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texts, and how digital tools and the participatory web culture can serve to tease out their literary potentials. He concludes with a re-evaluation of available concepts of literary competences in light of digital media. Finally, this section is rounded off with a contribution by Christiane Lütge, Thorsten Merse and Michelle Stannard, who engage with the diversity of digital textualities found in learners’ digital lifeworlds. They begin with a reflection of what counts as ‘text’, and present multimodality and interactivity as central features of digital textualities. They continue to scrutinize social media, digital literatures and virtual realities as examples of digital textualities, and evaluate their implications for classroom practices that tie in with the social and communicative practices typical of digital media.
This work and study book concludes with an outlook on how to get started with digital teaching and learning in English language education. For this purpose, Claudia Mustroph condenses the classroom implications and reflective endeavors of this book into a practical view on how to foster principal learning goals of ELT in a digital manner. She also addresses important requirements for digital education with regard to the teacher, the infrastructure in school, and curricula. This article is helpful for teachers to match digital activities appropriately with their teaching context, including low-tech and no-tech environments.
Before you dive fully into the diverse articles of this edited volume, we are proud to present an exclusive interview with Nicky Hockly that we conducted after a guest lecture on digital literacies she delivered at the University of Munich (LMU). Nicky Hockly is an esteemed global expert on digital education in English Language Teaching, and the Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E. She is an international plenary speaker, and regularly trains teachers all over the world. Nicky Hockly has written several prize-winning methodology books about new technologies in language teaching. Her most recent books are Focus on Learning Technologies (2016) and ETPedia Technology (2017). She is also widely known for her collaboration with Mark Pegrum and Gavin Dudeney on conceptualizing and researching digital literacies. In the interview, she spoke about their work on digital literacies, retraced historic developments in digital education, and reflected on the digital changes currently underway in language education.
In Dialogue with Nicky Hockly
Nicky Hockly
For this interview, the editors of this volume had the chance to speak with Nicky Hockly, a global expert on digital language education and Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E. In this dialogue, Nicky Hockly offered insights into the past and future of digital education and her current work on digital literacies.
Christiane Lütge and Thorsten Merse: From 1997 to 2002, you worked as the Academic Director of one of the first fully online MA programmes for English Language Teaching, and you have paved the way towards digital education ever since. In your professional experience, what were the ‘digital hopes’ you had in 1997?
Nicky Hockly: Fully online degree programmes were relatively new back in 1997, when I started teaching online. Although we had an adequate LMS (Learning Management System), the emphasis was still very much on asynchronous online communication. For example, our MA students would typically read texts and then take part in moderated forum discussions. There was some multimedia available in the form of audio and video, but it was not as easy to produce then as it is now. Our students accessed course content via desktop or laptop computers – mobile technology was still in its infancy, and Internet connected mobile devices only started to make an appearance in the early 2000s. In our online MA programme we did hold regular synchronous (real-time) small-group tutorial discussions, but the only way we could do this was via text. We had to use MSN Messenger, as tools like Skype were simply not around. You can imagine how slow and cumbersome it was to hold tutorial discussions in real-time via text with groups of up to 10 MA students who had plenty of interesting and complex things to say. I experienced at first hand all of the typical text-related communication issues, such as topic decay (students going off topic in their discussions), overlapping turns (students typing responses over each other) and lag (long pauses while students typed out whole paragraphs). And students who were proficient typists had the advantage over those (like myself) whose typing skills left a lot to be desired! We developed quite detailed ‘chat protocols’ to manage these real time text chats, so that these group text chats worked as well as possible. But it was not ideal to have to hold real-time tutorials via text chat.
My biggest hope back then was that we could find some way of communicating via audio in real-time via the Internet. Although telephone conference calls already existed, these were far too expensive for us to seriously consider for our students. Our MA students were based all over Europe and in Latin America, so it simply wasn’t feasible cost-wise to use telephone conference calls. Skype came along in 2003; these sorts of VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) tools marked a revolutionary moment by making real-time audio communication in online teacher development accessible to all. I was very lucky to experience the ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ of real-time computer-mediated communication. ‘Before’ we had to use text chat, the ‘during’ phase enabled us to use audio via VoIP tools, and the ‘after’ phase consists of videoconferencing made possible by video compression and high-speed internet. Widespread affordable videoconferencing was a distant dream back in 1997! And now, thankfully, it’s commonplace.
CL and TM: Looking back, what are the most exciting developments in the field of digital learning and teaching over the past years?
NH: For me, the most exciting development is undoubtedly the rise of mobile technologies. Mobile technology has seen us integrate a range of digital tools into our daily lives, for personal and professional use, to a level that was unthinkable just two decades ago. What’s more, before mobile, the geographical digital divide was much wider. When I first started working online in 1997, getting online required relatively expensive access to infrastructure such as wired Internet connectivity, and of course access to expensive hardware in the form of PCs and laptops. With the advent of mobile technologies, many developing countries have been able to leapfrog over the need for expensive wired internet infrastructure, and have moved directly to mobile technologies.
And of course, the longer that mobile technology has been around, the cheaper it has become. Some smart phones are now relatively inexpensive, certainly compared to when they first came out. Even simple internet-enabled ‘feature phones’ give users access to email and multimedia in the form of audio and photos. This doesn’t mean that there is equal access to the internet and devices worldwide, but the gap has narrowed over the past few decades, and mobile technology has played a significant role in this.
In terms of access to online language learning and online teacher development, mobile technology and Web 2.0 enabled access to a huge range of resources for learning. The rise of social networks, too, has seen teachers and learners able to access personal learning networks, and to connect with other learners and teachers all over the world. Continual professional development for teachers, much of it free, is now available through a tap on a mobile device screen.
I started using mobile devices with language learners early on, and undertook a research project for The International Research Foundation (TIRF) in 2012, which resulted in the development of a framework for effective mobile-based task design for language learners. You can read the research paper ‘Designer Learning: The Teacher as Designer of Mobile-based Classroom Learning Experiences’ online: www.tirfonline.org/publications/mobile-assisted-language-learning/designer-learning-the-teacher-as-designer-of-mobile-based-classroom-learning-experiences/. Gavin Dudeney and I subsequently wrote a teachers’ resource book called Going Mobile (2013, Delta Publishing) to help teachers understand the potential of mobile devices, and to provide activity ideas and guidelines on how to use them effectively in the classroom. I have always been interested in the possibilities that mobile devices bring to classroom learning, and I believe that mobile devices have plenty of potential to support language learning when used effectively with well-designed tasks. To my mind,