Jane Petring of Collège Édouard-Montpetit (Longueuil, Québec) asks this very question in an article and forthcoming discussion at TESOL 2009. She notes that “materials writers need to take an honest look at how Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact and learn if we want to remain relevant in the 21st century”. Petering is not alone – the future of the course book is also being discussed on the IATEFL Cardiff Online forum.

The web 2.0 is clearly changing how we work, communicate and learn. So, if the textbook is to keep up with these developments, what should it look like?

End of the Textbook?

Textbooks are still in demand – there are both teachers and students who appreciate the structure and order of a published coursebook. In fact at Avatar Languages we make use of the online English-to-Go service, which provides a valuable and solid textbook-like collection of lesson plans and materials.

However, as we strive to focus on the student’s needs we have found that many language learners are looking for a more flexible and tailored approach. The internet and especially 2.0 applications are key in enabling this because of the following attributes…

• Enormous source of up-to-date content such as BBC news and independent blogs
• Online language reference materials such as grammar explanations and dictionaries
• Interactive applications such as virtual worlds and Google Maps Street View
• Opportunities to create and collaborate through editing wikis, writing blogs or participating in forums

The above attributes of the new internet mean that more people are finding the web increasingly engaging and that it has greater relevance to their (increasingly online) lives than a paper-based textbook does. A previous blog post on “Dogme 2.0” mentions some of the reasons behind this trend and looks at some pedagogical principles that can guide the use of the web 2.0 in language lessons. This blog also has other posts that give concrete examples of how web 2.0 tools can be used in language lessons…

Google Maps Street View to allow students to visit real cities online and describe their virtual surroundings.

Second Life allows for more immersive experiences and can also be used for practicing activities such as presenting in a virtual world conference.

Wikipedia articles can be edited by students as well as being used as a source of information.

Textbook 2.0

But where does this leave the coursebook? And how should it change to keep its relevance? I see the following as possible attributes of a “2.0” textbook…

• Online format with print-friendly option
• Real content that keeps the book continually up-to-date
• Embedding and linking as the means to connect with third-party content
• Encouraging online engagement and collaboration
• Events online to bring together students for social learning and teachers for professional development
• Teachers’ Book offering greater support to the teacher as a facilitator of 2.0 learning

Nergiz Kern suggests similar possibilities on the IATEFL Cardiff Online forum.

Teacher Support Service 2.0

It seems that it is not just the book that may need to change, but also the business model. The textbook 2.0 could be more of a service than a product, because it would need to be continually updated and would therefore feel more like work in progress. Essentially the “book” could be rented as an online subscription rather than purchased as a finished product.

In large part, the textbook 2.0 could allow language schools to contract out some of the work that their teachers already do (finding and adapting resources that engage the students so that language learning opportunities emerge) rather than the current practice of buying in the materials and lesson plans (in the form of a course book).

This is an extreme alternative to the current model of a printed textbook, but perhaps this in itself is a measure of the challenges of keeping up with 2.0 developments.

Real-Life Activities Online – with a Social Element

The internet now has an enormous range of content (audio, video, images, text and applications) and is also becoming increasingly interactive and social. Under the general title of “web 2.0”, the new internet allows us to do more and more tasks online and engage with others in the process. A few examples…

• Shopping (for almost anything) and reviewing the products on the store’s website
• Planning (for travel, holidays and events) and sharing our plans and experiences
• Researching (for background information, daily news, opinions) and giving feedback comments
• Socializing and meeting others: chat-rooms, conferences (in virtual worlds), video-conferencing
• Creating and sharing content: uploading YouTube videos, slideshare presentations, podcasts, writing blogs and editing Wikipedia

With such a huge range of real-life, social activities that are now carried out online, there is an infinite quantity of language learning material available on the web. This material is up-to-date, interactive and very real. It is therefore especially relevant to language learners who do many of these tasks online in their own language and therefore would like to feel more confident doing them in another language.

Example Lessons with Web 2.0

Over the next few weeks this blog will look at some 2.0 tools and discuss how they can be used in language lessons. Some offer more social experiences, such as using Second Life for language learning and others draw on the practical uses of the internet such as using Google Maps Street View in a language lesson. Our students are also producing presentations that are hosted on Slideshare.net (a YouTube service for PowerPoint presentations) and have created podcasts which are hosted on Blip.tv. Others have written and edited Wikipedia articles, while some preparing talks for conferences in virtual worlds. All these examples demonstrate how the web 2.0 can offer a more relevant, real-life focused way to learn a language.

Dogme ELT: Inspiration for Web 2.0 Teaching

Using the internet in this way leads to a very different kind of learning from that offered in a textbook-based lesson. And so the ideas of the Dogme ELT movement (of educators who prefer not to use coursebooks) are particularly relevant to language teaching with Web 2.0 tools. Dogme ELT started in the mid 1990s and took its inspiration and its name from the Dogma 95 film movement. Dogme ELT promoted the use of real content in the language classroom in place of the artificially created materials from coursebooks. This real content serves to create real discussions within lessons and these discussions become the basis of language learning. Language then emerges from the communication in a more organic way than the structured and ordered approach of coursebooks.

Dogme ELT Principles

Scott Thornbury, one of the founders of the Dogme ELT movement, has highlighted several key principles of the Dogme approach. Here is a quick summary…

• Learning happens most directly through interactivity (eg between teachers and learners) and so knowledge is co-constructed in learning rather than transmitted by the teacher.
• Learning takes place through communication and conversation, through which language emerges. The learner’s voice (beliefs, knowledge, experiences) are valid content in lesson.
• Content should engage learners to enable learning – the learners themselves should supply this to ensure relevance. The teacher enables the emergence of language and guides the students toward it

* all emphasis my own

Dogme 2.0

These principles fit well with the teaching opportunities of web 2.0. In fact web 2.0 applications strengthen some of the most important aspects of Dogme ELT approaches: learning is more interactive, knowledge is co-constructed between many more people and materials are re-edited by students to reflect their voice.

• Knowledge is co-constructed amongst a far wider pool of players when using the internet. Communication is not just between teachers and students, but also with other web surfers, who watch slideshare presentations, read lonelyplanet.com reviews and attend (virtual) conference presentations.
• The distinction between consuming content and producing content is now blurred. For example, in a paper-based lesson, a newspaper article remains unchanged by the class activities (at most a letter to the editor could result). In a web 2.0 lesson the texts can be from a Wikipedia article and are therefore editable by the student, or from a blog post, which can then be commented upon by the student.

So perhaps we are looking here at an opportunity for the Dogme ELT approach to evolve into a “Dogme 2.0”, where the “2.0” tag represents the ability for students to engage, interact and create online.

A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.

View Larger Map

In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.

Because the photos were taken with a camera fitted in a Google car, there are set routes along which you can “walk” along the city. The white arrows and line (marked with red circle in the picture below) show where you can walk along. In most cities this is almost any street you can get a car down. The arrow keys take you along these lines and allow you to spin around on the spot. There is also a zoom function to get a closer look.

At Avatar Languages we are making more use of this in lessons – there are a lot of ways it can be used and it makes an interesting alternative to a 3D virtual world such as Second Life. There are no avatars, so you can’t actually meet anyone using Google Maps Street View, but you can share your exact location and even your exact view using the link function (as marked with a red rectangle in the above image).

In other lessons the students have done matching tasks using information from real websites (such as matching restaurant descriptions from Lonely Planet’s site and pictures from Google Image searches) and then done some analytical work with the short texts. The below screenshot shows this matching exercise using the online whiteboard Dabbleboard.

Students then go and visit the locations using Google Maps Street View and are able to describe the surroundings of the restaurant. A similar task is to use property descriptions and photos from online property agents and then visit the neighborhoods to discuss the location and talk about what the student thinks about it.

Street View is very easy to use – go to the map of a city in the countries with Street View (not all country maps have this function – currently it’s USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, France; UK to follow soon). Then drag the yellow avatar (see top left corner of map above) to where you want to visit on the map. Alternatively the balloons offer Street View by clicking on the little photo. The map then shrinks to the bottom right corner.

Although it seems right to say that it’s “almost as good as being there”, from a language lesson’s perspective it is better! We can now “visit” places while taking lots of supporting resources (namely, the internet!) – all from the comfort of your home, office or wherever you are.

Btw, Google has created an explanatory video…