The TESOL Technology Standards are designed to provide guidance for learners, teachers, teacher educators, and administrators who use technology as a component of English language learning and teaching. The Standards incorporate two complementary sets of standards. The Standards for Language Learners focus on what learners need to know in order to use technology productively, safely, appropriately, legally, and with a critical eye. The Standards for Language Teachers address how teachers can help learners achieve the Learner Standards, be personally productive and creative with technology, and continue to develop expertise in teaching with technology. The Teacher Standards recognize a general and an “expert” level. All teachers are expected to meet the standards at the general level. The expert level describes those who have additional skills, and who should be given the appropriate recognition for sharing those skills with others. Checklists for self‐assessment, program assessment, and online teaching are part of TESOL Technology Standards, Description, Implementation, Integration (Healey et al., 2011).
Unsupported claims have been made for the use of games in education and the gamification (game-like aspects, such as scores and point goals) of various learning elements. This brief article examines what may be the motivational basis of gaming and how it can affect students' behavior and ultimate success.
Communities of practice (CoP), a term coined by Lave and Wenger (1990), describes the kinds of informal knowledge building and sharing that occur in workplaces characterized by apprenticeships. CoPs are characterized by a common domain, a relatively narrow area of expertise or purpose; a community where newcomers and experts alike can build and share expertise in social interactions, both those that further the work at hand and those that develop as humans socialize with each other on a relatively frequent basis; and fi nally, a practice (praxis as opposed to theory), that is, the more or less conscious effort to build a repertoire of knowledge over time by developing skills in the fi eld hands-on . Lave and Wenger found signifi cant evidence that interactions not directly related to this matter furthered the cooperativeness and effi cacy of group endeavor. Thus situated learning in a CoP can be both unconscious and deliberate, but usually it is directed by the individual within a social context. This type of learning contrasts with the classrooms and curricula of educational systems, which involve knowledge that is abstract, out of context, and other-directed. Lave and Wenger's (1990) concept of situated learning is usually seen as harking back to Vygotsky's theory of social cognition (1978), social and cognitive development within a zone of proximal development; that is, children achieve their highest cognitive development by engaging in social behaviors, with adult guidance and in peer collaboration, or both.Over the late 1990s and fi rst decade of the 2000s, Wenger's further thinking about CoPs (1998CoPs ( , 2004 extended the meaning of the term to include online communities and interactions at a distance, rather than just in a physically confi ned workplace. The concept of online CoPs included the types of interactive environments fostered by then new technologies, such as electronic lists, online bulletin boards, or forums; and has since expanded to the social networking applications, such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. Wenger (2004, p. 2) was quick to point out that the type of casual socialization most usually found in these Web 2.0 applications does not really pertain to CoPs, which require a search for knowledge in a particular fi eld and the application of what is learned over a period of time. However, the capabilities of such applications for social networking are of importance in developing online CoPs, for they enable groups to socialize casually in ways similar to those of local, land-bound communities and when used to share knowledge, to develop a personal learning network (see, e.g
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