Prompt: How do you envision your project’s lifespan beyond your degree? What broader impact do you hope your project will have? What would you have to do (during, or beyond the program) to ensure your project realizes that impact?

I write this blog post as I’m thinking about the “Context & Setting” section of my (late) deliverable. Hopefully the blogging format, vocabulary, and sketchy tone will free me from being stuck with this part. Hopefully all blog entries will be useful as a means to think about future steps in my thesis.

Well, the prompt I chose makes me go back to the first semester, when I was taking Education Technology in a Global Context, with my adviser (and now committee member) Russell Neuman.

Russell has mentioned several times the importance of thinking about my career plan while doing all course readings and assignments. Basically, the question he taught me to ask was: “How can this thing I’m doing right now contribute to the career I am pursuing or intend to pursue?.

I’m not much of a planner and I’m even less of a career-oriented person. For example, the reason why I began to teach languages was that I needed money, and it was easier to just start teaching than going through a probably long hiring process at any media/design company. But once again, Russell motivated me to think about my goals, which ended up being connected all over with language learning and teaching. Then, since the end of Fall 2014, I began to focus most of my thoughts and efforts in languages. First time in my life I’m doing this!

And… who do I intend to be in the world of language learning and teaching? Not sure, of course, but the idea of being a language coach has stuck to me for a while. I certainly need to work on my own definition of this term (better than this definition), but I’d be something like:

  • I will know a lot about language learning as a cognitive process, so I’ll be great at picking, presenting, and adapting effective strategies and activities for language learners.
  • With such meta-knowledge about languages, I will be able to help people out even with languages I am not fluent in or don’t speak at all. Therefore, I’ll learn a lot as I go.
  • I will not necessarily teach languages to people for an extensive period. Since language learning is a lifelong process, I’ll teachhelp them figure out how to learn languages.

In order to do this, I will have to deal with a lot of materials and contents from different sources. Could you just imagine what it’d be like to work with three people on the same day, one Spanish intermediate speaker, one advanced English and one Portuguese?

Keeping up with this scenario, it’d be nearly impossible to keep track of which strategies have proved to be effective with each learner (adaptivity), which vocabulary each person wants to be exposed to (meaningful learning), when to motivate each student (positive reinforcement), etc.

In other words, I need a highly customizable tool to be an efficient language coach. My thesis project seems to be taking the shape of that tool. Basically, I’d be designing for myself at first, which is an idea that may have upsides, but it’s usually not recommended, as far as I know:

“Wouldn’t this approach simply result in a product that is designed for a target market of one: you? How much of your own time, effort and money would you spend designing, building and testing something BEFORE you start to investigate whether there’s anyone else out there who shares your particular problem?” (comment from this page)

This is a nice clue to what I probably need to spend more time researching: my target audience.

But maybe I can see this from a different perspective. Maybe I’ll be actually designing a tool not for myself, but for the language learners whom I will be helping out. Yes, that definitely makes sense: I’ll design a tool for them to use with and/or without my assistance.

This all got to confusing, so let’s try to think of my design as having two functions:

  • Planning lessons, that is, selecting and arranging the activities and exercises intended to help the user achieve specific competencies in a defined target language.
  • Taking lessons, which is, of course, doing everything that has been planned.

Now, let’s assume that my target audience can be divided into two groups: Teachers* & Learners. The array of possible scenarios of interaction would be something like this:

  • Teachers:
    • Planning lessons for students.
    • Planning lessons for self-improvement.
    • Taking lessons for self-improvement.

  • Learners:

  • Taking lessons assigned by teachers.
  • Planning their own lesson.

  • Taking their own lessons.

  • Teachers + Students

  • Taking lessons during class.
  • Planning lessons together.

By teacher (*), I mean any tutor, educator, coach, or friend that guides or helps another learner through learning a desired target language. Actually, these bullet-points show that teachers and learners have basically the same goals and abilities. This makes me wonder…

Am I targeting language teachers (like myself) or am I targeting language learners (like myself)? This is precisely the broader impact I hope my project will have: to make language learners realize they can be their own language teachers. Does this make sense?

After a long and confusing blogs post, I feel like I’ve achieved my goal to understand a little better my context & setting (the target audience was a bonus) and to feel motivated to keep writing the first (and super late) deliverable. Cheers!