Weaving the Web... (continued)

Each new student and faculty member at MIC is assigned both an e-mail account and a website location (URL) for developing their individual homepages. All files and programs are housed on centralized servers so that both faculty and students can access their e-mail, homepage, the Web, personal data files and library catalogues from any computer in the college; this set-up virtually eliminates the need for individual disks containing personal files. It also means that faculty members can create lesson plans on their own office computers and access the plan on the instructors' computer in the classroom. For our co-taught course in Sociology and Environmental Issues, we used a shared computer file to design the course and the lessons.

In the same way that content and language objectives are integrated, computer competencies are not taught in isolation but rather as an essential part of the learning as a whole. Students learn how to create a homepage on the Web, for example, by using their homepage to publish their assignments electronically. The MIC four-year curriculum includes a series of benchmarks for computer literacy which are modeled after the language benchmarks adopted by the college to describe language development . The range of competencies are those which are used most often by MIC students. The benchmarks cover four areas: wordprocessing; page layout and graphics; intranet and internet; and HTML and webpage authoring. The full document, which is still in draft form, can be viewed on the web at http:// www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp faculty/jgallian/CurrResearch.html . This website also contains abstracts of research papers on the use of web technologies in language learning by Judy Gallian, the MIC faculty member who developed the computer benchmarks.

Some examples of MIC faculty
and student work on the Web
The use of the Web varies greatly from one class to the next, from one professor to the next and from one student to the next. The list below is a representative sample of a few MIC websites which demonstrate the various uses. We encourage readers to explore the main MIC website http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/ to appreciate more fully the range of possibilities for using the Web for language and content learning. From this main website there are links to individual faculty members' homepages, student homepages, information about the college and the region.

Classes using the web
From the main MIC website, choose the link called "Classes", then the link called "Courses using Web technology - Archive". Two of the courses with which we were involved are archived at this link. In SS155, an Introduction to Sociology, David Rehorick and his teaching partner, Bill Perry used the Web interactively by structuring experiential modules. Students analyzed their experiences on their individual homepages, developed tables to display the information visually and wrote essays to synthesize their learning. As the course progressed, all student work was linked from their homepages to the main course syllabus.

English III, co-taught by Judy Gallian, Bill Perry and Sally Rehorick, used a multimedia approach for a unit on cloning, which had the following components:

- a traditional language laboratory set up to simulate a phone-in radio show. Students recorded and summarized the talk show responses in paragraphs, tables and charts.

- CD Rom databases accessed through the library server. Students researched and summarized information about cloning.

- WWW search engines. Students researched and summarized information about cloning. From this they formulated questions about the scientific basis of cloning, conducted interviews with a scientist, and prepared a person opinion paper on the ethics of cloning. They researched online government documents and newspapers on the legal status and pending legislation on cloning. They compiled a class bibliography consisting of the class choices for "hotlinks" to the best online information about cloning.

- MIC websites and e-mail. Course instructors posted assignments, course syllabi, comments and ongoing encouragement to students via the instructors' websites and e-mail. Mounting information on the website was found to be more effective than e-mail for most kinds of information because of the permanent nature of the website and the formatting flexibility. Students used their own webpages to publish their essays and they used e-mail to submit drafts of their work for comments.

Some representative faculty and student homepages
From the main webpage of MIC, you can find faculty and student homepages by clicking on the link called "People". In the faculty list, click on the links of Judy Gallian, Bill Perry and Katharine Isbell to browse state-of-the-art homepages. In the student list, the following homepages show student capabilities at different stages of development: Mami Shinoda (Class of 2002); Chizuru Kurono and Nayef Alfehadi (Class of 2000); and Takashi Shii and Koichiro Nomura (Class of 1999). It will be clear from a browse through these sites that uses of the Web at MIC are varied and creative. The format for homepages at MIC is not specified and students and faculty alike take great delight in the process of inventing new ways of using these technologies. The main characteristic of MIC's use of the Web is that it forms an integral part of the learning process rather than an adjunct to it.


Sally Rehorick and David Rehorick are founding faculty members of Miyazaki International College in southern Japan where they taught for two years (1996 and 1997). At the present time, Sally is Professor of Second Language Education and David is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Sally's homepage can be viewed at http://www.unb.ca/slec; David's homepage is currently under construction. They may be contacted by e-mail at the following addresses: sallyr@unb.ca and rehorick@unb.ca.


Réflexions, The Journal of the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers - November 1998

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