Carolin Fuchs

“Are you able to access this website at all?”: Team negotiations and macro-level challenges in telecollaboration

ABSTRACT This exploratory study contributes to the underexplored area of collaborative task formats in telecollaboration. The study investigates how English as a second language (ESL) student teachers in the US and English as a foreign language (EFL) student teachers in Turkey negotiated the design, implementation, and evaluation of technology-based English language learning tasks. The overall pedagogical goal of this spring 2014 project was to provide participants in different educational and institutional settings an opportunity to collaboratively explore and evaluate the affordances of technology tools in the design of joint learning tasks. This ethnographic case study triangulates questionnaires, telecollaboration logs, and computer-mediated communication data (blogs, emails) to examine the types of negotiation (personal, interactive, procedural) telecollaborative teams displayed at the projects micro levels (self, situated telecollaborative activity) and macro levels (institutional setting, political context). Findings indicate that one telecollaborative team, Global Team 2, effectively managed their learning as a group by making key decisions collectively about their work processes. The teams high number of procedural negotiation instances suggests a high degree of task-orientation, which may have aided their task completion. In contrast, the number of personal and interactive negotiation types was low. The latter, however, may have been called for midway through the project, when unexpected political developments in Turkey unfolded. Repercussions disturbed Turkish participants and affected social media, which were at the core of this telecollaboration. Implications focus on foregrounding personal and interactive negotiation via virtual Global Team check-ins, as well as on expanding collaborative tasks by incorporating perspectives on the wider institutional and sociopolitical contexts of participating institutions.

Use of the Wiki for Cross-Institutional Collaborations

This article discusses how groups of student teachers use the wiki to collaborate cross-institutionally in order to design tasks for English language learners. Participants in this case study involved student teachers at a private graduate institution on the East Coast in the U.S. and students at a public graduate institution in Luxembourg. In this action research approach, data triangulation involved gathering information through a combination of different instruments such as computer-mediated communication data, needs analyses, journal entries, and post-course questionnaires. Findings showed that in addition to writing collaboratively, groups used the wiki as a discussion tool. This subsequently led to an exploration of the interactions through computer-mediated discourse analysis and a discussion of methodological implications.

It’s Not Just the Tool: Pedagogy for Promoting Collaboration and Community in Social Networking in CMC

The title of this chapter suggests what is a commonplace truth among specialists in technology-based instruction: that it is not technology itself in the form of any tool that is going to necessarily lead to learning. Rather, it is learners’ use(s) of the tool in pedagogical tasks that will impact learning. And that use will often be a function of the pedagogical design of the course in which the tool is applied. Successful integration of technology into the classroom in a pedagogically sound manner involves more than simply introducing a software program or other innovation to the students in a classroom. Technology integration must be thoughtfully planned out based on curricular goals and instructional models — implying the use of new teaching strategies that actively engage students and rely on collaboration among teachers. (Oxford and Oxford, 2009, p. 8)

Cross-Institutional Blended Learning in Teacher Education: A Case Study

This paper presents findings from an exploratory case study, with the purpose of illustrating how student teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) in the United States and student teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Germany evaluated a blended learning course that focused on jointly creating Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) units via the Internet. This project enabled participants to share perspectives about teaching contexts and practices in other countries and learn about TBLT through model learning (Willis, 2001). Consequently, student teachers not only became more proficient users of technology, but also grew from the unique opportunity of collaborating with their future colleagues abroad. The author presents the German and American student teachers’ perspectives with regard to what both groups gained by participating in this project. Finally, the author makes suggestions for language teacher training.

Technology-mediated TBLT – researching technology and tasks, edited by Marta González-Lloret and coedited by Lourdes Ortega

Responding to the growing body of research promoting technology integration in language teaching (e.g., Blake 2013), Marta Gonzalez-Lloret and Lourdes Ortegas edited volume, Technology-Mediated TB...