---
title: "(Language) Teaching and Internet Technologies"
subtitle: "Replacing Teachers or Empowering Them?"
author: "Dominik Lukeš"
affiliation: "School of Slavonic and East European Languages"
date: "March 2001"
outline_version: 2
auto_title_slide: false
auto_thanks_slide: false
---

## (Language) Teaching and Internet Technologies: Replacing Teachers or Empowering Them?
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Dominik Lukeš

School of Slavonic and East European Languages

March 2001

## Questions to Ask
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- Philosophy of computer-assisted instruction
- Teachers aren't machines, or are they?
- What is the internet through the teacher's eyes
- Simple, cheap, available technologies: why aren't they used?
- Developing and using real online teaching materials
- Increasing the power of communication between students and teachers
- Distributed teaching and independent learning

## The Technology of Teaching: Teaching Machines
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Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers to save time and labor. In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensable human being. He may teach more students than heretofore—this is probably inevitable if the worldwide demand for education is to be satisfied—but he will do so in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores. In return for his greater productivity he can ask society to improve his economic condition.

## Taking it to the Internet
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**Language materials**

- Dictionaries
- Grammars
- Information about the language
- Corpora
- Linguistic information

**Other resources**

- Newspapers
- Company information
- Computer fonts
- Computer programs

## Leap of faith
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- Internet is good
- Computers are not here to replace teachers
- Technology doesn’t change the nature of the tasks involved
- Technology is powerful enough already to help teachers with most of what they do

## The Big Question - Why not now
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- Management have unrealistic expectations
- Staff are afraid management wants to use new technologies to replace them
- Not enough targeted training is provided
- To save costs projects are often coordinated with computer scientists who have no interest in designing user friendly applications

Click here for the **Big Answer**!

## Teacher ⇨ Student ⇨⇨⇨ Student ⇨ Teacher
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1. Teacher: Create exercises and compose sets.
2. Send to student with comments
3. Student: Complete exercise using reference.
4. Computer precorrects exercise.
5. Teacher: Correct exercise and comment.
6. Send to student
7. Student: View corrected exercise and teacher’s comments.

[http://www.bohemica.com](http://www.bohemica.com)

![Flow diagram in two rows. Top row, left to right: a computer; a teacher figure whose speech balloon says "Create exercises and compose sets."; an arrow "Send to student with comments"; a student figure whose speech balloon says "Complete exercise using reference." The address http://www.bohemica.com sits between the rows. Bottom row, right to left: a small computer with a curved arrow "Computer precorrects exercise" leading to a teacher figure saying "Correct exercise and comment."; an arrow "Send to student"; a student figure saying "View corrected exercise and teacher’s comments."](assets/pages/page-07.png)

## Looking at the whole picture
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**Advantages of the whole system:**

- Automates tasks where teachers behave like machines
- Makes communication possible outside classroom
- Anybody who can use the web can use it
- Uses cheap readily available technologies
- Isn’t limited to text
- Can incorporate other languages and other subjects
- Can incorporate future technologies

![A round white dish holding a cheesecake topped with a red fruit glaze and a ring of piped cream, photographed from above, with a spoon beside the dish.](assets/media/img-5885247fa91ed6d4.jpeg)

*Yes, you can have your cake and eat it!*