The authors of this publication have received financial support from the Norwegian Non-fiction Literature Fund.
This is a website for teachers and teacher educators interested in exploring ways of using tools available in a Virtual Learning Environment (or Learning Management System) to create interaction and dialogue between learners and teachers.
Many educational institutions - schools, colleges and universities - have invested in a Virtual Learning Environment and are looking for good ways of using it in addition to administration and evaluation. Many young people handle electronic communication as easily as they talk, and we need ways of giving them meaningful tasks that develop learning to harness their skills. We would like to show some of the huge potential for filling your “room” in a VLE with the “voices” of students using writing for discussing topics together and with a teacher, planning work, creating shared texts, producing portfolios, reflecting on learning.......
Background and intentions for the website
Authors: Kathryn Hermansen and Ninian Millar
Oslo University College, Faculty of Education, Senior Resource Base
Our own experience is from the training of teachers of English as a foreign and second language, and our examples come from this source. But the dialogues created with students can just as well be in their mother tongue and in any subject area. The ideas discussed here have developed from our work in the creation of distance courses for language teachers, supported by Norgesuniversitet (Norway Opening Universities). Much of the relevant literature is from distance teaching, where the VLE is often the only means of creating contact, but we hope to show that the same tools can create meaningful communication and learning in a hybrid context where face to face learning and learning in a virtual environment are combined.
The first two parts of this website discuss and exemplify in some detail what we mean by creating dialogue in a VLE and how this dialogue can be created. The third part looks at collecting and processing material from the Internet which may be used in a dialogue in the VLE.
The website does not set out to be a complete handbook for teachers at all levels wanting to use Virtual Learning Environments in their classes. It concentrates on “good practice” using some of the tools available in VLEs to create dialogue and interactivity. We therefore hope to get responses to what we have written so that a new dialogue will then be established between readers of the website and between them and us.
Much has been written both in book form and on the Internet , and if you want to know more or want to go into more depth on any topic discussed here, you should look at the references page.
If you have examples of good practice to share, critical or positive reactions to what we write, or questions which we or our readers might answer, we hope you will try out our blog or send us an email
Contents of this website.
In A Virtual Learning Environment we look at the way the VLE is constructed and what it can contribute to teaching languages or other subjects.
In Tools for Creating Dialogue we look in detail, with authentic examples, at the dialogue genres that can be created online. Forums and interactive writing have the main focus and we also look at chat and emails.
In Using the Internet in Teaching, we discuss how to bring the Internet into teaching and some of the advantages and problems involved.
