Nobles Technology - Digital Learning Center - Caveats
Based on our experience, we believe quite strongly that there are two key requirements or characteristics which any school wishing to set up a lab such as ours must have. Above all, any school building its own digital lab absolutely must have a language teacher or team of teachers who are technologically savvy and comfortable venturing into unknown territory with a "do-it-yourself, trial-and-error" approach. The school also must have a supportive Administration and Language faculty who can accept uncertainty and live with uneven "two steps forward, one step back" progress as the lab development team feel their way forward.
Another important consideration is the degree to which the language teachers are already comfortable with using computers and/or are secure enough personally and professionally to be able to accept help from students who know more about computers than they do. Teachers who feel intimidated by the technology may have a fairly difficult time adjusting to teaching in a digital lab unless they are provided with a fair amount of individual support. It should be kept in mind, however, that the degree of support needed by the faculty may actually be less than that required as a result of the installation of an analog lab. Analog labs require teachers to learn how to use a console which may well have no counterpart in the school, whereas the teacher (and student) workstations in a digital facility are perfectly ordinary computers, virtually identical to those the faculty and students may already be using both in the school and at home. While teachers and students must become familiar with new software, the fact that that software operates on machines with which the users are already familiar and in ways with which the users are also familiar (windows, buttons, pull down menus, etc.) reduces the amount of learning required.
Because of the degree with which Nobles had already incorporated computers into the life of the school, all of the language teachers (and all of the students) at Nobles were already using e-mail as a matter of course, and most already had a considerable degree of facility at using the World Wide Web. This pre-existing familiarity certainly is a factor in the surprising speed with which our language teachers have adapted to the new lab
Schools who have (or can "grow") such teachers and which can approach the process with the attitudes described above can gain one substantial benefit; such a digital learning space can cost much less than the more traditional analog lab. The cost of turning an existing computer room with networked PowerPC Macintoshes into a digital learning center is only the cost of the software. Since almost all of the "language lab software" is shareware or relatively inexpensive tools which are being "re-purposed" (and which the school may already have on hand), that extra cost would be only a few thousand dollars.
At the moment, we are not aware of any companies providing "turnkey" digital labs the way analog labs have been sold for many years. There is a great deal to be said for the sense of security buying a "turnkey" system can provide; if something doesn't seem to work, a telephone call to the vendor should be all that is required. If a school decides to develop its own digital learning center, it is dependent on its own resources and the good offices of the digital language lab using community, members of which share ideas and information electronically.
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