Presented at Tri-Tesol '96, Seattle, Washington
and at TESOL '97, Orlando, Florida
Colin
Sachs
Intensive American Language Center
Washington State University
Doug
Winther
Student Advising and Learning Center
Washington State University
Colin's Page | TESOLWeb.net | Prez & Pubs
Comments (11/22/02): While quite out-of-date, the general idea of using an existing local area network to allow students and faculty to explore the dynamics of internet publication and multimedia production is still sound. Afterall, one does not necessarily need a fast or live internet connection to do internet-like activities.
Multimedia in the form of the World Wide Web is exciting and motivating for students involved in language learning because it allows them to communicate ideas with images and sounds as well as text, and to publish them. To create Web pages, students need to learn the tools of page creation (i.e., Web editors or translators, graphic editors, sound recording programs and the like.) Unfortunately, we have observed that it is easy for teachers to spend the majority of their lab classroom time with the students teaching them to use the tools of Web page creation at the expense of language instruction. We have found that it is very easy to fall into the "tool instruction" trap. Ideally, as teachers, we want to minimize the time spent on the tools and focus our students' attention on giving a multimedia "voice" to their ideas. To this end, we explored the possibilities of multimedia with the WWW in the context of a Special Interest Course in Multimedia at the Intensive American Language Center during our Spring I and Spring II, 1996, sessions.
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Since the Web was relatively new a year ago, and since we were
struggling to provide on-line access to e-mail services for all our
students, we wanted to explore the possibilities of using the Web
within the context of a course in English as a Second Language. To
this end, we proposed (for two consecutive terms) a special interest
course that students could take as an elective to, in a word, escape
their more demanding academic courses for a short while and try
something different. The course, Multimedia was designed
to:
There were many problems with our initial course offering including, but not limited to, limitations of hardware and software. Our experiences are outlined in what follows.
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Our microcomputer lab for this class was composed of 8 computer
systems of several different hardware configurations. The only thing
they all had in common was that they were Apple Macintosh brand
computers and that they were all networked on a local area network
with file server and print server support.
One Mac LC was virtually useless to us as it had a 12" black and
white monitor and a small (20 MB) hard drive. It couldn't support
much of the software we had for this course. The other Mac LC had a
color monitor, external microphone and a large enough hard drive.
Four of the five Centris systems had Apple AudioVision (multimedia)
monitors with built-in speakers and microphone, and the remaining
Centris had a 15" Multiscan display with built-in speakers (no
micorphone connected).
Illustration of Lab Network
This is how our local area network was configured at the time of the course (Spring 1996)
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Providing multiple software packages was necessary in order to
provide students with sufficient tools to produce HTML formatted
pages with text, graphics and sounds. At the time, there were few
tools that were drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG editing for HTML, and there
were few A/V tools for which we could afford multiple licenses. As a
result, we used a wide range of independent applications that were
freeware, shareware or commercial applications that were bundled with
the systems when purchased. These were, primarily:
Netscape
Navigator 2.0b
Web Browser - Educational License
HoTMetaL
2.0
HTML editor - Freeware version of commercial product
GraphicConverter
3.2.1
Graphics manipulation/creation - Shareware
FastPlayer
1.1
Quicktime video player - Freeware, current version is 1.3.1
SoundMachine
2.1
AU format sound player/recorder - Freeware, though current version is shareware
Apple
Video Monitor 1.0.1
Video Capture software - bundled with AV systems
FusionRecorder
1.0.1
Quicktime video capture/player/editor - Commercial program bundled with system
Each of these tools took time for the students to learn, and each required them to access a different function of the computer systems. The challenge was how to minimize the time we spent teaching the tools and students spent learning them, and maximize the time the students spent creating with the tools and collaborating on their projects.
Aside from the requirements for the students to learn and apply the software tools, we faced several other restrictions.
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Impediments to working on multimedia presentations with HTML:
These restrictions existed for a variety of reasons, some due to the physical layout and location of the microcomputer lab, some due to financial/budget constraints, others due to service constraints imposed from without, and many due to time constraints.
We tended to view these restrictions not as limitations, but as opportunities and tended to ask ourselves "What can we do with what we've got?" We had a clear idea in mind of what we wanted to accomplish in the class and what kinds of products we wanted the students to be able to produce. Since the primary goal of the class was an enhancement of English language skills through the use of the technology (software and hardware), it was easy to focus on developing a solution that would overcome the restrictions.
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We, ultimately, decided on a simple and straight-forward solution:
Simulate Web services using our File Server. This:
Illustration of Simulation of Web Services on File
Server:
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The Love Page 
This project incorporates few graphics (title graphic, background of hearts, sound "buttons") with many different phrases for expressing affection in many different languages.
At some point, every student in the class was involved in this
project recording the phrases. The two students creating the page
negotiated with students not in the class to come to the lab to
capture languages not represented in the classroom.
Organization of Page
Phrases are classified according to five different situational contexts:
These contexts range from mild affection (I like you) to deep affection (I really love you.) in the following languages:
Each language is represented by a sound sampler (in AU audio format) that is loadable in a browser by clicking on a sound icon. In situations where there is no way to express the literal sentiment, a "no way to say!" message is present. Please feel free to sample this project! (11/22/02: no longer available!)
Additional student projects were made possible due to the initial work in developing the Multimedia Special Interest Course at the Intensive American Language Center.
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Out of five student groups working on the projects, three developed into something tangible with only the one mentioned here being completed within the 8 weeks of the course. This was the result of time taken away from the project oriented aspect of the course by process driven tasks (i.e., the students learning of the tools.) This is the fiasco mentioned in the title of this presentation.
When students and teachers spend more time learning the technology than in the actual learning tasks involved in applying the technology, less focused learning occurs. Our primary emphasis was, and remains, English language instruction. How we can make the technology fall into the background, make the software and hardware tools as easy to use for the students as cut-and-paste, leads to an enhancement of the language learning experience and not a distraction from it.
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Colin's Page | TESOLWeb.net | Prez & Pubs
Colin Sachs