Shiv on Learning

It’s no secret that the big ELT publishers have had very little success with online products or services.

They have the brand equity to draw a large audience to anything they produce. They have the resources to bring together the top brains of the ELT world. Yet most have produced no major online learning resources. There are a few good online dictionaries, but they are far from innovational. Online resource banks are adequate for their purpose but fail to leverage most of the strengths of the medium.

Maybe their problem is the experts they hire. Experts in traditional teaching are not automatically experts in online learning. The majority of experts with 20+ years of experience have very little firsthand experience of the online world. Their opinions of it are formed from reading about and observing the medium rather than active use and participation.

This is a problem. One could easily study and understand the materials required to gain a CELTA certification. But without the experience of being in a classroom with a class they could not be considered expert in classroom teaching. The same applies to the internet. You can read about Twitter and understand how it works but without using it you can not understand the depth of interaction. You could be and expert blogger but that doesn’t mean you know the first thing about other technologies.
A recent interview with “worldwide known teacher of Business English”^[1] Mark Powell brings this problem to light. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have never met Mark, but his online foot print is so small that I’ve assumed he has no interest in the area. You should be able to find a person who is known worldwide on Google when you search for their name.)

Powell, who is currently working on a multimedia project for Cambridge University Press, says:

“We know you can not learn to present or socialise with clients and colleagues through a computer.”^[2]

Watch this video:

Questions on the video:

• Did you see students communicating?
• Did you see students socialising?
• Did you see students learning business tasks?
• What tool did they use to do this? ( Clue: it begins with ‘C’ and ends with ‘omputer’).

In the rest of the article Powell, who gave the key note at SPRACHEN & BERUF 2009, makes the assumption that personal training in languages can not take place online. Anyone who has invested time in using technology, rather than simply reading or talking about it, will know that he is wrong.

This person is running a ‘Multimedia Project’ for Cambridge University Press. With his limited understanding of technology I expect the project will not be very popular and another well resourced technology project by a big publisher will go down the pan. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

I don’t really blame anyone for thinking this person knows anything about technology, he is presumably an expert in classroom teaching. We’ve had our share of faux experts at Languagelab. In an industry where status is often more valuable than ability or experience it is an easy mistake to make. Needless to say, no such people work at Languagelab now, and our classes are packed as a result, hopefully soon we will see a online project from one of the big publishers involving no such people.