Prompt 4

Reading Prompt #4
* LEVY – Ch. 2. Design
* RICHARDSON Ch. 5. RSS: The New Killer App for Educators
Comment one one or two issues raised by Levy and Stockwell CALL educators must think about when it comes to the design of CALL products. Then, comment on what types of RSS feeds you might be interested in using with students or following yourself.

Prompt 4
As Levy said, in many respects, the language teachers may be considered designers (p10), because they need to design materials, develop tasks, teaching goals, class time, class management, etc. while in contemporary CALL class design, many issues need to be taken into consideration, for example, know the strengths and limitations of CALL materials; be aware of technical support; be creative; test, retest, and evaluate with users, etc., and I think “be aware of the technical support” is extremely important. Because now we are talking about “computer based learning”, especially “distance learning courses” are more and more popular, technical issue involves in CALL design. I really like Strambi and Bouvet’s idea of “chose a CD format and WebCT to create the language-learning materials and the environment for their use” (p19). Some areas may have internet access problem, so CD is a good choice to facilitate the distribution of such media rich content, and overcome the access issue. On the other hand, CD format cannot allow student-student and student-teacher interactivity, so WebCT will be a good way to solve this problem (p18). In a word, technical support is the key issue of CALL class design, only when this issue is solved can students access to CALL class.
RSS is an interesting stuff, before I always met RSS logos on all kinds of website, but I didn’t know what it is! Now I realize that it is such a useful tool that we can read the subscribed feeds, which are from many sites, at one place. We can read more content from more sources in less time, and also, we can immediately get updated new information that we are interested. I will definitely use the RSS feeds for current news, my CALL class study, and graphic design information.