Breadwinners, sportsmen and conforming girls : representations of gender in Finnish EFL textbooks

Design perspectives on technology, language teaching and language teacher education

Despite the national strategies and major efforts to promote pedagogical use of ICTs in education, training programs for in-service teachers have often failed to develop sustainable pedagogical practice. For sustainable development, teachers need to be offered opportunities to explore the role of technology in relation to their concept of language and learning, and reforms should be designed in negotiation with teachers and students. In teacher education, aspiring teachers are being informed of the latest research results, but bringing the theory down to practice is a major task that calls for development work soundly based on research. In this paper we suggest that design-based research (D…

Multiplayer 3D Game in Supporting Team-Building Activities in a Work Organization

The aim of this study was to enhance and analyze communication and team-building activities in work teams that played a 3D multiplayer game. This paper reports the preliminary findings of the multi-methodological empirical study on players' perceived effects of the game play on team-building.

Towards new cultures of learning: Personal learning environments as a developmental perspective for improving higher education language courses

AbstractThis article provides readers with an understanding of the concept of the personal learning environment (PLE). It suggests that PLEs can be used in two complementary ways: as a developmental lens for integrating ICT and creating new pedagogical practices and digital literacies for academic language learning, and as a context in which learners can practise and develop core skills such as digital literacies, team and knowledge work, and interactional skills – skills that are needed for success in today’s knowledge economy. The article places PLEs within the broader development related to the cultural changes brought on by the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies – participation, team…

Doing what we teach : promoting digital literacies for professional development through personal learning environments and participation

Despite the proliferation of social media, few learners make effective use of digital technology to support their learning or graduate with the skills necessary for developing and communicating their expertise in the knowledge-driven networked society of the digital age. This article makes use of the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLE) to approach the question of how digital literacies for learning can be taught and learned in the context of higher education. It presents a model of a PLE course, the overall goal of which was to equip the learners with the skills and competences needed to create their own digital environments that would enable them to tap the online networks and …

Uusia oppimisen ympäristöjä rakentamassa

Artikkeli pohtii mediaympäristön muutoksen kielenopetukselle aiheuttamia paineita ja ratkaisuja oppijalähtöisen, henkilökohtaisen oppimisympäristön (personal learning environment, PLE) näkökulmasta. Sosiaalinen media liittyy arvoiltaan ja toimintatavoiltaan läheisesti PLE-ajatteluun, joten aihetta lähestytäänkin aluksi sen avulla. Lopuksi esitellään muutamia F-SHAPE-hankkeessa syntyneitä ajatuksia siitä, mitä PLE:n käsite tarkoittaa ja miten sitä voidaan käytännössä toteuttaa. nonPeerReviewed