Time is precious--you can't buy it or ever get it back!
That is why Delicious is a tasty tool: it increases mobility and saves time and redundancy. It would enhance just about any work domain that relies on frequent Internet searches. It also offers the user some power to edit and categorize, just as regular bookmarking.
Google Scholar is an interesting tool that has many potential applications in World Languages, particularly at the advanced levels. Like other search tools, it is important to alert students to the fact that there is no transparency in search ratings, and what the implications of that fact are. But, to be able to access full texts is a great "democratizer"--the
reader, in effect, gets to extract what s/he deems important from a text, rather than an unknown anthology editor. I can imagine this being terribly exciting to social studies teachers who want to encourage the use of primary sources. I anticipate that it will be extremely useful for my projects in which language and cultural studies overlap, but of less relevance to other aspects of language learning that do not lend themselves to "project-based learning." (For a more detailed look at this "pb" phenomenon, of which MILI is also a part, readers may want to check out an essay by Steve Lohr in the
New York Times, August 17, 2008: "At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/technology/17essay.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Steve%20Lohr%20/%20School&st=cse&oref=slogin).
Like most other tools, search engines and project calculators are only as good as the people who use them. The clearer the goals are stated from the outset by an instructor, the better the outcomes are likely to be. The RPC is a solid insurance policy for good outcomes. It forces instructors to be very specific about
developmentally appropriate goal setting, access to information, applications of information and "product" evaluation. In fact, I prefer the term "outcome" in the medical sense to "product"-- "outcome" suggests a fluid, ongoing process, rather than a termination.
There are only so many hours in the "real world" day of an educator. By training, American teachers often lack serious research experience of any kind. They also suffer from very weak content-area preparation compared to professional peers in other industrialized countries. Teachers' academic and on-the-job "training" (an unsettling term if ever there were one) favors reliance on gimmicky "one-size fits all" methodologies. That is one reason why these technology and research tools are just as important to teachers as to students; putting them to good use compels teachers to maintain their own skills in knowledge acquisition and use. That can only serve to improve the generally low regard that most other professionals have for educators.
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