Abstract:

Simple, stable, and – the key word – sustainable. Technology for language teachers they can rely on.

Academics hunt for data the way vampires look for blood. It keeps them alive, but it means, just like vampires, they leave behind a path strewn with victims. Furthermore, their insatiable requirements for data frequently leave them unable or unwilling to create fair, ethical relationships with others. In this case we talk of language teachers. Often academics in the area of technology require the support of language teachers to enable what they are doing. The academics get feedback and data. But what do the teachers get? Likely a distraction and interruption from the normal flow of their teaching and little else to show for their cooperation. The typical conclusion is that the academic project stops for lack of funding or because it was never to be more than an ‘experiment’. Teachers are left stranded if they were naïve enough to use the technology offered them. It is no wonder that language teachers shy away from academic projects. The relationship is far from symbiotic. Instead, if one exists at all, it is fraught with tension and has potentially high cost for the teacher, with no compensation.

In this paper, we describe how we are trying to find a better solution, where technology providers and teachers can interact in a mutually beneficial way. LARA (Language and Reading Platform; https://www.unige.ch/callector/text-content/) is an open collaborative project initiated Q3 2018. The intention is to create tools that let teachers easily create multimedia reading material to support beginner- and intermediate-level language learners. Crucially, the project has been designed from the start to be long-term sustainable, with a social network which we anticipate will ensure that the open source platform software is maintained by multiple volunteer developers, the emphasis being on non-commercial, free license; among the software projects we are taking inspiration from are the popular ILIAS learning management system (https://www.ilias.de/ ) and LeelaChessZero, the current computer chess world champion (https://lczero.org/ ). At the time of writing, LARA involves about a dozen developers, and material is being used by classroom teachers in three countries.

Over the past years, the notion of University Social Reponsibility has become part of the conditions of how universities around the world operate. This is our attempt to translate the ideal into action, with positive effect for a large community for whom interaction with technology is always precarious. We outlined the ethical thinking behind LARA and its mother project CALLector in two earlier papers (Chua and Rayner 2018; Chua et al 2018). Here, a few months into the project's second year, we will describe how the ideas are playing out in practice, and how different kinds of people – developers, teachers and students – are interacting to try and reach a balance that everyone can be pleased with. In Stephenie Meyer's phrase, we want CALL technology providers to be vegetarian vampires.

References:
[1] C. Chua and M. Rayner. 2018. What do the founders of online communities owe to their users? Proceedings of the enetCollect Workshop, Leiden, Holland. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2390/
[2] C. Chua, H. Habibi, M. Rayner and N.Tsourakis. 2018. Decentralising power: how we are trying to keep CALLector ethical. Proceedings of the enetCollect Workshop, Leiden, Holland. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2390/

Keywords:

CALL, ethics, online communities, open source, University Social Responsibility.