Q. What about the use of technology in an Invisibles classroom?
A. I know it is impressive to tell our bosses that we use the internet, distance learning, audio and visual enhancements, discussion boards, graphic organizers and voice-over Internet protocol, even videoconferencing in our classrooms, but I think that we are just fooling ourselves. Maybe five kids in a classroom can make that stuff work, if that. It’s a bust.
Q. But there is a lot technology out there in schools these days and people expect us to use it.
A. If technology really helped kids acquire languages, then kids would acquire languages much faster than kids did in the past, but that hasn’t happened and all the new computer stuff is pretty much regarded these days as a big fail, along with textbooks.
Q. So you think that technology is a bust?
A. Pretty much, at least in foreign language education. At one time 15-inch wide laser disks were all the rage. They lasted about a year in American classrooms, and other so-called great innovations have all met the same fate, including the original debacle, that miserable thing called the language lab, which besides the huge costs made a tremendous amount of people intensely dislike language learning for many decades in the latter part of the last century.
Q. It’s because of the need for human community in acquiring a language, right?
A. That’s the way I see it. Nothing is more interesting to a human being than human speech, in my opinion. New words are acquired omnisciently because the learner enjoys hearing the message of the language and that is how they learn, not because some machine tricks them into it.
Q. Do you have any more thoughts on computer-based language learning?
A. Look, do we really want to further isolate our kids away from basic human contact and their need to learn social skills, which is accomplished through human speech via eye contact with other human beings?