Response to Questions from the Presentation

Just a quick recap of the paper I critiqued on my presentation. The study that I reviewed is "Interactions in a Blending Environment for English Language Learning" . The purpose of this study is to identify different kinds of interaction present in a virtual learning environment and face to face settings for English learning, and also to analyze the impact of various interactions on language learning.

1. What role does gender play in this research?

In fact, gender doesn't play any role and it's not even mentioned in this research. That's why I mentioned it in my critique because I feel like that gender to some extent would affect people's interaction. In this research, we can only see that there's a disproportion of gender in the English class. There were 11 female students and only 5 male students. I mentioned in my presentation that another study conducted by Caspi, Chajut, andSaporta (2008) showed results about interaction from the gender aspect. In that study, it showed that men tended to speak up more in face-to-face settings than in the virtual learning environment; women had the tendency to be more engaged in online posting than men. Since there were more women than men in this study, I was curious whether this disproportion of gender in class would also cause any differences regarding interaction for language learning in a blended learning environment. For instance, male students are too talkative in class which makes female students intimidated or discourages female students to have more interaction in class. Or probably female students don't feel like having online interaction (e.g. respond to male students' posts) due to their bad experiences in face-to-face settings (this may be one of the causes why there was no student-student interaction in the virtual learning environment in this study). That's also why I suggested in my presentation that the authors should also look into this factor while carrying out this research.

2. Why do you think interactions in virtual environments is important for students?

In this study, it's more than just learning in a virtual environment. It's also about the connection of learning in both face-to-face settings and the virtual learning environment. According to the literature review, it is said that there should be some overlap of the lessons taught in face-to-face settings and in the virtual learning environment because it helps students reinforce the knowledge they acquire from one place (e.g. in class) in another place (online platform). So in this case, it's important for students to have interactions in the virtual environment because it will help them practice their target learning language. It provides them another platform for them to use the target language outside of the classroom as well. We know that in a EFL (English as a foreign language) country, students usually don't have many chances to use the language outside the classroom. It means that once they leave the classroom, they have little exposure to the target language and probably they also won't review what they have learned in class until they go to class next time. By offering them this virtual learning environment, students would be able to expose themselves to the target language outside of the classroom, literally anytime and anywhere. This not only enables the students to practice the target language, but also increase their interest in learning the language for they actually get a place to really use the language and put what they have learned into practice.

But in order to keep students stay in that online community to learn and practice the language, interaction is one of the key factors to keep them there. This is because people would be more engaged in that virtual learning environment if someone responds to them or ask them questions. Either it's in written form or verbal form, this kind of interaction, again, allows the students to practice the language which reaches one of the students' goals of learning the language: being able to use the target language to communicate with others. Aside from that, through the interaction, people would also feel being valued by others and contributing more to the online community. In that sense, if more people participate in that online community, more knowledge would be contributed there. So they are constructing a knowledge base on the Internet for their online community members to learn about. That is to say, learning no longer just resides in classrooms; learning can happen beyond the classroom walls. It happens in the virtual learning environment at any time and anywhere!

Still another point I want to make is that I think there's a correlation between the interaction in class and in a virtual learning environment. If people in the virtual learning environment build up this friendly online community which makes all the members want to participate in, freely express and respond to each other's post, this kind of sense of online community belongingness could possibly be transcended into face-to-face settings. People who are used to be shy or hesitant in speaking up or interacting with people in classroom would be more comfortable now in delivering a speech in front of the class or having a discussion with their classmates there. So the above reasons are why I think interaction is important for students in a virtual learning environment, particularly in a blended learning context in this study!

A Virtual Second Self & Digital Courtesy

In this article Can You Hear Me Now, the author mentioned that many people have the opportunity to experience a virtual second self due to computers since later 1990s; people can do whatever they want to do in their virtual world. This statement made me think of the comments brought up in last week's discussion. Some female classmates talked about having two avatars that are in different genders while playing the game. They said that they can act completely different when being a male avatar like being a jerk or mean to others online. This is a very interesting psychological change in a person's state of mind when doing something like this in online game. I used to play online games but never had an experience like that. I always picked a female avatar, but my behavior of creating and presenting my female avatar in the real world maybe a little be similar to my classmates'. That is, I usually would dress her up in a completely different way which I would not wear things like that in my real life like fancy gown, really high-heels, mini-skirt, heavy make-up,etc. And my female avatar would act completely like a lady who comes from a high-class family which does not resemble me or my background in my real life. So I guess this is what the author of the article has been talking about--a virtual second self. Since I won't be able to experience those things in my real life, I just wanna to see how it goes or feels like in my virtual second life. Hmm~ it also makes me wonder how I would act when I present myself as a male avatar. Maybe next time when I play an online game, I'll give it a try to see how it goes!


Another interesting point that drew my attention in this article is that it talked about how people "try to" show some "digital courtesy" such as occasionally stopped using the laptop or giving the speaker some attention during a conference. Indeed, this kind of stuff happens a lot in today's world, especially after the emergence of iPad and laptop, and not to mention "smartphone". This comment quickly reminded me of two experiences I had in the past few months. I took one course in TC which the instructor of that course was super nice and flexible; the structure of the course was basically lecture-based. So after a few weeks, I saw some of the classmates starting to use their laptop to do other things like doing online shopping, using online communicative tool to chat with their friends, doing an assignment for another course, etc. Another incident that I had happened in this summer. I helped out as a teaching assistant at an international summer college for students from overseas to take courses. My friend also helped out as a TA for a math course. One day she showed me this picture. You have to take a closer look to understand what happened at that moment.

Yes, this did happen in class. The student was watching a cartoon Crayon Shin-Chan by using his laptop. This seemed to be very ridiculous to me because they spent around 400 USD on for the credits, but this student should choose to be like this in class. It also seemed to be disrespectful to the professor who was teaching the class then. Because of things like this happen in class, no wonder many teachers would ban students from using cellphones or laptops in class in order to make sure that students are really learning at that moment or prevent students from being distracted or lured by the laptops to do something irrelevant to the course. And this kind of phenomena (use the technological tools in a wrong way in class) is universal. I believe that schools around the world all have this kind of problem and try to find solutions to deal with it. This brings me the questions of how do we regulate students' use of the technological tools like laptop for the right purpose, and how do we strike a balance between regulation and the freedom of using them?