Listening & Speaking in a Computer Lab

This week we are working on Listening and Speaking in our CALL class.  We are looking at a lot of technology tools and several people are giving presentations, including a guest presentation from our local Podcasting expert. 

In class today, we'll be working on developing a list of podcasts that may be of use for language teaching/learning.  You can view the list here as it develops.

Unfortunately, by trying to cover so much information, we won't have that much time for hands-on work with the tools, which means that our group learning experiences will be somewhat limited to "See this cool tool I've linked in the PPT?  It has tons of great teaching applications, but figure them out on your own...outside of class."

But that brings up another point that's very interesting (and salient to this week's topic).  We have class once a week in a computer lab.  The computer lab model was once one of the biggest resources for technological approaches to education, but in many ways a computer lab seems to have (possibly) outlived its usefulness. Or, rather, it is in need of updating to interact with Web 2.0 tools. 

This is not to complain, as I am glad to have access to such a resource.  And, actually most of the limitations that we have faced in my class have relatively easy solutions. Rather, I'm interested in some of the limitations to the traditional set-up of a higher education computer lab and why they matter in CALL.  Here are two that have been somewhat inconvenient for our class so far:

• No permission to install software.  In order to avoid littering computers with all kinds of programs, computer labs on our campus (and, in my experience, this is true for many large educational institutions) are locked down to allow only administrators the ability to install programs.  We could contact the IT person to have the programs pre-installed, but this is not an ideal solution.  

• Limited A/V capability. The lab computers (desktops) do not have webcams, which is perfectly normal for computer labs.  Nor do they have microphones/headsets.  All this makes sense as these labs are paid for by and designed for the composition program on campus (where recording audio/video is not common).  However, this limitation of these massive desktops is in stark contrast to the cellphones, laptops, and tablets that most students in higher education carry around with them.  Only having a keyboard and mouse on the desktop makes some areas of CALL become very passive or non-interactive experiences.