The old standard of analog technologies typically included audio cassettes and audio-active tape
player-recorders. In a number of instances, monitoring and broadcasting were possible from a
teacher's console.
The hardware was unique to a small number of disciplines in education. Learning how to use it did not,
therefore, constitute an exportable skill.
Activities were limited to passive listening, listening and writing answers, listening and repeating or
answering orally (while recording), and recording student monologues. Complex labs frequently had
several other functions which were rarely used.
These labs could be used during a class session, but as class sizes grew, this function became
increasingly difficult to accomplish, and in large institutions there was need for several schedualable
rooms full of workstations to accommodate all classes. Even with adequate workstations and rooms,
scheduling was often set on a rotation not particularly favorable to the learning sequence in units of a
language course. Many teachers did not like the job of on-the-spot monitoring and evaluation in a
situation where there was no face-to-face possible. While a lab was being used in lieu of a class
session, the actual classroom was vacant, and nobody except students from that vacant classroom could
use the lab. As it became more difficult to replace work stations in a specific system or to have the lab
for regular sessions, an increasing number of institutions reverted to lab use for assigned work, which
frequently involved only two functions, passive listening or listening and writing answers. Student use
of audio-active functionality dropped off rapidly once students were not being monitored.
The audio-cassettes themselves were engineered for effectiveness and maximal longevity at 30 minutes
a side, yet the lab component of a typical publisher's foreign language lesson became 38 to 42 minutes
long, necessitating 90 minute cassettes, which were more likely than the others to fail, snag or wear
out. Since students rarely use the full capacity of the media, they are find themselves unable to deal
with the situation where a students before them have recorded their answers on a cassette, and they feel
forced to listen to these, unaware that they can use the recording head to rid themselves of previous
users' voices. In addition, cuing to a spot on an audio cassette, finding a particular part of a lesson, is
always th big challange. Cassette playing quality can be effected by the condition, cleanliness and
alignment or position of recording heads. Student lab tapes are at least 4th or 5th generation copies in a
media whose stability is affected by signal fuctuation. Finally, certain mistakes from improper
operation of high-speed duplicators are inevitable. While it can be argued that tapes produced for
"library" or listening mode are quite portable, many of the last generation of publisher's tapes
required an open workbook. In other words, they were not really designed for a commuter student's
passive listing on the car tape player. Those cassettes containing student responses made in the lab
often had to be reviewed and evaluated in the lab because of the special placement of recording heads on
audio-active machines.
Newer digital technologies typically include micro computers and software (on hard disk, disk
drive, zip drive, CD or DVD drive). The hardware is common to both office and home. A number of
students already have years of experience with it before beginning language study.
Practice using this hardware, with systems software and specific applications always develops
exportable skills. One only has to remember that the hundreds of thousands of unfilled Information
Technology positions in business exist because of our society's relative technical illiteracy. The more
experience our students have with computers, the better off they will be in the real world.
Multimedia computers, configured with the right software permit students to do all of the basic things
the old analog equipment did, and many more, like viewing web sites, listening to or watching live radio
and TV programming, reading the world's great literature, facilitate person-to-person communication
through e-mail, chat, moos, internet phone, low-end video conferencing, and many more. They have
the capacity of taking students out of their monolingual and monocultural isolation, and either present
or simulate the real-world target culture in which we are training students to operate. Voice
recognition software allows students who choose to practice a much better idea of their accuracy than
anything in the analog lab. Multimedia Computers can therefore develop all four linguistic skills and
cultural competency. This and the fact that they can be used literally anywhere, make them important
tools for learning independence, since students can have access to materials by owning their own
software, through remote use of licensed and protected software or through web sites.
If an institution has electronic classrooms, the instructor can bring in a laptop to demonstrate just
about every lab functionality for a number of orientation features. A good instruction sheet (with a
web page for a back-up) will take care of the rest. In addition, if a teacher collects and checks lab
work, including some lab activities on tests and quizzes, students will spend their time wisely in the
facility. If they are not finished when a lab closes up, there is a good chance they can continue their
work at home.
The fact that students will go individually into the lab on their own time assures that the lab will be
able to serve several classes and perhaps languages at any given time. At a time when classroom space
is at a premium in many institutions, it also assures efficient use of classrooms.
The limitations of the audiocassette are vanished with the variety of delivery vessels in diskettes, CDs,
DVDs, internet applications. While diskettes are limited to 1.4 megabytes of information, CDs can
store up to 650 megabytes, and DVDs up to 17 gigabytes. Digital recordings have the potential of
lasting longer, and their binary-base assure a stability not found in analog.
This is not to say that there is no place for analog technology. At this point, audio and video libraries
will be largely analog, though a number of worthy alalog recordings are being remastered and recast in
digital format. I would add that the variety and flexibility of experiences made possibile through
multimedia computers allow for some productive integration with analog technologies. We see this in
some of the better foreign language textbook packages, the activities revolving around the use of TV5
and SCOLA (which involve limited off-air recordings), and those suggested by transmediating efforts in
the The Mercury Project North American Distance Education Network*
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*"The Mercury Project." In La Visiocommunication à l'Université
d'Orléans (Orléans, 1998). [script and one minute internet demonstration in a 31
minute educational film].
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