Ania_Lian

Narizoma: Critical Pedagogy in Practice
A chapter submitted for publication in a book series sponsored by
APACALL
(Asia-Pacific Association for Computer-Assisted Language-Learning)
2004

Ania Lian
Critical Pedagogy and Technology Consultants Pty Ltd, Australia

Grazia Scotellaro
School of Teacher Education
Division of Communication and Education
University of Canberra, Australia

Debbie Dolan
School of Languages and International Education
Division of Communication and Education
University of Canberra, Australia

Andrew Lian
Center for the Study of Languages – MS 36
Rice University
6100 Main St
Houston, TX, 77005, USA
Phone: +1 713 348 5913
Fax: +1 713 348 5846
E-mail: lian@rice.edu

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concept of Narizoma: a web-based educational environment currently under development. The discussion focuses on the collaborative aspects of the environment and therefore on the kinds pedagogic demands that teaching institutions as a whole, rather than single departments or individual teachers, may need to respond to, if they wish to help support such a complex community at work.

Characteristics of Narizoma are that it is a large and complex environment. It is ongoing (potentially forever), engaging students in an increasingly complex web of issues which then feeds back into their daily lives. It is autopoietic because the lives of the participants constantly generate new issues. These issues develop as a result of need rather than from pre-determined content.

Its objectives and structure emerge from ongoing discussions in the literature in relation to the quality of communication that information technology systems can make available to us and the potential that enhancing these qualities may contribute to education in general, and second language learning in particular. The discussion which leads to the description of the Narizoma environment brings to focus the issue of the intellectual framework which would provide a basis for creating such negotiating structures. The concept of the Narizoma environment is presented against the background of a number of educational projects conducted by the authors over the years. All these environments share the principles of Narizoma, and illustrate the contributions that reflective and exploratory learning models can offer.

Narizoma: Critical Pedagogy in Practice

1.   Introduction
The concept of communication as involving negotiation of the references which are familiar in order to effect a change in the dynamics between people is not without consequences to L2-teaching research and practice. The concept suggests that communication as negotiation leads to generating new forms of reference. This then implies that to learn to communicate does not mean learning a language as such. Rather, it means learning the skills of negotiating i.e. “rules of use without which the rules of syntax are useless” (Hymes, 1996, p. 33).

The understanding that language is both, a means (or terms) for negotiating meaning and, as suggested above, also as a product of this negotiation suggests a very dynamic view of language. It also helps us form a framework which coherently links the concepts of communication and language. But, it is a very risky framework. It implies that the logics upon which we build our negotiations are an object of and subject to negotiation. There seems to be nothing stable about language that we could teach as the pieces which comprise it, or that make up the knowledge of language. Communication, as a concept which involves negotiation, removes from language teachers the object of their expertise: the language.

This dynamic view of language also shifts the focus of L2-teaching and research away from the issue of ‘What to teach and how?’. If communication is always about negotiation, be it between speakers of the same or different languages, then it is impossible to identify the correct protocols or logics which would guarantee that understanding happens. In short, there is nothing that can be taught as such. Furthermore, teaching abstract concepts, in fact, runs contrary to the understanding that communication means negotiation. Thus studies which hope to match learning objectives with specific models of learners (low level, high level, students from different backgrounds, etc.) run the risk that, effectively, they create learning conditions that respond to the learning needs of the constructs of learners that they create, rather than to students’ negotiation problems as they experience them.

This risk is reflected in the critique that theories can often suggest the existence of the very problems they are supposedly designed to solve. Thus, in our view, the objective of the learning environment therefore is not to teach, but nor is it to leave learners without support. Rather, the focus on negotiation orients L2-teaching research and practice toward identifying the means which would help learners to break the logics, or the protocols, that obstruct this negotiation process. The objective therefore is no longer how to teach ‘correct logics’, but how to ensure that negotiations would not stop. Without negotiation, communication stops, and so does learning.

In congruence with this view of L2-teaching research and practice, this chapter describes the concept of Narizoma: a web-based educational environment currently under development. Narizoma means ‘New Rhizome’. 'Na' is a play on the Greek word for new/s and 'rizoma' stands for rhizome in Italian. Narizoma is being created with the intention of increasing communication opportunities between individuals and groups in spite of whatever differences may exist between them. The idea is to construct an environment which, in order to function in an inclusive way, must come to terms with a number of issues, least of them linguistic differences between its citizens.

In this regard, the hope behind Narizoma is to create conditions where the support which teachers offer, or the citizens of Narizoma themselves, is directed toward overcoming the specific difficulties which living in Narizoma generates. In this way, the pedagogic practices of classrooms, would be geared toward assisting students in the actual communicative interactions which they need to resolve to participate in the life of Narizoma. Of course, this focus does not ensure that the applied forms of assistance will be successful. But it does challenge L2-teaching research and practice to respond to the demands that living in Narizoma places on their students, and, also, it takes pedagogic practices of classrooms outside of the walls of classroom, and therefore outside of the world of abstract knowledge taught to realise abstract objectives.

It may also be the case, that in order to function in Narizoma, students will learn more than one language simultaneously. As said earlier, in Narizoma, the goal is to communicate in order to live, rather than to study a language as such. The main objective behind the structure of Narizoma therefore is to reflect how educational institutions can adapt their intellectual capital to the demands of a truly collaborative structure. The argument of this chapter is that in order to so, it would be necessary to step away from strategies which reinforce divisions between individuals in terms of arbitrarily selected commonalities (linguistic or disciplinary) and instead, to focus on ways in which the quality of students’ interactions could be enhanced and assisted.

The discussion which leads to the description of Narizoma focuses on this aspect of the environment. It does so by foregrounding the concept of dialogic learning conceived as directed toward facilitating forms of interaction which help individuals grow the frames of reference in relation to which they evaluate and hence restructure their communicative behaviour.

2.   The concept of dialogic learning and CALL-based environments
The concept of dialogic learning as used in this chapter is different from that generally applied in the sociocultural approaches in SLA (cf. Lantolf, 2000). Dialogue here does not describe a process of progressive build up toward mastery (Lantolf, 2000, pp. 17-18). Rather, it involves individuals in critiquing or revising the terms in relation to which their interactions are played out (cf. Latour, 2000). Thus the two concepts of dialogue are very different. In Lantolf, the dialogue serves to ‘recreate history’ by creating experts in the process where individuals first “move through stages” until “finally they gain control over their own social and cognitive activities” (Lantolf, 2000, p. 17). Here, on the other hand, dialogue serves for ‘escaping history’ i.e. “generating more ideas than we have received” (Latour, 2002). It is a process which involves a collision of perspectives whose sources of validation and capacity to enhance understandings take the form of an object of investigation, not acquisition.

A dialogue of this kind does not aim at recreating experts as it does not construct a person into a specific position. Rather, the objective is to involve individuals in reflecting upon or testing the concepts in terms of which they act in order to identify their explanatory power in relation to other rival perspectives. In this sense, dialogue is not conceptualised as structures which reproduce history, but which effect change. Dialogue therefore is seen as contexts where histories collide and where negotiation occurs between contrasting or incommensurable positions. An outcome of this process of collision and negotiation are more informed perspectives i.e. perspectives which are more aware of own limitations and, as such, more critical. We can thus conclude that dialogue, as conceptualised in here, involves a change in the dynamics between concepts that inform our actions, effectively expanding these concepts and, and, as a result, effecting change.

Most importantly, though, it would seem that this change in the dynamics will depend on the extent to which the negotiations help to bring in new elements powerful enough to reveal tension between elements or perspectives which otherwise appear commensurable while, in fact, obstructing expansion and learning. In the context of L2-teaching, the difficulty in achieving this goal is compounded in models which conflate language with culture and which suggest that groups which are separated by language are also separated by culture. It is our argument that an assumption of this kind immediately removes any platform for dialogue and learning. It leaves individuals nothing to negotiate and build upon as it creates an unassailable gap between linguistically different groups. With no frames of reference available for students to compare, contrast and, in the process, restructure, the teaching models offer no framework which would explain how the learning is to take place. L1 and L2 speakers are conceptualised as belonging to two different worlds, each for itself, and each developing in isolation from the other. This is the case, for instance, in recent studies conducted by Kramsch & Thorne (2002) and Furstenberg, Levet, English & Maillet (2001).

Both projects involve CMC-based interactions between American and French students. Both projects adopt a methodology where the object of investigation is the other culture and the other language. Both involve students discussing these although neither study proposes frames of reference which the discussions are to follow. Consequently, as Kramsch and Thorne’s (2002) study shows, it was not the frames of reference that were on trial but the students themselves. Furthermore, as Eric’s (an American student) commentary shows, for the entire duration of the study neither group quite understood what the interactions were meant to achieve: “[I]t seems true that they weren’t doing the same thing we were. It seemed like, you know, we had a task. And they, it seemed like, I didn’t know what they were doing” (Thorne, 2003, p. 45).

To explain this confusion, Thorne uncritically adopts the argument of the ‘cultural divide’: “Trust and relationship-building for the Americans and truth value and negotiation of factual accuracy for the French involved differing goals, frames of reference, and perceptions of what is desirable, and even possible, though Internet-based communicative activity” (Thorne, 2003, p. 46). He does so without attempting to consider that the divide did not emerge naturally but was imposed by the very framework of the course and effectively prevented students from questioning its meaning and, in the process, building upon shared frames of reference. It is the divide implied in the methodology of the course that made Eric speak about “us and the French” (Thorne, 2003, p. 45).

As in the Kramsch and Thorne study, interactions in the Cultura project are also directed toward creating a picture of the other thus reinforcing, rather than seeking to overcome, the unassailable gap which engaging in this activity creates between the foreign and target language speakers. The project leaders thus speak about “developing students’ understanding of another culture” (Furstenberg et al, 2001, p. 57), enabling them “to look at the universe through the eyes of others” (Furstenberg et al, 2001, p. 58), and the project offering “both sets of students” (Furstenberg et al, 2001, p. 59), the French and the Americans, “on both sides of the Atlantic a unique comparative, cross-cultural approach for gradually constructing knowledge of other values, attitudes, and beliefs, in ever-widening approach to understanding the foreign culture” (Furstenberg et al, 2001, p. 57).

As the project asserts, “Explicating these differences is one way to develop cultural literacy” (Furstenberg et al, 2001, p. 75). However, since the explications were to be constructed within the language-specific cultures it seems plausible to argue that they would be framed monologically and not dialogically thus lacking a platform which would allow students to identify the explanatory power of the differences that they identified. This is why discussions about culture do not necessarily generate understandings of culture:

Given that, even for native speakers within French educational systems the explicit teaching of canonical culture regularly fails to produce legitimate cultural ease, how much less likely is it that foreign-language classrooms will provide their students with functional skills for that kind of performance? (Cryle, 1996, p. 281).

The tendency to see language as unifying its users in a single frame of reference (culture) is widely spread in L2-teaching research. It is our view that learning activities which link A language with A culture do not only propagate the belief in one’s own culture on the one hand, and the culture of others on the other (Chambers, 1996, p. 144), they also provide no conceptual basis for constructing a platform for intercultural dialogue and hence are counterproductive in relation to the very goals which they hope to realise (de Nooy, 1996; Freadman, 1994). However if, as Thorne mentions, culture mediates human activities (Thorne, 2003, p. 40), culture can be seen as tied to the frames of reference (i.e., the interplay of various forms of value, or capital, cf. Bourdieu, 1991) in terms of which these activities are constructed.

Furthermore, since it is impossible to trace the historical developments of the American and the French people (or indeed any other people) to the point where it would be possible to claim that a complete separation of the cultural frames of reference has occurred, it would seem that whatever understandings individuals form, they do so in the context of practices and in relation to those practices. It would follow that the objective of (cultural) learning cannot be to understand the other (and in the process to create the other), but to ‘work’ with the other. In other words, the aim is not to see the “other” as located in language, but in the various forms of reference which are sourced in practices and which, therefore, are irreducible to language. In this way, the “other” does not divide, but functions as building blocks which help everyone, irrespectively of their language, test the assumptions about practices with which they enter their communicative contexts. In this model, practices, or forms of engagement, provide a space necessary for a dialogue of this kind to emerge and for learning to happen.

The idea of engaging students in contexts which challenge their established frames of reference and, in the process, help them expand these, is congruent with the concerns expressed by Calhoun (Calhoun, 2002) regarding Information Technology. He sees it as a priority to resolve the problem of the effectiveness of communicative spaces.

A short description of the TNN (Thai News Network) project is presented below as an example of a way in which technology could play such a supportive function. The TNN project was a pilot study conducted in Thailand, with first year undergraduate students of Thai, with the objective of facilitating the sort of reflective environment discussed above (Buranapatana & Lian, 2002). The TNN project also functioned as a precursor to the Narizoma project.

3. TNN (Thai News Network) – the precursor to Narizoma
The idea of creating a Thai News Network information channel was born out of projects and university courses which engaged students in a number of macro-activities. Some of those took place at the University of Queensland’s Department of French and engaged students in the contexts of practices of specific target communities. Examples of such activities included: Creating and living in a French village (Lian & Mestre, 1985), and Creating a day on French TV. Another stream of similar projects relates to the projects conducted by Scotellaro from 1997 in partnership with ItalyCa (Italian Radio Program) and Tuttifrutti (youth multicultural radio program). These projects involved students from a number of high schools in Canberra, Australia, producing Italian radio broadcasts for the Community Multicultural Services. Several years on, some of those original students continue to this day to be involved in broadcasting. The success of the projects can be gauged from the fact that there is continuing cooperation between the Community Multicultural Services radio station and the Australian National University whose students of Italian participate regularly in the production of radio programs as part of their standard language-learning activities.

The concept of involving students in the production of radio broadcasts was subsequently translated into a project where students from Khon Kaen University, Thailand, undertook to develop an Internet-based information channel TNN (Thai News Network). The project was part of a course on critical reading in Thai. Although it had no L2-component, it offers some general principles for thinking about the ways in which technology could be of assistance in contexts which challenge learners’ ability to affect the dynamics of their interactions. On reading the literature (e.g., Freebody, Luke, & Gilbert, 1991), it became apparent that for the environment to offer such challenging conditions, it was important to create structures where students not only engage in the criticism of texts but also, more importantly, do so in order to enhance their interactions with others (Buranapatana & Lian 2002). With this objective in mind, the project of the Thai News Network was proposed to students from Khon Kaen University, Thailand, who embraced it both with some fears and great enthusiasm. As the students themselves reported:

I was interested in taking part in the experiment because we had been informed by the researcher that we would enhance our critical thinking abilities so I wanted to see how I would go.

Another student wrote:

I have never ever worked so hard before. In the beginning I did not work much because I never had to before, so I did not know how to do it. My teacher explained everything clearly but I did not understand how to start working.

The objectives of the course were based in pedagogies which derive from the concerns of critical theory. Their goal can be summarised as constructing conditions which enhance students’ informed participation in the contexts of life. It is this goal of enhancing informed participation that the project sees as critical to the process of creating a platform toward a form of empowerment that helps individuals and groups “to transform their circumstances for themselves by themselves” (Tripp, 1992, p. 13). Students themselves understood the power of informed participation. A number of them expressed excitement that their work was no longer to be an essay for the teacher to grade but was directed toward creating a resonance in those who would come to their website: “I think presenting our work on the TNN website is an important way to encourage all the students in the experimental group to work harder…” Another student wrote: “When writing on-line articles, I always thought of the readers and what they might say.” Comments from the public which included people from within the university and outside were posted on the site as well as the discussions which they generated.

A number of strategies were employed to assist students in the exploration of the contexts, understandings and practices in relation to which they were positioning their own stories. The main aspect of their journey, that about which almost all students reported, revolved around the search for information. Students often reported on learning to use the libraries in a far more interesting and useful manner than before. Importantly, they also learnt to look for information outside libraries, reading newspapers, searching the Internet, or looking for people who could offer them more insights. Students themselves spoke about this aspect of the project:

In the beginning of this course, we were not ready to learn in this way. […] We tried very hard to search for more information from the Internet, journals, magazines, and other sources. We were surprised that we got more information from more sources than we expected.

The most important aspect of this form of exploratory learning was that students were not directed to any specific sources of information. Instead, they were told about choices and shown ways to exercise those choices. There was no pedagogic agenda which would lock them into specific forms interactions. The only elements that united all the explorations was the desire to be understood i.e. validated as coherent and making a contribution. Students’ searches for information were backed up with various field trips, talks to other people, other students and villagers. The students met a chemistry professor who gave them time and spoke to them at length on the issue of interest to them (spirulina).

Students also held general meetings of the entire group to stimulate further exchange between them. In this way they obtained useful clues about their thoughts from other students who, at the same time, were working on different issues and reading different things. The diversity of activities that students undertook illustrates the point that the environment was constructed with the objective of enhancing opportunities for dialogue to occur rather than for students to depend on information solely from the computer. This is also a very important aspect of discussions which foreground concerns that some students may not be able to match their peers from privileged backgrounds with equal computer power. Within the context of TNN, not a single student complained about technology because the objectives of the course did not depend on technology. Rather, the aim was to explore opportunities available in order to facilitate dialogue. Technology was only a part of the means toward making this goal possible.

The TNN pilot study provided some interesting insights in relation to Narizoma. Most of all, it showed that dialogic activity, even though supported by on-line resources, needs not be limited to those who are on-line. In fact, the TNN-study showed that a richer and more far-reaching dialogic platform is established when students explored both the on-line and off-line sources. Moreover, the off-line interlocutors need not necessarily be directly involved with students’ on-line projects. This way of linking on-line and off-line environments around students is rather different from settings which make on-line exchanges the focus and which, as a result, remove students (and their forms of engagement) from their local communities. The TNN-project sought to protect students from such isolationist tendencies thus helping individuals to construct their various forms of engagement in a manner which does not dislocate them from either of their contexts of participation.

As students’ comments reveal, the TNN project enjoyed great success: “Now I read more. My parents are surprised that I have changed in this way in that I think more when I talk with them, and when we are watching TV together. I can talk with them about political issues. Normally I like watching cartoons, not serious matters like political or academic issues.” The success of TNN was also shared among the University faculty. All this also illustrates that within the confines of universities and course syllabi, there is plenty of room for experimental projects which, by virtue of being different, help to achieve goals which ordinary classes may miss.

Currently the TNN project is undergoing revision and a number of changes will be implemented in order to make room for forms of expression and action that have not been included so far. The project will seek involvement from students from other classes or universities from Thailand, Australia and elsewhere. However its main goal will remain the same: inspiring creativity on the part of whoever is involved in order to enhance communication between them. This is also the goal of the Narizoma environment which provides a larger framework for projects such as TNN or any other project which may be generated as a result of the possibilities that it offers.

4.   Narizoma
The Narizoma environment has been conceptualised with the aim of enlarging the contexts of interaction for projects such as TNN to allow for a greater intersection of ideas and issues than projects like TNN alone can generate. Narizoma is the name of a virtual (Internet-based) community constructed in such a way as to enable its inhabitants to create a way of life as they would want it to be and in terms that they collectively decide upon. It is a space to be filled with history and hence with everything that life brings. The challenge of Narizoma therefore is relatively simple: it is a potential alternative to the current social structures inasmuch as its shape and the way of life that it takes on do not depend on reality as we have come to know it but on the decisions which will be made within it. Whatever the problems, the citizens of Narizoma should find ways of solving them. The aim is to give participants the possibility to shape their destinies in ways that reflect how they would like Narizoma to be.

The general objectives of the Narizoma environment are no different from those of TNN. The main goal is to enhance the quality of interactions between individuals and/or groups while, at the same time, not removing the link which joins the participants with the world outside the on-line confines of Narizoma. The environment is designed to facilitate such a link and, as a result, it functions as a platform for negotiating the beliefs that come from the contexts other than Narizoma (the “old world”) in the contexts of conditions which apply in Narizoma (the “new world”) and vice versa. As these interactions grow, it is possible that the ideas from Narizoma may impact upon the ways of the “old world”. Movement the other way is also inevitable. Because Narizoma is an open space, it is planned that the only citizens of Narizoma can be students from educational institutions. The greatest advantage that we see in Narizoma is the fact that it sets up no other constraints thus allowing for interactions to be driven by intersecting agenda rather than by agenda which would prevent such criss-crossing. Thus, Narizoma helps to bring to the surface the more and the less salient concerns which reflect the historically-shaped experiences of their participants i.e. the different tensions in terms of which they structure their solidarity relationships (national, political, class oriented, linguistic, professional, disciplinary; cf. Calhoun, 2003). It allows for people to meet and communicate who otherwise would not be likely to do so. It allows for investigating issues which have a larger than disciplinary focus.

In this perspective, Narizoma has the potential to respond to the challenge issued by the sociologists who are concerned with the Internet being used mainly to reinforce the already-established connections thus contributing amazingly little to reshaping the current structures which underlie thought and action (cf. DiMaggio et al, 2001). As signaled by Calhoun (2002), to effect such a change would require practical experiments based on an idealistic vision where “rational-critical debate improves the quality of opinions, educates the participants and forms a collective understanding of issues that advances beyond pre-existing definitions of interests or identities” (p. 19).

Moreover, without such models, it may be that our use of information technology will remain reduced to isolated “websites giv[ing] the impression of consisting simply of the spontaneous postings of the public” (Calhoun 2002, p. 15). It is hoped that Narizoma will rectify this status quo while also giving researchers a chance to participate actively in this goal. In this task, researchers are challenged to change their own relationship to information technology and the Internet in particular. To effect change, the Internet need no longer be just a laboratory (DiMaggio et al, 2001, p. 329) but a means for creating spaces which enhance dialogue and, as a result, awareness.

4.1   How would Narizoma work?
Like TNN, the Narizoma project is designed as a space for experimental learning projects. As in TNN, the issues that life in Narizoma generates should form the contexts for projects which students, together with the support structures around them (other students, teams of teachers, parents, members of the public who may be consulted, literature, privately-available technological support or support accessed through schools or universities, various browsing tools attached to Narizoma and those developed in due course by its citizens) will undertake. Thus students’ engagement in Narizoma can take multiple paths. They can partake in the environment out of curiosity, or as a result of curricular (or extracurricular) activities designed to enhance their interdisciplinary skills, or as an experimental project carried out within the standard curriculum where disciplinary objectives (e.g. the study of law, foreign languages, mathematics, information technology, physics) form the specific focus for structuring their contributions to Narizoma.

Because Narizoma is a different world, it does not require from students to become members of specific communities of practice but, rather, it challenges them to reflect on the relationship between what they do and what they seek to achieve. In Narizoma students have a choice to reflect upon the ways in which their specific discipline foci can contribute to life in Narizoma. Thus, how students word the law of Narizoma, apply the law, work with linguistic differences, apply their understandings of mathematics, how they utilise their study of physics or Information Technology, all depends on how they see their actions to be of value to the community at large. Students’ contributions if conducted within the framework of curricular, and thus assessable, university or school subjects can be evaluated with this objective in mind.

The task of shaping and living in a new world will reveal a number of challenges, not the least of which will be linguistic ones. Since the citizens of Narizoma are united in the goal of making Narizoma a liveable and interesting place, the belief is that life in Narizoma will demand a great deal of cooperation between individuals who may be from different linguistic backgrounds. The linguistic demands will be multiple. They may range from students engaging in activities utilising solely their second languages through to activities which would allow students to narrow down the specific language needs which they experience, to specific forms of support that Narizoma may offer. It needs to be stressed that it is the cooperative or collaborative aspect of life in Narizoma that may allow for diversification of the ways in which students attend to the linguistic demands that participation in the environment brings with it. Since Narizoma is likely to bring together students from various linguistic backgrounds, it will be important that communication and exchange between students do take place. There are many ways to achieve this.

Taking TNN as an example, students may wish not only to broadcast or express themselves in their native languages but also in second languages. This may in fact happen soon as the Khon Kaen foreign languages faculty have already expressed the wish to develop TNN in languages other than Thai. Students may also wish to translate entire broadcasts or selected items to make them available to larger communities. Furthermore, life in Narizoma will demand of students to settle disputes as well as understand and discuss issues. All these tasks are conducted in language and will require from students to adjust their linguistic competencies appropriately. Thus language-learning needs may emerge where they previously did not exist through a collision between the task and self. Students may wish to use the collaboration of other students to help them deal with the linguistic difficulties that they encounter. They may even engage in some on-line or even off-line language courses. Less commonly taught languages would acquire a presence if only because this presence is currently refused to them on financial rather than any other grounds. The depth of students’ involvement in language-related activities will be shaped by the direct needs that they experience and the forms of support available.

Students will find support structures both off-line and on-line. Off-line support will come in the form of peers or language teachers. On-line support may come in the form of dictionaries or other exploratory tools designed to enable various forms of language analysis (cf. Lian, A-P., in THIS VOLUME). A need for on-line dictionaries will grow. Students from Information Technology subjects may help the situation by making it their project to create software to help bridge linguistic gaps in a multitude of ways, each piece of software perhaps fulfilling a different function. Sociology students may consider enriching the sociocultural data that comes with the software. The input from native speakers would be welcome but it would come in a form that would help to problematise understandings rather than seeking to contain them in the shape of an elusive native-speaker culture (a “C1”, Kramsch, 1993, p. 211) There are countless possibilities.

The key to making all these exchanges possible is the original set-up of the environment. It is believed that the technological organisation of the environment will change as Narizoma experts take over and its future form will reflect the rules of interaction as they develop in an organic fashion. In summary, Narizoma is an environment where everyone affects everyone else and where everyone can contribute in one way or another, not to mention the off-line communities which no doubt will be drawn in and affected in unpredictable ways by the on-line interactions. Thus Narizoma has the potential to create a truly integrated and integrating space.

4.2   Technological and other support in Narizoma
Technically, the Narizoma environment will be designed as a combination of various platforms. The place where people live is constructed as a 3D world (possibly using the Active Worlds software) and is completely left for students to organise as they please. Nothing prevents the Narizoma citizens from writing their own 3D software and, in the process, challenging the commercial world to create more flexible products. The learning of how to use the 3D world is left entirely up to the members of Narizoma. As Dolan’s study has shown, students help one another quite eagerly to resolve whatever technical problems may arise in managing a 3D world (Dolan, 2003). In Dolan’s study, after the first 10 days, most students were proficient in using the basic tools. Unlike most environments which, in one way or another, are oriented toward providing students with specific knowledge content and the means for acquiring this knowledge, the main focus of all the support structures which accompany Narizoma is different. Since dialogue happens between incommensurable positions, it can occur only when incommensurability is experienced and is driven by the objective of enhancing the degree of commensurability between them. Thus to enhance dialogic conditions, the Narizoma environment seeks to provide its citizens with tools which can help them identify incommensurable frames of reference which prevent cooperation. The idea is to enhance the degree of commensurability in order for individuals to enhance (enrich) the frames of reference in terms of which they act and interpret actions.

To this end, apart from standard communication tools which accompany most Internet-based communication platforms, Narizoma will also be equipped with a number of browsing facilities which would allow for organising interactions in ways that make them visible, thematically identifiable, and stored in such a way as to allow for ‘needs-specific’ exploration. Databases will play an important role here. Whatever the activities within the Narizoma, its databases should be able to store information, organise it and enable students to re-arrange it according their specific requirements. To follow the example of news/radio-broadcasts, the databases should be able to arrange the broadcasting channels according to a variety of criteria that may appear to be of value. Such criteria might include specific stations, languages, the genre of the channel and the authors. The databases may also have a facility which, for each query, would indicate the most popular similar items selected by others. Databases should be constructed which function as Narizoma libraries, storing historical and other documentation produced within the life of the community. The ways in which this information may be organised need not correspond to the systems of description currently applied in the “old world”. Everything that happens in Narizoma is subject to creative negotiation. Databases should also organise information about specific research projects in the Narizoma world for others to know, and possibly join or observe. Narizoma will therefore include a number of databases and search engines, each allowing for different forms of interrogation of the dynamics of this developing world.

Not all Narizoma activities need happen within the space available to it. The databases can link Narizoma citizens to various other websites conducting activities relevant to Narizoma (like TNN). The important issue here is to create databases which integrate the contents of those sites and therefore incorporate them directly into the life of Narizoma. Databases will need to be multilingual and will have to allow for more as well as for less detailed searches. Furthermore, systems will have to be written so as to allow for the automatic storage of information and there may also be facilities for students themselves to enter information directly into databases. Allowing students to enter their own information is a very important aspect of their empowerment within Narizoma. There is an inexhaustible amount of possibilities that can help Narizoma citizens enhance their communication. The main thing is not to attempt to exhaust them but to provide a few options in the beginning for the participants, subsequently, to develop their own facilities and to control them. Finally, it is important to emphasise that technological support is not the only support available. Much support will come from the people around the participants, on- and off-line, their peers, their teachers and the community at large. Most importantly, as the TNN study showed, not all knowledge comes to us in writing.

5. Conclusion
This chapter took it as its goal to introduce the concept of Narizoma, a learning environment currently under development. The objectives and the structure of the environment were conceptualised in such a way as to escape the drawbacks of pedagogies which frame the learning process into following a particular path and a particular result thus reducing the possibilities of dialogue and critical exploration. Examples of such learning spaces were discussed and it was argued that environments which reinforce divisions between individuals in terms of arbitrarily selected commonalities lack in pedagogic frameworks capable of offering dialogue be it between individuals divided by language or by other socially constructed interests. The difference that the Narizoma project and its precursors (e.g. TNN) offer is their capacity to bring people together in the goal of helping one another in negotiating the means and the terms in relation to which they approach their contexts of interaction. This is the dialogue which is at stake. The objective is to maintain dialogue and in the process to grow the frames of reference in relation to which individuals evaluate and hence restructure their communicative behaviour. It is with this specific notion in mind that the concept of dialogue was used in this chapter.

It was also argued that Narizoma and TNN could support dialogue precisely because they challenge their participants to inquire about the conditions in relation to which interactions (and human relations at large) are structured, interpreted and enacted. Furthermore, these environments are likely to involve students on exploration paths which are largely unpredictable. The pedagogic and technological challenge that they issue is for the support structures provided not to limit the inquiry itself to the means available but to expand the field of inquiry beyond the immediate on-line environment. In the context of TNN therefore students were taught to explore a wide range of possibilities available to them through technology and also through the strengthening of their links with each other and with the community around them. Narizoma resolves the problem of unpredictability in a similar way. On the one hand, it provides the environment with standard communication tools and with technological assistance oriented largely toward helping the participants to sieve through information. On the other hand, it relies on human support and it is envisaged that the development of its technological support structures will build up as life in Narizoma progresses. It is this autopoietic aspect of Narizoma that can turn this vision into reality.

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Biodata
Ania Lian is currently completing a PhD. Her field is critical pedagogy and technology. She has been a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Technology-Enhanced Language-Learning most recently at the University of Canberra, Australia. Currently she is a Director of Critical Thinking and Technology Consultants Pty Ltd, assisting the development of a number of educational projects, including a students' Internet-based information channel (TNN) at Khon Kaen University, Thailand.

Debbie Dolan is a lecturer at the University of Canberra. Her teaching and research experience ranges from language acquisition and technology in language teaching, to English for Professional Purposes. She is currently involved in several projects designing and developing technology-based resources (on and off-line) and regularly presents papers at a variety of international conferences on computers in education and for language learning.

Grazia Scotellaro is a Lecturer in Information Technology and Education at the University of Canberra, Australia where she also teaches in the TESOL program. Previously, she had taught Italian at school and university levels. She regularly holds TELL workshops for language teachers on behalf of government and private educational organisations. She is currently enrolled in a PhD in TELL and is one of the principals of Mondomedia Education.

Andrew Lian specialises in the methodology of teaching foreign/second languages and has a special interest in the uses of modern technology to enhance learning. He is Professor of Humanities and Director of the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA and Emeritus Professor of Languages and Second Language Education at the University of Canberra, Australia. Previously, he had been Professor of Modern Languages at James Cook University and Professor of Computer-Enhanced Language-Learning at Bond University, Australia.