ikt-basert norskundervisning i utlandet - Høgskolen i Nesna

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this case me) will decide to do so (typically, when a few more students will ask the same
question, i.e., when the question will really became „frequently asked“)
4) On-line forms, or on-line questionnaires, are one of the most important ways of
communication via Internet. Its advantage, in comparison with the ordinary email, is that the
student does not need to have her/his own email account. The students of the Norwegian
language have a possibility to fill in such a form, to indicate what they need most in the
lectures, and to add any (so called „free-text”) comments about the lectures or the site. In
principle, the person who creates an on-line form, may indicate which fields are compulsory
(e. g., sender's name, email, gender and so on). I have decided not to set any field as
compulsory, so the students have the possibility to keep their names and email addresses
secret when they fill in the form. I think that this should increase their sense of security they
know that they can criticise me anonymously. However, in practice I have not received a
single anonymous form, although some students have sent me critical remarks!
Besides these sorts of indirect asynchronous communication over the Internet, there exist a
few more, which we do not use in communication with our students at least, not at the
moment: such as mailing lists and newsgroups. Mailing lists is a kind of email
correspondence, when a group of persons use one common email address. All messages
which are sent to this common address are forwarded to individual email addresses of each
member of this particular mailing list. In some cases messages can be sent to this common
address by anyone, in some cases only by the members of the mailing list themselves, and in
some cases only by the moderator. A very similar thing is the so called newsgroups. In this
case the messages are distributed and presented somewhat differently to the so-called
subscribers to a newsgroup, but the result is, loosely speaking, the same: messages are being
received by a group of persons.
We have not yet been using blogs (that is, on-line diaries) in the process of teaching, but we
intent to employ this tool in the very nearest future.
Thus, the asynchronous ways of communication via the Internet are both important and
practically useful. They enable both the students and the teacher to publish information
quickly, and they stimulate the communication between the students and the teacher, decrease
the distance and increase the confidence between these two parts.
That's why, when somebody asks me what I think the Internet actually is and whether it might
in any way be useful in the learning/teaching foreign languages, I use to answer, somewhat
metaphorically, “The Internet Is the Space of Dialogue”.
One of the most important aspects of Internet, besides the means of communication, is the
World Wide Web, which is, loosely speaking, presentation of text and images in the form of
HTML-files.
One can use such files not only to present the competition questions, which I have already
mentioned, but also to give a brief description of the Norwegian grammar, tables of noun,
adjective, verb and pronoun declination/conjugation, glossaries to some texts, some texts
which are not included in our main textbook, and – very important – lists of home-works and
deadlines for every individual group.
Fredrikke nr. 11, 2005
Organ for FoU-publikasjoner – Høgskolen i Nesna