Language centres: are we holding the future in our hands?

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-216
Author(s):  
Ian Michael Robinson

Abstract With the advent of web 2.0 and the ease of use of many hand-held devices, access to the internet has never been easier. This has been accompanied by a growing range of sites available for learning an L2. These sites offer lessons, explanations, exercises, corrections and feedback. It now becomes time once again to question whether physical bricks and mortar language centres are necessary any longer, or whether the language centre can now be held in the palm of our hands. With special regard to English, this paper reports on a survey carried out at a university language centre in the south of Italy, where students are regularly involved in face-to-face lessons, but whose courses also involve guided use of websites and independent use of websites outside of the confines of the language centre. The survey is designed to investigate how students react to these different EFL learning scenarios and what they feel the future holds in store for us concerning the use of language centres. Finally, by uniting the strands of the student’s perspective of one particular case and ideas from the literature, this paper attempts to give a clear picture of what a language centre contributes to academic life, with the aim of contributing to the discussion of what the future holds for these centres.

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.


2010 ◽  
pp. 2298-2309
Author(s):  
Justin Meza ◽  
Qin Zhu

Knowledge is the fact or knowing something from experience or via association. Knowledge organization is the systematic management and organization of knowledge (Hodge, 2000). With the advent of Web 2.0, Mashups have become a hot new thing on the Web. A mashup is a Web site or a Web application that combines content from more than one source and delivers it in an integrated way (Fichter, 2006). In this article, we will first explore the concept of mashups and look at the components of a mashup. We will provide an overview of various mashups on the Internet. We will look at literature about knowledge and the knowledge organization. Then, we will elaborate on our experiment of a mashup in an enterprise environment. We will describe how we mixed the content from two sets of sources and created a new source: a novel way of organizing and displaying HP Labs Technical Reports. The findings from our project will be included and some best practices for creating enterprise mashups will be given. The future of enterprise mashups will be discussed as well.


Author(s):  
R. Todd Stephens

In this chapter, the author takes a look at how organizations can integrate Web 2.0 technology into their current electronic commerce environment. The success of the Internet can be seen within any organization, but customers are asking for more interaction with the enterprises they do business with. In a few years, having a standard electronic commerce site will be as passé as having an information only site today. Organizations must progress to the next level in order to have a viable business model in the future. Web 2.0 provides the basic technology for creating a network of customers who are passionate about the company’s product offering. This chapter reviews several different examples where organizations have added Web 2.0 to their environment and are succeeding in transforming themselves.


2011 ◽  
pp. 213-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa M. Regueras ◽  
Elena Verdú ◽  
María A. Pérez ◽  
Juan Pablo de Castro ◽  
María J. Verdú

Nowadays, most of electronic applications, including e-learning, are based on the Internet and the Web. As the Web advances, applications should progress in accordance with it. People in the Internet world have started to talk about Web 2.0. This chapter discusses how the concepts of Web 2.0 can be transferred to e-learning. First, the new trends of the Web (Web 2.0) are introduced and the Web 2.0 technologies are reviewed. Then, it is analysed how Web 2.0 can be transferred and applied to the learning process, in terms of methodologies and tools, and taking into account different scenarios and roles. Next, some good practices and recommendations for E-Learning 2.0 are described. Finally, we present our opinion, conclusions, and proposals about the future trends driving the market.


English Today ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 2-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morana Lukač

When I launched an online survey last December with the aim of learning about people's practices of looking up usage advice, I anticipated that searching for answers to grammar questions would not differ considerably from what are currently most common practices in searching for any kind of information. The answers are, as a rule, simply looked up online. From a group of 189 respondents, among whom the majority were university-educated language professionals such as linguists, editors, journalists and translators, more than half reported that they preferred consulting online rather than printed sources. The respondents below the age of 25 who reported looking up usage advice in printed books were few and far between (11%). The question that can be consequently raised is what implications this finding has for the future of the printed usage advice literature, which includes usage guides, all-in-one reference books we are researching in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. What is more, the number of sources that are available on the Internet is growing exponentially, and we need to probe more deeply into the matter to ask which of the available sources are in fact consulted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 551-557
Author(s):  
Oktifani Winarti ◽  
Ratih Pandu Mustikasari ◽  
Hanna Nurhaqiqi ◽  
Valentin Cretto-Bergerat

The COVID-19 pandemic has made people rely on the presence of the internet to run their business. Businesses, schools, retail, religious gatherings, and other components are all required to use an internet platform in some way. People can meet face-to-face and the feature of the contact is reinforced by both verbal and non-verbal communication prior to the viral eruption, making conversation much easier. The goal of this study is to emphasize the importance of being present during the COVID-19 Pandemic as well as the future projection of presence post-pandemic. Being present, as before the pandemic, comes effortlessly without conscious reflection because the interaction takes place offline without any restrictions. The result from this research that being present is the most crucial communication skill; it is the foundation of communication and can aid in more effective engagement on all levels (perception, comprehension, reasoning, memory, and production).


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Budi Harsanto

Internet has influences numerous aspects in our life, including our learning process. Interest in the internet as a media to enhance learning experience in education operations has increased over the last decade. The recent web era termed as web 2.0. In web 2.0 era, users have the convenience to design their own website without need of learning complicated programming language. Combination between offline and online learning is known as blended learning. Innovations related with blended learning are emerging. The purposes of this paper are to elaborate the features of Google Sites that are useful for blended learning and to share users experiences from utilize Google Sites as tools of blended learning program at Faculty of Economics and Business University of Padjadjaran (FEB Unpad), Bandung, Indonesia. Users are often inhibited in creating or maintaining a website because of the complexity challenge. Google Sites, known for its tag line“create, collect and control”, offers ease of use in this regard. Faculty member and student can use this tool to interact. Users experience survey was conducted involving 84 users (78 students and 6 faculty members) to elaborate response of users, both faculty members and students. Results suggest that highest agreement rate was attained that Google site is helpful in share information. The lowest aggrement rate was found in “Google site useful for online discussion”.


Author(s):  
Joel B. Johnson ◽  
Pritika Reddy ◽  
Ronil Chand ◽  
Mani Naiker

AbstractThe rise of online modes of content delivery, termed e-learning, has increased student convenience and provided geographically remote students with more options for tertiary education. However, its efficacy relies upon student access to suitable technology and the internet, and the quality of the online course material. With the COVID-19 outbreak, education providers worldwide were forced to turn to e-learning to retain their student base and allow them to continue learning through the pandemic. However, in geographically remote, developing nations, many students may not have access to suitable technology or internet connections. Hence it is important to understand the potential of e-learning to maintain equitable access to education in such situations. This study found the majority (88%) of commencing students at the University of the South Pacific owned at least one ICT device and had access to the internet. Similarly, most students had adequate to strong ICT skills and a positive attitude toward e-learning. These attitudes among the student cohort, in conjunction with the previous experience of The University of the South Pacific in distance education, are likely to have contributed to its relatively successful transition from face-to-face to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
David Mathew

This chapter argues that as educators moving into a Web 2.0 world, we are likely to experience anxiety, which is an important part of the educational process (as it is for our learners). It is also a response to a perception of an older and worn out version of the internet. Anxiety has implications for the design of Web 2.0 educational materials. Web 2.0 is more than a tool for the beginnings of the future of education: it is also, in and of itself, the beginnings of the future of education. Web 2.0 is about learning from the learner, and this chapter asks: What role does the educator play in his/her own developmental learning of the tools of the trade? How does this inform his/her preparations for the learners’ experiences? The chapter also argues that in addition to online educational environments owning their own systems of localized logic and systems of internal rules, they are also sentient systems.


Author(s):  
John Hadley Strange

This case study of EDM310 at the University of South Alabama covers the transition of the class from a group of face to face courses, which covered Microsoft Office, to face to face classes of 20 students taught by different teachers, which emphasized, to varying degrees, the use of Web 2.0 tools, blogging, commenting on blogs; then to a set of face to face courses all delivering instruction using Web 2.0 tools, blogs, and commenting on blogs. Finally the chapter discusses a course of 170 students taught by one faculty member with assistance from graduate and undergraduate students’ course almost entirely on the Internet and in an open lab conducted by undergraduate assistants. A detailed description is provided, showing how projects are used as a central learning tool; how blogging and comments on blogs play a critical role in the course; how students react to these new instructional approaches. The case study also contains specific suggestions on how to organize such a course, and how it was implemented at the University of South Alabama with great success.


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