people don’t. Technology doesn’t work for you, for plenty of people it does. Your kids surf for porn, plenty of teachers have their kids doing something creative, constructive and rewarding. You can’t find reliable data on the benefits of technology, I can’t find any on the benfits of dogme. And so we go on…

Gavin

That was me paraphrasing you, you see?

While you were with your learners in the (yes, very same) Internet Room and they were all looking for pron (to quote your recent tweet), mine were engaged in a multicultural project with Poland involving synchronous text chat and a variety of discovery tasks designed to help them get an idea of how people their age lived in another country, or they were writing to their penpals in the States (penpals their age).

This second group produced some amazing writing, but also put together a real life package of video, photographic, etc. samples of their lives and of Catalan culture which was exchanged for a similar one with the school in West Virginia.

So whilst your learners were looking at pictures of naked people mine were engaged in quite productive language work on a multi-cultural level. I’d say that says more about the teacher’s attitude and approach than it does about the good/bad/ugly of technology.

If you can do it, it can be incredibly successful. But of course you have to be able to do it, and also have strategies for getting round the ‘they’re so bored with my ‘nouny’ old technology class that they’re surfing for porn’ scenario…

Of course that was ten years ago – imagine what they could be doing today with the affordacnes of web 2.0 sites and broadband, if only they weren’t all (putatively) sitting down having a chat with old farts like me and you…

Gavin

“So Gavin, to paraphrase Chia, I would work with whatever motivated your four learners, in whatever way was helpful.”

Marvellous! I look forward to a future posting from a confirmed dogmeist who met a bunch of young people who were into WoW where s/he explores their use of the game in class…

And doesn’t claim all technology is ‘faffing’, ‘porn’ or simply non-communicative (in an ‘I remember the one time I took a group of learners to the Internet Room in the mind-nineties and it wasn’t very succesful’ kind of way).

Dogme 2.0 lives, it would seem…

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13341

Giving learners what they want / need / desire – and, of course, within reason, with balance, with experience and skill – should be part of any approach (or state of mind), from dogme to technology and anything else inbetween.

Letting kids eat crisps as their primary diet is obviously not a good idea, nor is watching telly all day every day. and that’s what I’ve been talking about all along (see loads of past blog postings on my blog) – it’s a matter of balance. Have a few crisps each day, as long as you’re also getting other food types. Use a computer each day, as long as you also talk to people f2f and go outside for a bit. Balance…

But the problem with some of the ‘question the use of technology’ brigade (since we’re not longer allowed to call them anti-tech) is that what they’re saying in this debate is a combination of ‘no proof’, ‘it’s all porn’, ‘it never works’, etc., etc. ad nauseam.

Effectively that may lead plenty of people thinking about using technology to the conclusion that it really is a very bad thing indeed. What I’m saying is that since there’s no proof that either dogme or teaching with technology realyl work (beyond the ‘I tried this and it worked really well’ / ‘I tried this and it didn’t') let’s go for that balance.

The reason learners may not be crying out for more technology in their classroom may be connected with the agenda of teachers, and especially teachers who enter classrooms with no tech (where it is available) and with a negative ‘faffing, porn, inconclusive’ viewpoint plastered over their faces as they have everyone turn off their iPods and mobile phones and settle down for a decent chat about ‘stuff’. If we don’t ask, we may never find out – learners are generally not overly encouraged by education systems to walk up to teachers and say “How about using our iPods?’. It’s simply not the done thing.

Might be worth everyone asking, sometime soon.

Similarly I have no great recollection of learners crying out for ‘more real use of language’. So obviously we’ll have to agree to disagree on that. I suspect that both of us are only hearing what we want / expect to hear and that we would do well to ask about the other. But I can’t prove that, obviously.

Enjoy the outside world. People who go there tell me it can be quite fun…

Gavin

You seem to be suggesting that a principal part of dogme is giving learners what they want.

I don’t really see it in this way and I’m doubtful if there are many others who do.

If I asked my seven year old what he’d like to do today, he might say watch telly and eat crisps. Am I failing him as a parent because I’m going to meet a friend with some kids and we’re all going swimming, rather than going with his suggestion.

Actually maybe I am failing him as a parent becuase I’m locked away in my office, staring at the computer screen while he fights with his little brother down stairs waiting for me to take him out.

It isn’t actually my experience that learners are crying out for more technology in their classes anyway. A cry for a more real use of language is one that I hear more often.

Its a shame that lots of voices from teachers and learners will never be heard in this discussion because this isn’t a medium which they tend to communicate in. But as you know there are lots of people like this out there.

And now I hear a cry to get away from this computer and out of the house.

Nick

Sorry – forgot the last point. My ‘tad rude’ comment about teachers ignoring technology was, of course, based on certain quite logical premises:

1) There is technology available
2) Learners actively want to use it

In that sense ‘tad rude’ means exactly that – if we bang on about listening to our learners, responding to their needs and acknowledging their wishes and desires then should those include tha active use of technologies in their learning, it’s rude not to go down that route.

If teachers are constantly told that technology is all ‘faffing’ and ‘porn’ and ‘unproven’ as a teaching tool then they won’t seek to get the skills they need to respond to certain learner needs.

As such, although not actively being rude (since it’s not their fault, directly) they will be ignoring a major part of the relationship between teacher / facilitator and student / learner (delete as appropriate). And that is what I most certainly do find a tad rude.

Gavin

I know we all selectively answer each other’s postings, but I’d still like to know why technology has to prove itself to be better, bigger, faster, stronger when no such demands are put on dogme when you write about it.

What is it about technology that means it has to prove itself, and why doesn’t this apply to other approaches (or methods, state of minds, etc.)? Or, to put it another way, it’s not fair (and yes, I DO know life’s not fair and all that – but seriously…)

Just as you find it baffling that some people are bothered by dogme, I find dogme people who spend more time dissing technology than writing about dogme equally baffling. It makes me wonder if technology isn’t a thorn in the side of dogme…

For you, technology seems to be all about kids in the nineties going to an ‘Internet Room’ and looking at porn (as if they didn’t do that in class in other ways before technology came along…), and you spending loads of time ‘faffing’. For many people such as myself it’s generally technology that works fine out of the box and leads to some creative practice when the teacher knows what they’re doing and the learners want to do it.

So yes, I’m baffled. Baffled as to why technology causes such reactions from some people, and why it needs to prove itself more than dogme does. I’m baffled as to why we need to look back to the nineties (pre the collaborative side of technology) to justify reactions to technology. I’m baffled as to why dogme and technology can’t co-exist (as you suggested months agon in Second Life). I’m just baffled.

This conversation has gone on for months now. As I pointed out, I don’t spend most of my time knocking dogme because it’s a neat idea, and it’s a very ‘human’ idea and in some situations it can and does work fine. I’ve read enough of the dogme list to see that, and have (pre-dogme) had classes like that on many occasions. Dogme is as old as the hills – perhaps that’s why it has such an uncomfortable time with technology?

I’ve also had many successful classes based around a very ‘human’ use of technology, allowing learners to collaborate creatively globally, etc. The fact that (as you said in SL) dogme developed over a period when technology was in flux, and Teaching Unplugged was written at that time, is surely more of an opportunity (as you intimated) to see how new creative, collaborative technologies might be applied in the service of dogme, rather than simply dismissing them as ‘unproven’ and ‘just too much faffing’?

At the moment both dogme and technologies in classrooms remain ideas and values that people espouse. Dogme is a teacher’s decision to adopt an approach (state of mind, etc.) in their teaching, and is, to an extent, top down. The use of technology (where it is available) can be a learner driven need and desire IF the teacher knows what they’re doing and knows their job. This video amply demonstrates how that might be the case:

wwwDOTyoutubeDOTcom/watch?v=ZokqjjIy77Y

There’s no evidence that either works, despite your views that there is a suspicion that dogme ‘should’ work, so why don’t we just assume that those people exploring either way of teaching are perfectly at liberty to do so, and should be encouraged in their work rather than criticised or told shouldn’t be ‘faffing’ when there are plenty of lovely people in class to talk to?

Even better, why don’t we encourage the work of people like Karenne, Graham Stanley, etc, who are making daily attempts to get the best out of dogme and technology. In the end, they’re probably more reasonable than either of our extreme ends of the spectrum. Plus, they’re in the classroom on a daily basis, so probably have a much better idea of what actually works.

I’d like to propose a bit of ‘pax’, but I don’t see this one dying any time soon.

Have a good Sunday – the sun’s shining where you and I are, so looks like lunch outside and a decent bottle of wine.

Best,

Gavin