As recently as five years ago, I had never even touched a computer. Worse, having been educated outside the United States, I had never learned to type. Yet I am now one of those whom Nicholas Negroponte calls the"Digitati," people who are fairly competent users of Internet technology. The Internet is filling some important professional needs for me and for others in my field (English as a Second Language).
My first Internet discovery after learning about electronic mail was LISTSERV, a program that distributes e-mail to a particular group of people who share certain interests or needs. CUNY provides this service to its faculty and runs several electronic "lists" or forums. English - the world's most taught and most powerful language, taught in the school system of every country on earth - scatters its teachers around the world, so we have extreme difficulty sharing professional information and ideas.
Even within CUNY, ESL and English teachers find it hard to keep in contact with colleagues. Back in 1991, it seemed to me that e-mail (which was new to me at the time) could serve CUNY faculty well as a way to alleviate professional isolation. My good fortune was to be told about LISTSERV and to get help setting up an electronic discussion forum for ESL and English teachers, TESL-L, using LISTSERV. The LISTSERV administrator at CUNY is Bill Gruber, and thanks to his patience and skill, the fledgling forum for ESL teachers stayed afloat while I was learning the LISTSERV ropes.
What I hadn't realized was the that TESL-L would not just be for CUNY teachers, that English teachers everywhere would join. Soon, we had members from 30 countries, then 40, then 50...it kept going up. The discussions became so lengthy that we had to split into several "branches" or sub-groups of the field. Each of the 7 "branches" is a list in its own right, and one of them (TESLJB-L, the jobs and employment issues branch) has 1,550 members.
Soon, all this activity became too much to manage in addition to my regular teaching load, so I wrote a proposal for a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). FIPSE was excited by the project and decided to fund TESL-L for three years. The grant from FIPSE has allowed TESL-L to have an archivist, Susan Simon of The City College of New York, to develop the extensive archives of materials that is now part of TESL-L. Through contributions from teachers everywhere, and through skillful editing of the online discussions, the TESL-L archives have become one of the largest resources of its type anywhere on the Internet.
Like me, Susan was a relative newcomer to electronic communications and, like me, she has been helped in her work by the staff at CUNY/CIS. One of the things that we load into the TESL-L archives each year is the program book for the annual conference of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), the 23,000 member professional organization that supports teachers of English. Having the program book online in advance of the conference is a wonderful resource for teachers, both those who attend the conference and those who don't.
By the time TESL-L was two years old, the United States Information Agency (USIA) had begun to require all its overseas English Language Program Officers to join TESL-L, as part of their duties. Eventually, the USIA found that their mandate (to promote American Language and culture around the world) was well-served by TESL-L, and they proposed a joint-venture with CUNY to start a gopher based at CUNY. This gopher, an Internet tool which allows one to easily access textual data stored in a variety of locations, is dedicated to focusing on documents and materials related to teaching English as a second or foreign language.
The CUNY/USIA project started in July, 1994, and is already an important place on the Internet for English language teachers around the world. In the "quiet" weeks between December 23, 1994 and January 22, 1995 our gopher had 17,000 "hits" from people all over the world, far exceeding expectations. Everyone involved with the project is very happy with it, and the thousands of users evidently are too. The technical side of the CUNY gopher (of which the English-teaching section is just one part) is maintained by Helen McLean at CUNY/CIS. I, no longer the Internet newcomer, select and edit materials to be placed in the English Language Teaching part of the CUNY gopher.
CUNY's LISTSERV resource and its gopher are wonderful tools for faculty, and English teachers, among others, are taking full advantage of them. TESL-L has around 7,000 members in 83 countries as of March 1995, and is growing at the rate of 10 new members a day. In spite of the numbers and the vast amount of mail it generates, TESL-L has never "broken down," never even slowed down, a track record that is a tribute to both the robustness of the software and the skill of the CUNY/CIS staff.
With the help of that skill, I became digital.
-- Anthea Tillyer, City College