Chris Walsh

On 9 November 2006 Dr. Christopher Walsh, from the School of Education, Deakin University, gave a talk to Payap TESOL students and faculty on making use of Internet technologies in ESL instruction. He underlined the value of getting students to work with the media and technologies that already inform their social and private and lives, capitalizing on young people's motivation to 'get noticed' in the 'attention economy' that they increasingly inhabit. A wide range of learning tasks and activities can be based on blogs, message boards, penpal exchanges and online games. There are real pedagogical benefits to the responsibility and pride of ownership felt by students who post blogs in public spaces or upload their multimodal creations to open-access web sites. Dr. Walsh reported positive results also from allowing students to choose the medium for handing in their course assignments - including, for instance, PowerPoint and web page formats. His presentation generated much enthusiastic discussion.