Thoughts as of today

Indeed a week has passed since I last posted. In the meantime, I've been busy with various commitments in Padova (work & family) but have had time to read the Introduction by Andreas and Marita Schocker-v. Ditfurth, who works at the University of Freiburg, to the book (let's see if I can get this in German!) Aufgabenorientiertes Lernen und Lehren mit Medien: Ansätze, Erfahrungen, Perspektiven in der Fremdsprachendidatik. (So I've been trying to figure this out...The first part means "Task-oriented learning and teaching with media: approaches, experiences, perspectives in" and I think that last long word means telecollaboration in German because it has something to do with teaching languages with other people, right?)

Anyway, Andreas kindly sent me this text and I was utterly surprised to see how much it fit into what I'm already researching - now whether or not this has anything to do with my PhD remains to be seen! The chapter is entitled Research on the Use of Technology in Task-based Language Teaching. What struck me most was the emphasis given to multiliteracies. Thanks to my good friend and research colleague, Francesca Helm, I've been inspired by the multiliteracies movement, starting with the New London Group (A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies in 1996!) and Lankshear and Knobel (new literacies) as well as the work on multimodality by Mirjam Hauck in the context of FL and Kress in a more general context, but have been having difficulty finding this 'research gap' that could be the focus of my PhD. Anyway, the point is, I have (sadly) realized that Fran (the Francesca mentioned above) and I in our daily practice have simply 'landed on' something that other researchers, such as those mentioned above and Warschauer (in the context of NBLT - OMG he has a page on Wikipedia!), have already considered. Nonetheless, before becoming totally depressed, I think the framework that Fran came up with is worth investigating.

So, I'm going to make a few posts here about what the article has made me think about and the other parts of the literature it has inspired me to read. BTW, it's so nice to be a student again :-)