Ioannou-Georgiou (2006, p. 382) supports Bax’s (2003, pp. 23–24) concept of ‘normalisation’, that CALL will become sufficiently mundane as to cease to be remarkable – a deliberate tautology – however I believe it is more likely that in the age of “there’s an app for that” ongoing awareness of CALL will become more restricted to practitioners who implement it for teaching and learning. With an ever-increasing scope of what is achievable (and being achieved) in software, the lay person will have an proportionately ever-decreasing interest in fields that are not immediately relevant to them as consumers. Similarly, the physical technology will become less a factor as portability (both in terms of the mobility of the device, and the ability to use a software across operating systems) as BYOD1 (ahem) normalises.
Interestingly, Ioannou-Georgiou (2006) identifies two factors for approaching normalisation - enthusiastic and motivated pioneers in an organisation, and organisations that have extant CALL policy and guidance (p. 382), over and above access to money and therefore equipment (p. 383) – which indicates a willingness to work with the materials at hand rather than a dependence of emergent technology.
It should be noted that Ioannou-Georgiou’s (p. 382-383) reference to a mobile phone as being new technology but not a computer would not stand up to scrutiny today, with smartphones having greater computing capacity than the collective total used to achieve the lunar landing (Zakas, 2013, p. 1).
It is my view that as the capacity and capability of technology has now outstripped the demands we seek to place on it (in my experience as a computer scientist, but a shared view) CALL will develop within that framework – that is, if we can meaningfully imagine it, we can achieve it – with the eventual appearance of holographic person-to-person interfaces (Walker, 2003) and ‘Gene’ Roddenberry-inspired2 universal translators appearing in the next decade.
1 see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device
2 see roddenberryfoundation.org/
References
Bax, S. (2003). CALL—past, present and future. System, 31(1), 13–28. doi:10.1016/S0346-251X(02)00071-4
Ioannou-Georgiou, S. (2006). The future of CALL. ELT Journal, 60(4), 382–384. doi:10.1093/elt/ccl029
Walker, R. A. (2013). Holograms as Teaching Agents. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 415(1), p. 012076). IOP Publishing.
Zakas, N. (2013). The evolution of web development for mobile devices. ACM Queue. Retrieved from http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2441756
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