Educational Tool or Death of Humankind? Why Not Both?

My own acquaintance with Computer Assisted Language Learning comes in the form of various podcasts I have downloaded in order to enhance my own abilities. Like a lot of people, my expertise in any of the foreign languages I have been introduced to is fairly lopsided; this makes any particular format or lesson, in any media, insufficient to address all of my own shortcomings.

I have therefore sifted through quite a number of podcasts over the years, hoping to find one tailored to my needs in, say, French or Spanish. I have seen the quantity and variety of podcasts multiply substantially in the last year or so, which leads me to wonder if we won’t eventually reach a state where every second language learner on the planet is in possession of his or her own needs-based curriculum, available on the internet or some other unforeseen method of distribution.

My reservations are that this could seemingly lead to the creation of a dystopian “hive-mind” in which each of us represents a single cell in a unified organism—but, then, I am prone to consider such things. I only hope that we, as a species, are blessed with an enlightened and benevolent Queen.

As for the reading, I have long suspected that pedagogical texts require a certain quota of graphic insertion in order to present the illusion that they are embracing a multimedia approach to instruction. In the present article we are offered the conceptual benefit of triangles, as well as a set of concentric circles; in the next chapter I fully expect to be entertained by a trapezoid.

In the end, I guess the real question here is how to use CALL technology for good without making our roles as teachers (or our species) obsolete?