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
Classes using the web
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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
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. |
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