I very much like Carol's enthusiasm for adapting interfaces and content to
culturally specific situations so students can tap into prior knowledge and
familiar styles of discourse and make effective use of the unique
multimedia and interactive capacities of computer-based learning
tools. But Luiz and Mike bring up a really interesting question: what
about the teacher? It makes sense to apply the same reasoning that Carol
applies to the students that are **using** the tool, to the teachers that
are **designing** its features - and therefore using its programming
techniques, which, as Luiz and Mike point out, cannot be culturally
neutral. Here are some passages from Carol's article - think of them from
the point of view of what the teacher has to do.
from Carol's article:
page 51
Because the CBN is a tool, teachers, curriculum designers, or researchers
can create content and interfaces that are responsive to the community of
students and the particular demands of the texts.
page 52
The tool [the CBN] itself is inherently flexible because it is simply a
structure on which differing content and interfaces can be built.
page 58
In the case of tools such as the Lyric Architecture developed by Pinkard
(2000) and the CBN described in this article, teachers, for example, can
create content, structure tasks, and in some cases create interfaces that
can be adapted to local audiences.
- Steve
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