Introduction: Week 12

It is reasonably straightforward to see how current trends might continue, but we don't know whether some new development will change the landscape of computing and CALL. We do have the move to mobile devices and the use of apps and certainly there will be language learning activities accomplished using these devices. 

Social networking is one area that we have not covered. although it has come up in the discussions. Facebook can provide an environment for language learning and it has the advantage of being known and so there is unlikely to be a lot of overhead in terms of setting up the class (in most countries at least).

In this session we will continue looking at avatars and virtual worlds, as examples of smart technologies.

One of the readings I used in the past refers to the cloud.  A few years ago cloud computing was quite new, but now it is the norm. A shift to the use of Moodle or similar platforms would be one example of cloud computing. Our classes/data/quizzes are not on some local computer in the school, they are in some remote but accessible location. It is obvious that in language teaching there will be a push towards blended learning as the norm, along with the use of a LMS (such as Canvas). The addition of neat features to a LMS may be one path of development. The third strand for the future might be the use of "big data". Again, I am not sure how it will come into play but the chatbots, while not new, exemplify what rich, if not smart, data can do. There is no Artificial Intelligence behind chatbots, just lots of data patterns. Could we assess big data on language learners to help provide targetted intervention in the same way that we all get targetted with product offerings?

We have considered virtual environments of various types in this course. One development might be in augmented reality and there might be some role for mobile devices in this area. Google glasses did not take off as a technology, but these sorts of things always come back in a slightly different form.