VEGETARIAN VAMPIRES WHY THE CALL TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER DOESNT

VEGETARIAN VAMPIRES: WHY THE CALL TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER DOESN’T HAVE TO SUCK THE TEACHER’S BLOOD Cathy Chua Manny Rayner

OUTLINE • Technology providers and teachers: a toxic relationship • From the point of view of moral philosophy • Walkin’ the walk: our own experiences • Vegetarian vampires?

A TOXIC RELATIONSHIP The basic problem • CALL technology providers seduce teachers into using their software • Then they take it away/change the rules • Blood everywhere

HOW IT GOES WRONG: STORIFY • Social media platform useful for teaching • Heavily promoted, widely used • Platform sold to Adobe • No longer affordable for most teachers • Platform closes down, teachers left stranded

HOW IT GOES WRONG: POSTEROUS • Social media platform useful for teaching • Widely praised by experts (Chronicle of Higher Education, Ko & Rossen, Padansky. Brock) • Sold to Twitter • Twitter only wanted to get the engineers • Closed down, teachers left stranded

ARE ACADEMICS ANY BETTER? • Academia increasingly turning into business • Horizon 2020 key concept: innovation to drive economic growth • Popularity of gamification • Data collection: “life-blood of academia” • Helping teachers not in practice a priority

WHAT DO THE TEACHERS THINK? Examples from (Perrotta 2017) • “Sue”: ‘Is it (technology) a better way of doing things, or just an expensive way of doing something very simple? ’ • “Robert”: ‘What I cannot do is be funky and interesting and let my results slip – I just don’t have that freedom. ’

WHAT DO THE TEACHERS THINK? (2) Examples from (Perrotta 2017) • “Mark”: ‘ICT is a black hole, with very short product cycles, the costs of licences and upgrades are also prohibitive. ’ • “Michael”: ‘It’s very clear that we are given freedom insofar as we can demonstrate that we can improve standards. ’

FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW… • Try to recast our ideas in a formal ethical framework • Garrett Cullity, Concern, Respect and Cooperation (2017) • (Other book is less relevant)

“CONCERN, RESPECT, COOPERATION” • Concern: should value people’s welfare • Respect: should value people’s autonomy • Cooperation: should collaborate on worthwhile causes • Tensions: these goals usually conflict

THE CALLPROVIDER/TEACHER RELATIONSHIP: OBLIGATIONS OF THE • Professional obligation: help students TEACHER become autonomous language users • Limited time available • CALL might help students be more autonomous • Risk: if it doesn’t work, waste of precious time

THE CALLPROVIDER/TEACHER RELATIONSHIP: OBLIGATIONS OF THE CALL • CALL provider knows reliability of platform PROVIDER • Teacher does not know reliability of platform • If teacher starts using bad platform, they lose • Conclusion: CALL provider has ethical obligation to warn teacher clearly about risks

WALKIN’ THE WALK • This isn’t just other people • We’ve been less than ethical ourselves • Example: CALL-SLT English course + Spoken CALL Shared Task • Our MOST ETHICAL project so far

THE CALL-SLT ENGLISH COURSE • Exercise: part of Ph. D project 2014 -15 • Interactive online English course • Speech recognition to help teach generative language skills, improve fluency and vocab • 215 subjects in 15 schools

THE SPOKEN CALL SHARED TASK • Joint open exercise 2017 -19 • Used data collected from CALL-SLT exercise • ~15 groups involved, ~20 papers published • Created agreed-on standards and metrics • Considered successful in academic community

BUT WHAT GOOD WAS THIS TO THE TEACHERS? • Unclear that they gained anything • Unclear that everyone gave informed consent • Base software platform abandoned • We can do better than this

WE NEED TO RAISE OUR GAME • We started a new CALL project last year • “LARA”: tools to build interactive multimedia texts for language learning • Already about a hundred students involved • How do we avoid repeating our mistakes?

VEGETARIAN VAMPIRES: KEY PRINCIPLES (1) • Make platform sustainable in the long-term • Value the unpaid contributors most • Write good documentation • Decentralize the server architecture

VEGETARIAN VAMPIRES: KEY PRINCIPLES (2) • Make results usable even without servers • Content-creators must own their content • Clearly inform users about data logging

TO FIND OUT MORE https: //www. unige. ch/callector/lara/ Links to portal, examples, code, documentation