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Nicky Hockly

For this interview, the editors of this volume had the chance to speak with Nicky Hockly, a global expert on digital language education and Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E. In this dialogue, Nicky Hockly offered insights into the past and future of digital education and her current work on digital literacies.

Christiane Lütge and Thorsten Merse: From 1997 to 2002, you worked as the Academic Director of one of the first fully online MA programmes for English Language Teaching, and you have paved the way towards digital education ever since. In your professional experience, what were the ‘digital hopes’ you had in 1997?

Nicky Hockly: Fully online degree programmes were relatively new back in 1997, when I started teaching online. Although we had an adequate LMS (Learning Management System), the emphasis was still very much on asynchronous online communication. For example, our MA students would typically read texts and then take part in moderated forum discussions. There was some multimedia available in the form of audio and video, but it was not as easy to produce then as it is now. Our students accessed course content via desktop or laptop computers – mobile technology was still in its infancy, and Internet connected mobile devices only started to make an appearance in the early 2000s. In our online MA programme we did hold regular synchronous (real-time) small-group tutorial discussions, but the only way we could do this was via text. We had to use MSN Messenger, as tools like Skype were simply not around. You can imagine how slow and cumbersome it was to hold tutorial discussions in real-time via text with groups of up to 10 MA students who had plenty of interesting and complex things to say. I experienced at first hand all of the typical text-related communication issues, such as topic decay (students going off topic in their discussions), overlapping turns (students typing responses over each other) and lag (long pauses while students typed out whole paragraphs). And students who were proficient typists had the advantage over those (like myself) whose typing skills left a lot to be desired! We developed quite detailed ‘chat protocols’ to manage these real time text chats, so that these group text chats worked as well as possible. But it was not ideal to have to hold real-time tutorials via text chat.

My biggest hope back then was that we could find some way of communicating via audio in real-time via the Internet. Although telephone conference calls already existed, these were far too expensive for us to seriously consider for our students. Our MA students were based all over Europe and in Latin America, so it simply wasn’t feasible cost-wise to use telephone conference calls. Skype came along in 2003; these sorts of VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) tools marked a revolutionary moment by making real-time audio communication in online teacher development accessible to all. I was very lucky to experience the ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ of real-time computer-mediated communication. ‘Before’ we had to use text chat, the ‘during’ phase enabled us to use audio via VoIP tools, and the ‘after’ phase consists of videoconferencing made possible by video compression and high-speed internet. Widespread affordable videoconferencing was a distant dream back in 1997! And now, thankfully, it’s commonplace.

CL and TM: Looking back, what are the most exciting developments in the field of digital learning and teaching over the past years?

NH: For me, the most exciting development is undoubtedly the rise of mobile technologies. Mobile technology has seen us integrate a range of digital tools into our daily lives, for personal and professional use, to a level that was unthinkable just two decades ago. What’s more, before mobile, the geographical digital divide was much wider. When I first started working online in 1997, getting online required relatively expensive access to infrastructure such as wired Internet connectivity, and of course access to expensive hardware in the form of PCs and laptops. With the advent of mobile technologies, many developing countries have been able to leapfrog over the need for expensive wired internet infrastructure, and have moved directly to mobile technologies.

And of course, the longer that mobile technology has been around, the cheaper it has become. Some smart phones are now relatively inexpensive, certainly compared to when they first came out. Even simple internet-enabled ‘feature phones’ give users access to email and multimedia in the form of audio and photos. This doesn’t mean that there is equal access to the internet and devices worldwide, but the gap has narrowed over the past few decades, and mobile technology has played a significant role in this.

In terms of access to online language learning and online teacher development, mobile technology and Web 2.0 enabled access to a huge range of resources for learning. The rise of social networks, too, has seen teachers and learners able to access personal learning networks, and to connect with other learners and teachers all over the world. Continual professional development for teachers, much of it free, is now available through a tap on a mobile device screen.

I started using mobile devices with language learners early on, and undertook a research project for The International Research Foundation (TIRF) in 2012, which resulted in the development of a framework for effective mobile-based task design for language learners. You can read the research paper ‘Designer Learning: The Teacher as Designer of Mobile-based Classroom Learning Experiences’ online: www.tirfonline.org/publications/mobile-assisted-language-learning/designer-learning-the-teacher-as-designer-of-mobile-based-classroom-learning-experiences/. Gavin Dudeney and I subsequently wrote a teachers’ resource book called Going Mobile (2013, Delta Publishing) to help teachers understand the potential of mobile devices, and to provide activity ideas and guidelines on how to use them effectively in the classroom. I have always been interested in the possibilities that mobile devices bring to classroom learning, and I believe that mobile devices have plenty of potential to support language learning when used effectively with well-designed tasks. To my mind, mobile technology is still the single most exciting technology development we’ve seen.

CL and TM: Your own work is closely associated with the model of digital literacies you developed together with Mark Pegrum and Gavin Dudeney. What has originally caused you to develop this model, and what aspects did you feel needed integrating into current revisions of this model?

NH: Literacy has always been a central concern of formal schooling. In the past literacy included learning how to read and write, numeracy, and media literacies (e.g. looking at traditional media such as TV or newspapers with a critical eye). With the advent of digital technologies and the Internet, it has been apparent for some time that children need to learn additional literacies in order to thrive in our modern hyper-connected and digital world. Hence the focus on digital literacies reflected now in most educational curricula around the world, at primary, secondary and tertiary level.

‘Digital literacies’ is an umbrella term, and as such, it is somewhat vague. Although almost everyone agrees that we need to be digitally literate, exactly what that consists of is less clear, despite the existence of numerous frameworks. Our model of digital literacies is a construct that tries to break down the rather vague term ‘digital literacies’ into smaller and more understandable competences or sub-skills. Our model groups these sub-skills (or ‘literacies’) into four main areas: 1) communication; 2) information; 3) collaboration; and 4) (re)design. We consider these four areas to be the lynchpins in any consideration of digital literacies. Communication because digital technologies allow us to be connected and to communicate both locally and globally, via range of tools and media, as never before. Information because of the vast amounts of information that we can now create and/or find online; and we need a range of digital literacies to be able to access, evaluate, create and understand this digital information. Collaboration because digital technologies allow us to collaborate, to present ourselves, and to learn and work in distributed networks globally. And finally (re)design because since the rise of web 2.0 in the late 1990s, we have been able to produce or design our own digital content, redesign or remix the digital content of others, and to easily share that content across a wide variety of digital channels.

Our model of digital literacies was developed, particularly by Mark Pegrum, in the early 2010s, and the first edition of our book Digital Literacies was published in 2013. A lot has happened technology-wise since then. We have seen the development of new digital technologies and tools such as fitness trackers, or augmented and virtual reality apps and headsets. Each of these new tools allows us to do new things in our personal and professional lives, and they require new digital literacies. For example, understanding and applying the data provided by your fitness tracker requires a certain amount of data literacy. Using virtual and augmented reality requires spatial literacy. There is also an increasing amount of misinformation and disinformation being spread online, which we ourselves may unwittingly share or amplify via our social networks. Navigating one’s way safely and ethically through this ‘information pollution’ (Wardle & Derakhshan 2017) means that ethical and critical digital literacies have become more important than ever. Current revisions of our digital literacies model keep the same four key areas, but we have renamed some literacies (e.g. ‘multimedia’ literacy has become ‘multimodal’ literacy to reflect current scholarship), and we have added others (e.g. data literacy and a range of critical literacies – critical mobile literacy, critical material literacy, critical philosophical literacy, and critical academic literacy). Code literacy now includes an overt focus on technological literacy and robotic/AI literacy to reflect current developments in hardware and software that are likely to become increasingly important in the future.

Although ours is one of several digital literacies models or frameworks currently in existence, what makes it unique is that we focus on language teaching and learning. Our model is quite detailed, with several literacies within each of our four key areas, and we provide concrete activities for teachers and learners that can support the development of specific digital literacies at the same time as developing students’ language skills. Our focus on digital literacies is both theoretical and practical, and our model has been used to inform a number of European language learning initiatives, including the DigiLanguages project funded by the Irish National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (www.digilanguages.ie ), and Swedish pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes (Allen, 2015; Berggren & Allen, 2017). The second edition of our book Digital Literacies (Dudeney, Hockly & Pegrum, forthcoming) will include activities for language learners that help them develop the newer digital literacies in our framework too.

Digital Literacies

The model of digital literacies by Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockly and Mark Pegrum was first published in 2013 in Digital Literacies: Research and Resources in Language Teaching. The revised version is already accessible in the article “Digital Literacies Revisited” The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL (2018, Volume 7, Number 2). Figure 1 shows the revised framework of digital literacies from 2018.

Figure 1: Revised framework of digital literacies 2018. Adapted from the original source: https://markpegrum.com/overview-of-digital-learning/e-learning-with-web-3-0/

CL and TM: Is foreign language learning actually changing fundamentally through the use of digital media? Or is this merely an illusion?

NH: This is an interesting question. Second language acquisition (SLA) research shows us that certain things need to happen for us to learn a foreign language. For example, we need both input and output – that is we need to be exposed to the language, and we also need to produce or practice it. We need a certain amount of language awareness, that is, an understanding of the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation – the ‘nuts and bolts’ – of the language. We need to be motivated and engaged to learn. These things have not changed. However, digital resources arguably enable us to optimise some of these key SLA conditions. For example, we can now get input in the foreign language from a huge range of sources, and in a range of media (written, audio, video, images). We can easily connect with speakers of our target language, and communicate online with them in written and/or spoken form. There are plenty of language learning resources, apps and courses, in a range of languages, that we can access, often for free. So there is no doubt that digital technologies have changed how we access – and even use – language. It has also changed where and when we access learning resources, because the internet provides us with many opportunities for informal and ‘just-in-time’ language learning.

The role of the teacher has also been changed by technology. From frequently being the only source of information for and about the foreign language, the teacher now needs to become a facilitator who can guide students towards online resources, which in some cases can provide better or more relevant language models than the teacher him/herself. I don’t think that the teachers are going to become extinct though. Language is essentially social, and language learning is a social process. Language learning apps and websites, no matter how fancy the interface or media used, only go so far towards satisfying our communication needs. And teachers will continue to be well-placed to facilitate and support those needs in formal learning contexts.

CL and TM: If you could freely design a tool or an app for language learning without any financial or technological restraints, what would it be able to do?

NH: Probably the most difficult thing to mimic with digital technology is the cut and thrust of real human conversation. Chatbots function adequately in very limited domains, in which the conversational prompts are limited and predictable, but they are nowhere near capable of producing the kinds of real-life interactions that humans are capable of. So if I had a completely unlimited budget, I’d love to have an android (a humanoid robot) that could hold a real conversation on a huge range of topics, using all of the typical elements that we see in human speech, such as interruptions, hesitations, rephrasing, and so on. Maybe that will be possible someday, à la Blade Runner, but it’s a long way off! Essentially what I’m suggesting is the ideal language conversation partner, with whom you can practice your newly acquired grammar and vocabulary as if in real life, while having an interesting and engaging conversation!

CL and TM: How do you judge the potential of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence for foreign language education?

NH: These are essentially the latest tools in a long line of digital technology tools. There has been some research into virtual reality (VR) for example, which shows that it can be effective in certain learning contexts, such as vocational training. For English language learning one can imagine VR being used to create slightly more realistic scenarios for role-plays. There has been some interesting work done with VR in teacher education, in which teacher trainees watch 360º recorded videos of themselves carrying out teaching practice with a class, to support post-teaching in-depth reflection (Driver 2018). However, there is no way that VR – or any other technology – is going to revolutionise language learning. There is no one single tool, app, webpage or piece of software or hardware that is going to magically make your students learn English ‘better’. Beware any educational technology vendor who comes along and promises you that their latest VR learning material is what you need to help your students learn more effectively. The research to back up such a claim is simply not there.

In terms of artificial intelligence, it is already being deployed in tools like chatbots, which have some limited applications to language learning. As pointed out by Fryer et al., “chatbots present a free and ubiquitous source of language interaction for many students learning English as a Foreign Language” (2019: 4). Research into the use of chatbots for language learning shows that they can provide low level learners with exposure to and repetition of grammatical structures, in very limited conversational domains. Nevertheless, students perceive chatbots as a poor substitute for communication with another human being – “[a chatbot’s] lack of emotion, visible cues, and inability to confirm understanding were reported to be some of the major drawbacks to its form of interaction” (Gallacher et al. 2018: 76).

So AI (in the form of chatbots) may function as a support for limited grammar or vocabulary practice, but currently AI is not complex enough to mimic human interactions in any convincing way, as I mentioned in response to the previous question. In short, I see virtual reality and artificial intelligence as having limited roles within language learning and education. They may make things more engaging and provide additional support or practice for students, but they are not a solution in themselves.

CL and TM: Thank you, Nicky, for this exciting and insightful dialogue.