Webinars

Webinar 1 (Regine Hampel): 

“Disruptive technologies and the language classroom: a complex systems theory approach”

 This seminar explores how teachers and researchers can realize the potential that the new technologies offer to transform education (Säljö 1999; Wertsch 2002), including in the context of language learning and teaching. Although technology is embedded in students’ lives today, there is an assumption by many teachers and researchers that its use is inconsequential, an assumption that has been critiqued (e.g. Levy 2000; Hampel 2003; Thorne 2003) but that persists. I will start off the session by giving an overview of a framework that brings together complex systems theory (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008) with sociocultural understandings of learning and the theory of multimodal communication (Hampel 2019) to explore the disruptive potential of the new media. Conceptualizing the language classroom (in the widest sense) as an ecosystem consisting of different interacting parts will allow us to focus on the changes that language education has undergone over the past decades as a result of the introduction of new technologies. As a group, we will then explore how new technologies can be used to open up the classroom to new patterns of interaction and multimodal communication and to position language learners differently in relation to the world where language is not just a set of rules but where it is used to make meaning. We will discuss the implications of what has been called a ‘phase shift’ for language teachers, for institutions and for policy makers, and how we as teachers and researchers can realize the potential that the online media offer, thus encouraging a new learning ecology.