5/17/2012 – The Facebook Project: Negotiating the gaps between foreign language program directors, foreign language TA’s, and their tech-savvy students
mb35 on May 10 2012 at 10:17 am | Filed under: language pedagogy, technology
CSL Presentation Series
Jamie Rankin,
Director of the German Language Program at Princeton
will discuss
“The Facebook Project: Negotiating the gaps between foreign language program directors, foreign language TA’s, and their tech-savvy students”
Once upon a time, language program directors were the main repositories of SLA theory and classroom experience, and until recently also experts in developing media applications. No longer: the TA’s now teaching language courses have been using social media for most of their lives and are comfortable with it in ways that relatively few directors are; and they are keenly aware that their undergraduate students are even more comfortable with technology, having lived their entire lives in a social media environment. This creates challenging scenarios for directors who want to help TA’s apply SLA theory as usefully as possible to their classrooms.
The discussion is based on a project – centering on Facebook as a media delivery vehicle – developed and carried out collaboratively by a language program director, two native-speaker TA’s in the their late 20s/early 30s, in classrooms of undergraduate students learning German.
When: Thursday, May 17, 2012
Time: 12:30 – 1:30PM
Where: Cobb 210 (CSL – 2nd Floor of Cobb Hall)