WEEK 7.O: Learner Autonomy and the Potentials of One Computer Class

Hello fellow bloggers,

Well, I ended my last week post expressing an urgent need to go the beach. I had to go there to forget, for a while, about the excruciating tasks and assignments of the webskills course. I had to go there to recharge the batteries and interact with the cosmos! As you can see in the picture above, I look very distressed and happy, but, honestly, I manage to keep the smile and the good spirit throughout the course.

Week seven has brought with it two wonderful topics to discuss and a practical task to do, which I haven't completed so far. We were required to discuss the notion of learner autonomy in the light of our readings of the recommended articles. The latters and particualrly Thanasoulas were, in fact, very useful in the sense that they provide the reader with a summary of what different authors meant by learner autonomy. As I mentioned in my post on Nicenet, learner autonomy is a slippery notion and doesn't seem to lead itself to a unanimously agreed-upon definition. Logically, autonomy is synonymous to freedom and independence. And the essence of these concepts goes counter any type of limitations and constrictions usually imposed by definitions. Consistently perhaps, learner autonomy wants to remain autonomous and independent from the boundaries set by definitions.

Much of the skepticism I had about either learner or teacher autonomy, I found out, was echoed, in a way or another, in the different articles, assigned and unassigned, I read this week. In my humble opinion, there is a kind of redundance in the phrase "learner autonomy". It is redundant in the sense that learning as a cognitive processs occurs internally and individually though within a group of people. A number of students may be exposed to the same input but there is no guarantee it will be processed in the same way. Parts of a lesson would be learnt by some and likely mislearnt by some others because the act of learning occurs inside and independently from their peers.

Learner/teacher autonomy is not only slippery, but illusory as well. Teaching within an official educational system implies that one must opearte within a set of pre-established curricula that usually neither students nor teachers contributed in their making. Manoeuvering within such teaching/ learning environments becomes very difficult for teachers due to the various constraints they encounter ( financial, equipment, managerial bureacracy...) However, if teachers cease to see themselves merely as instruments within the system, things would look differently and learner and teacher independence would become a reality.

Fostering learner autonomy is not the school responsibility only. Before coming to and while in school, children should be trained gradually to be autonomous learners. This could be done if parents treat their children as responsible individuals who can be assigned tasks to be done without adults' assistance and overprotection. Raising children that way would undoubtedly make school mission to turn them into autonomous and long-life learners much easier than it is now.

The other assignment was to discuss the possible uses of one computer in a classroom. What follows is what I wrote:

" It should be noted that having and using one computer in a class is a plus in itself. Though my school has neither a computer lab nor one computer classrooms, I have been using my desktop first and my laptop later for different teaching and learning purposes.

I've been mainly using my computer to help me prepare extra exercises, quizzes, tests and customize certificates for my students. With small-sized classes, it's possible to use one computer to involve students in interactive games and cultural quizzes. Students' representatives should be chosen to use the mouse to click on the right answers. This, I noticed, involves all students in learning and further boosts their motivation. Noise resulting from students' answer negotiations is inevitable, but it's a healthy noise. I very often use my laptop with extra speakers to teach listening and speaking skills. For instance, I give students the printed lyrics of a song with blanks to fill in and other questions and ask them to accomplish the required tasks while listening. The song could be either audio or a video clip which they tend to prefer more. I used my laptop as a presentational tool to effectively teach vocabulary with pictures or videos downloaded from the Web or included in CDroms. This proved to be much more time-saving than traditional methods of dealing with new lexis. Grammar points could also be effectively taught through colourful PowerPoint presentations that you create or the ones that you download from the net and edit for your particular teaching context. Last but not least, one of the greatest pluses of using one computer in the classrooms is that is DUST-FREE;-)"

Yours,

Arbi