CMC in Education

My name is Dan and I am the web director for the Language Resource Center here at Cornell. I'm taking this course because I am fascinated by how much the online universe has changed since I started working at Cornell, not to mention how drastically different the internet is now compared to when I first started getting involved. My introduction to the online world began in the early nineties where I became completely addicted to the world of MUDding. I stayed up until all hours in an entirely new reality, one in which I had the power to create new worlds as a "wizard." Of course it was all text-based, accessed via telnet on my little 2600 baud modem. Things have evolved enormously since then and I can't help but feel that we are all very lucky to be witnessing the creation and evolution of the Internet.

I've spent the last seven years developing online language learning tools for teachers to use in their courses. I am interested in Computer Mediated Communication within the context of a learning environment. What sort of user interface issues are more or less conducive to learning? What limitations are there in educational CMC which can only be supplemented in a classroom? Will the classroom ever become obsolete? What features of CMC are particularly helpful in learning a foreign language?

Of the various tools which language teachers have adopted here at Cornell, I'm very interested in the explosion of a system which we at the Language Center call Web Audio Lab (WAL.) The system consists of a client CD which a student uses to listen to a variety of language-related audio. They are then asked to respond to the material orally, using the microphone on their computer. The system submits their recordings to a server at the Language Resource Center, and teachers can access the audio submissions and respond accordingly by means of a web-based interface. It has grown to become extremely popular among language teachers

WAL is clearly asynchronous. The student and teacher are communicating, but never with immediate feedback. I suppose it crosses between "asynchronous discussion" and "interactive video and voice" in terms of how Wallace classifies online space. The fact that the system allows a user to communicate in their own time and physical space, and that a teacher is given a web environment for feedback to the student gives us an entirely new mode of teaching and learning.