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Margaret lecturer in Turkish language and culture, however Margaret has very different experiences of using ICTs and has been chosen as a vignette for this reason. Margaret also teaches Turkish literature, modern history and intellectual history in addition to language and culture, both at undergraduate and graduate level as well as supervising a few DPhil students. 


Margaret says that she has a great deal of administrative tasks, mostly related to teaching, which take up a lot of her time: ‘I spend a lot of time contacting students to rearrange meetings . . . when students come from a number of different courses it's very time-consuming to reschedule’:


I mean it was impossible before email, but even with email the way it works is the way most of us do it though I know there are better systems is by emailing everyone and saying, “Look I can manage the following times, let me know which of those times are possible, impossible or best for you.” and you wait and you get it back and not everyone can do it and so you try again.  


Report-writing is also a lengthy process: 


  [V]ery time-consuming, what’s the most time-consuming things about them? [pause] Well, yes, the, the form itself comes in about four bits. Um there’s the one that you actually do the report on, but the calculations that they require in terms of um how many hours with how many people um have some really tricky aspects to it. Because if, for example, you’ve got four students, and they’re at three different colleges, you’ve got to try to apportion the amount of money that you’re claiming from that particular college. I mean they expect you to do, to do that yourself. You can’t just say I’ve been supervising your two students, x and y, in a group of four. They want you to sort of do a calculation to work out what sort of notional number of hours to charge for per student.


Margaret says that on average each report takes about two hours to compose. She now uses a word processor to write the reports, previously writing them by hand: ‘this has made things somewhat easier; I mean I can copy and paste bits like the course content into each report rather than re-write it every time. Also, I can save a copy on my computer rather than paper copies. Yes IT has made things better there’. 


Like Rosa, Margaret’s teaching is mostly ‘class based’ with a large number of staff contact hours. Margaret describes her way of teaching as varied. For a grammar lectures she distributes handouts (mostly reading lists and extracts of grammer textbooks) which she has compiled in Microsoft Word. In class she uses the whiteboard to demonstrate language rules, and sometimes uses an overhead projector to show maps and images. She feels that her lecture technique could be improved and wishes to learn to use PowerPoint so that she can provide a visual ‘route map’ to her lectures and easily re-edit the content every year. In class students take turns to translate texts to which Margaret provides oral feedback. In tutorials she goes through essays or translations that her students will have submitted in advance, either via e-mail or her pigeon hole. Margaret makes annotations to the hard copy essays via hand and students will take further notes in the tutorial. 


Margaret is contemplative when discussing the course aims. She perceives different aspects of the course as developing different skills in the students: 


  I: And what are the course aims in terms of student learning?

  That is a difficult question to answer. I mean what’s the aim of teaching in general? [Pause] I mean all the students that I teach, well, lets focus on the on the undergraduates, they’re studying Turkish for a degree in Turkish so they’re expected to acquire a very precise understanding of the language so that when they read texts they understand I suppose what you would call it the ideational meaning, the actual sort of content meaning of the text but also the tone, the image which is being delivered, the, the level of register which is being delivered that sort of thing. That’s, that’s purely the language side.  Then with regard to these texts that we read the study of the literature clearly is intended to, I mean the study of the literary texts is intended to give them insight into Turkish literature and be able to debate and discuss it with a knowledge of the language. Why does anybody study literature?

Margaret feels that it may be advantageous to put her teaching materials online in the VLE for her students to access but she has heard from her colleagues that it is a ‘bit complicated’ and will take time to learn. However, she imagines that it is ‘one of those things that, once you have learnt it, it could be labour-saving both for oneself and for the students’. Time is the main barrier to Margaret improving her IT skills – ‘during term time I can hardly breathe.’

Recently, Margaret has been using Google to check whether certain constructions of the Turkish language are possible. By putting in word combinations and seeing what google returns, she has found that the system has become a ‘source of real language texts’. Margaret started using the Internet about 8 years ago and expresses that is becoming quick source of information for her and she has found out about various useful web sites from colleagues and students. 

There is a faculty system for collecting student feedback. Every term one of the departmental administrators e-mails Margaret’s students a word-processed evaluation form which they are asked to return by person or by e-mail. They have a very poor response rate and Margaret has never received any feedback herself from this system.