A Brave New Digital World

While reading chapter 1, in A Brave New Digital World by James Blake I firstly impressed by his description of technology and how he breaks down the meaning of technology with the tool metaphor.  He uses the metaphor "good tools become invisible once the users understand their basic operation", which is new perspective of technology for me.  Reflecting on this new perspective, the majority of our daily interactions are mediated by tool, that largely goes unnoticed.  Applying this principle to SLA, language learning takes place in the social context (sociocultural theory), can perhaps take place in a sudo-social context created by technology.  Blake stresses that the L2 language should be comprehensible for the students and also that the students themselves feel like they are interacting in a social manner.  Comprehensible input is necessary for L2 learners to be able to engage with the target language.  Mediation is required to ensure that correct forms of the target language is being used, and also to guide students to the correct formation of the target language.  Students are and have grown up with this explosion of technology literally at their fingertips.  Their proficiency and confidence with this medium is most likely at a high level, perhaps maybe even more than the teachers.  Yet, this new medium should not be avoided but rather embraced, because if not for anything else, students will want to engage with the target language in this medium.

Blake's explanation of technology helped me to obtain a better perspective of the use of technology and how it becomes invisible after sufficient exposure.  This is not something that I had reflected upon before.  His explanation made me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the opening scene where there is a monkey who uses a tool (i believe a bone) to accomplish a task then he throws it up into the air and it becomes a spaceship.  As humans we have always had technology but not necessarily realized that it was around us.   As educators, we have the opportunity to engage our students with this new technology in a meaningful way.  Students use technology for social purposes already, why not translate this into the SLA realm.