Real life vs Second Life

I was listening to an interview the other day with Jonathan Alter when an interesting comparison came up. Alter, a Newsweek columnist and MSNBC correspondent, compared bloggers to reporters. In his eyes, bloggers, who are typing away in their pyjamas, are not reporters. They do not go out to all corners of the world to get the stories. They simply regurgitate and put a ruminant twist on what they hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read in newspapers.

Naturally, being a blogger myself, I felt humbled as he said this. I’m also a blogger who — mea culpa — occasionally writes in her pyjamas. But hearing it reminded me of another parallel in our lives as teachers: Real Life vs Second Life.

Are those who offer language instruction online without experience, credentials or classroom management skills the “bloggers” of the teaching world? If journalists need fact-finding, writing and international diplomacy skills, what skills do real-life teachers need?

In our recent workshop at the BESIG conference, Deborah Capras and I talked about competition for Web 2.0. We discussed how teachers can compete with all of the online learning offers out there — and how to exploit them.

With the news of companies cutting 25 per cent of their workforce due to the financial crisis, we can safely predict that it’s not going to get any easier for freelancers to land in-company training contracts. Some companies may even claim that with the rise of learning online, the days of classroom business English are numbered. So it comes down to the old saying of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.

Put together your best portfolio of material, credentials, experience and technological savvy to wow your students and, more importantly, the bosses who are paying for their lessons.

Classroom technology certainly scores points in the “wow” column. Pete Sharma’s talk at BESIG was full of ideas and updates from the technical world including Mimio, a portable device that turns any whiteboard into an interactive whiteboard.

Pete’s presentation inspired me to bring a little technology into an upcoming lesson by just using downloaded files on my laptop — no Internet connection necessary. There was a palpable buzz when my general English students got into the holiday spirit with videocasts on how to carve a turkey and how to roast sweet potatoes. If it had been a business English course, we could have moved from Martha Stewart in the kitchen to white-collar crime and her prison sentence for insider trading back in 2004. Nothing like a little corruption to spice up a lesson.

It’s neither in our best interest, nor the students’, to do away with the human touch* in teaching. After all, it’s managing human interaction from the boardroom to the bakery that truly measures our language ability. In his book From Corpus to Classroom and his BESIG plenary, Mike McCarthy used the word “confluence” instead of fluency to describe the “interplay between initiation and response”. As McCarthy points out, the standard notion of fluency is monological in most classrooms, whereas confluence is “joint production based on two or more participants”.

Now that’s food for thought.

* If you’re looking for the answer to “Who’s The Boss?” from my 1/2009 Business Spotlight in the Classroom editorial, here it is: Bruce Springsteen, whose songs include “Human Touch”.