Language Teacher Education
7. Conclusion
The online exchange projects between the University of Education in Karlsruhe and the University of Muenster described in this article represent a twin focus.
For one, a context for collaborative work on assignments in a higher education setting was provided using social media tools with the overall goal of exploring and critically reflecting on used tools and the practical implementation of these.
The second, equally important focus of the exchange mirrored the fact that all participating students are pre-service foreign language teachers. Therefore, the online-based scenarios were intended to provide an experiential environment in which students could learn how to use media purposefully, with the objective for them to discover ways of integrating online media meaningfully in the context of foreign language learning.
Collaboration via social media such as wikis, blogs or social networking sites is one way of using the productive, creative and participative potential of Web 2.0 applications and supporting students in the exchange of ideas and working towards a negotiated task outcome. For course instructors, it is essential to scru- tinize the social media tools available and to identify how the structural make-up and the functional logic of each medium can facilitate or engender collaboration.
Instructors and teachers need to develop complex tasks with relevant themes for collaboration that encourage each student to contribute individual content and opinions to the shared final outcome. For the participants of this exchange –as the pre-survey results indicated– it was essential to move from a more receptive use to a productive and collaborative use of media, which required that students had to learn how to use online media such as wikis and blogs in a Web 2.0-oriented way. The students’ reflection of the collaborative processes, as well as the analysis of the resulting media products, showed that in general the social media used can provide a suitable environment for solving tasks, working together and pre- senting a final product. It must be said, however, that the ‘high hopes’ frequently
connected with the use of social media in educational settings might not always be met, and that their alleged potential does not per se play out productively in the classroom, e.g. when students bypass the collaborative potential of a wiki or when the interactive potential of blog comments to negotiate meaning is not always fulfilled due to lack of an actual audience, as the examples have shown.
Therefore, collaborative learning environments using social media require strate- gies that allow students to embrace the full potential of the social media used.
Further research is needed to investigate the detailed micro-processes that occur during the collaborative processes in order to understand why some collaborative settings work well and others can be prone to failure.
When it comes to the focus on teacher education pursued in the courses and in the online exchange, the described approach aimed at enhancing students’
digital literacies and give them a ‘taste’ of how online media could be incorpo- rated meaningfully in language learning. To achieve this, the use of social media and the collaboration was designed so that students would have to deal with the various dimensions of digital literacy theoretically and practically: e.g. knowing how a medium is operated technically, understanding the potential of a medium to achieve certain learning goals and actually putting a medium into practice, and then reflecting critically on learning outcomes (cf. Guichon/Hauck 2011).
All of these steps seem to be necessary for teacher candidates to be prepared for planning, conducting and evaluating learning scenarios that make ready use of social media. Indeed, the online exchange between the courses provided a protec- tive environment to try out, and then reflect on the actual use of media, while at the same time freeing the students from the general assumption that they would be treated as omniscient digital natives. The outcome of the cross-institutional exchange indicates that after using social media tools themselves, teacher candi- dates develop a high capacity to critically reflect on the suitability and potential of using such tools in the language classroom and to evaluate their respective advantages and disadvantages. It would be interesting to investigate in how far the participants of this teacher education course would perceive of the knowledge they were able to acquire throughout the course projects as helpful for their ac- tual profession as soon as they have begun their teaching practice. Such insights could then be fed back into higher education to update and improve the concepts employed in media-oriented courses for teacher education.
Heutzutage werden Soziale Medien fast selbstverständlich zum kommunikativen und sozialen Austausch genutzt. Auch im universitären Bereich erhalten diese Formen zune- hmend Einzug, beispielsweise durch E-Learning Plattformen mit Chat-Funktionen oder den Einsatz von Wikis und Foren. Dabei stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob und wie die neuen
medialen Kanäle in Seminaren kollaborative Arbeitsformen unterstützen können, um Studierende sprachlich und medienpädagogisch auf ihre Tätigkeit als zukünftige Fremd- sprachenlehrende vorzubereiten.
Der vorliegende Artikel bietet einen Einblick in den Einsatz Sozialer Medien für kol- laborative Lernzwecke auf universitärem Level. Es werden neben den zugrunde liegenden theoretischen Grundkonzepten der digitalen Medienbildung, Kollaboration und des kom- munikativen Fremdsprachenunterrichts auch diverse kollaborative Projekte beschrieben, die im Sommersemester 2014 und 2015 zwischen Lehrerbildungsseminaren in der Fremd- sprachenwissenschaft an der Universität Münster und der Pädagogischen Hochschule Karlsruhe durchgeführt wurden. Die Studierenden erhielten durch die Kooperation die Möglichkeit, verschiedene Soziale Medien für kollaborative Lernzwecke kennenzulernen, einzusetzen und über ihre Vor-und Nachteile zur Fremdsprachenförderung zu reflektieren.
Dabei werden im Artikel der Einsatz von Wikis zur Sammlung und Archivierung von Lernergebnissen, das kollaborative Erstellen eines Lesejournals durch die Verwendung eines Blogs und ein virtueller Austausch innerhalb eines Sozialen Netzwerkes detailliert beschrieben und diskutiert, sowie durch die Ergebnisse der Teilnehmerevaluation kom- plementiert. Am Ende des Beitrages steht eine allgemeine Reflexion des Potentials von Sozialen Medien für kollaborative Zwecke in der universitären Lehrerbildung sowie für die Förderung digitaler Medienkompetenz bei zukünftigen Lehrkräften.