Monday, January 29, 2018
I find myself wondering what is the MINIMAL degree of technical savvy a teacher might need to use MC.
I find myself wondering what is the MINIMAL degree of technical savvy a teacher might need to use MC. I suppose that ranges form "almost none" to "serious MC skills and and server know-how." At the low-tech end, teachers could just direct their students to an already existing game-server...and perhaps join them there as a fellow MC novice and language-guide. The fact is that no instructional technology will ever become widely accepted, if it requires more technical expertise than connecting a laptop to a projector. Teachers have too many other things to do (and are paid too little) to become de facto tech-support experts. A key requisite for wide-spread adoption of any educational technology is that it not require any more technical expertise than is generally held by the general population of teachers.
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Also I'm a little bothered about the idea of the teacher having to be a skilled MC player. In my view, the best-case scenario is illustrated by Mattie and me playing together. I gets boring really fast for an expert always to be telling you how things work. I wouldn't want to put myself (even if I could) in the position of "teaching MC" in addition to teaching my subject matter.
ReplyDeleteBut if Minecraft were your subject matter, if this were something both you and your students were interested in and were using it as a means to learn English, as opposed to, say, doing exercises in a grammar book ...
ReplyDeleteSome teachers are questioned as to whether Minecraft is in the curriculum. The clever answer is, "the curriculum is in it." But that probably takes students who truly want to learn the language and who want to learn it as opposed to being taught it. And if you're not doing it free lance after hours, you need a very enlightened administration that is open to experimentation. But I haven't put all these ingredients together yet in my own success story.
For me MC most certainly is NOT the subject matter, though it could serve as a medium, if learners find that medium engaging.
ReplyDeleteMy job as a TESOL instructor is to guide students though their language learning experiences...and like any guide TESOL instructors need to know "the lay of the land" and I'm talking about the nature and organization of language here not MC skills. The majority of the world's ESL/EFL teachers, IMO, have a very limited understanding of language in particularly as regards its social organization and lexical relationships. Even in MATESOL programs, future language teachers have likely only been outfitted with a semester of "pedagogic grammar" and basic linguistics courses. Very few language teachers are given even an introduction to discourse analysis or corpus linguistics...which are the very heart of language. As Deborah Tannen has said: "Discourse isn't the icing on the cake; it's the WHOLE cake."
If we conceive of MC as a space for experiential ("naturalistic") language acquisition, then perhaps there's no need for a (language) teacher at all. (Not all students will be successful learning this way.) It seems to me that if a teacher does want to accompany students into a virtual world, like MC, then it would be preferable for "teacher" and "student" (labels that would no longer really be relevant) to enter the world as equals, learning together how the world works...with the ONLY advantage the language teacher brings with him or her being more advanced L2 skills.
So again, for teachers ("L2 learning guides") to use MC shouldn't require any (or many) MC skills. And ideally, should only require a minimum of technical (computer) savvy.
Vance, I want to address your point about "the curriculum being in Minecraft." As you say that's a clever-sounding response. But it begs the question of what is meant by curriculum. Most teachers understand curriculum to be the body of knowledge or set of skills which are intended as the goals/outcomes of learning. If I were in a supervisory position and one of my teachers told me they wanted to use MC as a tool for language development, I would say, fine, IF you can provide me with a detailed description (ideally with examples) of specific language skills which students might acquire. As one example, in terms of in-game texting, many of the posts are "how do I" type questions with the replies coming in command format.
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