Tapped In Member Perspectives: Meet Vance Stevens
Vance (VanceS) is a media specialist living in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He leads the weekly
Writing for Webheads: World friendship thru online language learning discussion
group at TAPPED IN.
Vance's Perspective
I consider myself a teacher of English as a Second Language, having done that for
the first 20 years of my career. I have been keenly interested in how computers
facilitate the process of language learning since 1979, and my most recent jobs
have involved management roles in CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) and
Self-Access Lab management. In 1995 I took up a 2-year position with an educational
software company and it was at that time that, in order to keep my hand in teaching,
I started a writing course online. Once I resumed working overseas, my online course
evolved into a language learning community called
Writing for
Webheads. More recently, it is a teacher-training course in online community
building modeled on W4W, Webheads in Action (see
http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/webheads.htm
and
http://lightning.prohosting.com/~vstevens/papers/evonline2002/webheads.htm).
Both communities were formed and nurtured entirely online and both have developed
into supportive communities of practice where participants experiment hands-on with
free online multimedia connectivity tools.
It was perhaps inevitable that such a community should gravitate toward TAPPED IN.
Our community has met each Sunday noon GMT since 1998 and TAPPED IN is the portal
for those meetings and proven to be our most robust environment for text chats.
It not only serves our purposes in that regard but has introduced us to many other
like-minded "Webheads" from among the TAPPED IN community. In addition
to being the most appropriate platform for our endeavors, TAPPED IN has encouraged
us to become involved with its own community development. We are highly appreciative
of the support of its members, and look forward to an ongoing and long-term mutual
relationship.