Constanza Tolosa

Pedagogical Hesitations in a Mobile Technology Rich Learning Environment. A Self-Study of Redefining Expertise.

At a time when advances in technologies continue to demand swift responses from education at all levels, we have used self-study to frame a critical discussion of the issues surrounding the impact of mobile technologies on teacher education, and on ourselves as teacher educators. As a group of lecturers in a large Faculty of Education, we identified possibilities for using mobile technologies in teaching practice beyond traditional models of teaching as transmission. We have researched our own practices in a way that helped us to imagine our teaching differently and enabled a sensitivity to pedagogy as a complex process.

Motivating Twenty-First-Century Learners: The Impact of an Online Reciprocal Peer-Tutoring Initiative for Foreign Language Learning

This chapter presents key findings from a 4-year research engagement with a school in New Zealand that has embraced the opportunity to teach the Net Generation. We have followed the school’s implementation of the foreign languages (FL) curriculum for its Year 7 and 8 students (age 11+ to 12+) through a combination of forward-thinking leadership and technologically rich programme design incorporating a blended model. Following a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest approach, we collected data to measure the effects on students’ FL proficiency and motivation as a result of a dedicated online writing peer-tutoring initiative. Our study enabled us to consider the interplay between motivating the learner, educational leadership and curriculum design, and our data provided evidence of students’ engagement in meaningful and authentic written interactions. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires and summative interviews with students indicated benefits in terms of motivation towards language learning, and engagement with peers as tutors and tutees. Our findings demonstrate that, although not without its limitations, when it comes to motivating netizens to learn an FL, there is considerable potential in technology-mediated peer tutoring. For several learners, learning a language online optimised conditions for authentic interaction and genuine collaboration with others while learners co-constructed new knowledge. Although working under the guidance of their teachers, students exercised agency in the nature and form of the interactions, becoming the drivers of their own learning as true members of the Net Generation.