O n f e r e n c e

Discussion 
Short-Term or Long-Term? 
There is a cognitive dissonance among academics studying CALL. Leaders in the CALL 
field are advocating long-term evolution of applications based on strategic evaluation of 
what technology will best produce the required outcomes in student ability. Most CALL 
researchers, however, face the pressure to publish. As a result, they use their students 
or other available groups as subjects for year-long, semester-long, or even shorter tests 
of technology. Kennedy and Levy (2009, p. 446) called th
is a “one
-
off project” meaning 
that it is limited to a single or short-term evaluation of the technology. 
The authors have done short-term limited tests of specific technologies, but we have also 
developed an instructional design, described above, that we have used over several 
academic years, making minor adjustments each year, to achieve specific goals for EFL 
students in Taiwan. This background, plus the literature review and critical thinking 

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-252- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
performed in developing our 2013 CALL Journal conceptual paper (Marek & Wu, 2013) 
led us to an insight that helps us to resolve our own cognitive dissonance on the subject 
of sustainable design. 
We conclude that CALL professionals need both kinds of instructional design. We need 
shorter-term one-off projects that help determine the affordances and pitfalls of specific 
technology applications in order to help us determine which best lead to our desited 
educational outcomes for our students. We also, however, urgently need systems-
oriented strategic development of long-term CALL applications that address these specific 
goals for student outcomes. Only with a broad base of experimentation will curriculum 
designers have the foundational information to determine how to best serve the needs of 
students in their individual language program. 
It follows logically, therefore, that one of the primary needs of instructional technology 
designers is meta-analysis of the large number of one-off projects in the literature. 
Whereas most one-off studies are constructed to compare technology use to a control 
group using no technology, and thus identify benefits accruing from the technology, what 
we really need is more information on failures. Why did a given technology, application, 
or platform NOT work well? What were the dynamics that caused to students to reject, 
underutilize, lose motivation for, or out-and-out fail in their use of the application?
Answers to these questions would inform decisions about technology and lead to choices 
that mitigate the negative attributes of technology while maximizing the positive 
attributes. The answers, furthermore, may cross-pollinate between different applications. 
For example, the thesis of one of our Master’s students, Jui
-Fang Sammy Chen, explored 
use of the VoiceThread platform (http://voicethread.com) for peer and expert 
audio/video recorded feedback about student presentations as a vehicle for improving 
speaking performance (Chen, 2012). She discovered that the learning curve required for 
students to master the powerful but complex functions of VoiceThread reduced their 
motivation. Because similar results have been reported in other studies in which students 
faced a hitherto unknown application, meta-analysis might produce a technology design 
principal similar to that outlined in Marek an
d Wu (2012, p. 4), that “
CMC systems that 
are overly complex or hard to learn can cause stress for students, chilling their 
motivation to engage with the CMC system. Therefore, simplicity, user-friendliness, and 
ease of training are important.”