Nose to the AI grinder and course dev ponderings


Well, it's been a hot minute since I last jotted down some thoughts. Don't worry. blog, it's not you, it's me 😂. I also have a daily meditation/reflection journal that I used to jot things down in, even though sometimes it was "Doogie Houser style," that only gets an entry twice or thirce a week.  Gotta take a step back and do some more reflecting.  On the plus side, the weather is finally nice enough to get out and do a daily walk, something I used to do most summers until work (in all its multiple facets) got to be a bit too much.

In any case, you didn't come here to read about my (lack of?) exercise and my busy schedule, did you? I thought I'd jot down some thoughts since it is July and summer is one-third gone (sigh). One of the things that I am not making as much progress on as I would have liked is course design. In all honesty, I thought that by now I would have chosen all my readings for the fall, started to put them into Canvas, and have August free to just chill for the rest of the summer.  That's not happening...  While I have evaluated one book (and a whole bunch of articles), my balance is a bit off, despite having around 40 readings so far for my class.  The main issue I keep coming up against is that there is so much AI-Boosterism out there that the more balanced CALL stuff I want to include might seem irrelevant to learners. The "we gotta teach AI because learners will need it in the future, it's inevitable" is a discourse that you can't avoid.  So yeah... Trying to navigate the fresh, actually stale, hype of it all.

On the plus side, there are a few things that have happened! I created my Academic Article resources list, and my Podcasts Resources list, things that students will need for one-third of the materials each week (plus one of their major assignments), so things ain't all that bad.  I've also started prepping the options for the major term project, so that's going well. I just need to develop some directions about what to do with each 

The other notch on the "plus side" of things is that I've gotten my CALL groove back. Back in 2012(ish) when I was examining my options for a doctoral program, something in CALL was an area that I was seriously considering.  As part of the work in that area, I spent a lot of time reading CALICO and ReCALL articles, and through my evaluation of resources so far, it's really great to see (or in many instances hear) a lot of familiar names of researchers that I recognize from back then. I think it's really lit a fire that I've been kindling for a while.  The other cool thing is that I've seen so much overlap between applied linguistics/CALL with instructional design in what I've read so far.  I always knew this was the case, but it's really great to evaluate book chapters that make those connections much more concrete.

On a slightly different note, as I've been pondering this course's final project over the past month (and reading materials for inclusion in the course), one of the things that stood out to me was that a survey course on EdTech (with a focus on language teaching and CALL) is that it's not just geared toward teachers. Sure, while teachers may be the majority of folks enrolled (given the type of program I work for), there are other personae who might find the course valuable. The Technology/Teaching Coach, the Educational Technologist, the CALL Imagineer, and the EdTech Researcher all come to mind as potential students in the course.

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