EAP and New Technologies

I had a go at using the 7 criteria for evaluating websites and found that I ran into difficulties. Common sense (and my years of experience as an EFL teacher) tell me that the interactionist model and its 7 recommendations form a good basis for helping students to acquire new language and is certainly a good model for classroom practice. In terms of how applicable it is to the websites I'm less sure. I think this maybe partly because I'm not sure that the central aim of many of the sites is language learning/acquiring language per se. Many of the websites seem to be much more aimed at helping students with academic skills: organising, structuring, stylistic features, study skills etc. All of these are very much central to our role as EAP teachers: much of what we do is about choice of and organisation of language rather than acquiring new language. Maybe what's up for debate here is the role of an EAP teacher (I don't think we've focused on this much in this module)?
I suppose one of the reasons that the websites don't seem to focus as much on the productive side, which involves a high degree of interactivity, is not through lack of methodological principle but because of the constraints of time and money. (Klaus expressed this much more lucidly in his post, I think.) In Chapelle, the illustrations used were sophisticated software packages which allowed students to "...engage in target language interaction whose structure can be modified for negotiation of meaning" (Chapelle, p16) and this seems to be where many of the websites fail.
So, when I chose websites I tried to focus on activities that had a productive language aim. The first website I looked at was the University of Richmond Writing Center> Writing> Focusing, Connecting> Adding Action and Clarity to Writing (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/clarity/html).
This activity looks at avoiding weak verbs and the passive voice in order to add clarity to writing.
In terms of how it fulfilled the criteria:
Criteria 1 and 2) The focus was more on what language not to use than vice versa. Some examples of how to avoid the passive and weak verbs were given, but the syntactic changes were not highlighted. The semantic (stylistic) implications of the changes were outlined.
Criterion 3) Sentences are provided for transformation, so students do have the opportunity for target language production, though there was no answer key.
Criteria 4,5,6 and 7 were not addressed.
I looked at a few other pages on the site and concluded that this would be a difficult website for students to use unless they were very high level learners. The emphasis was very much on explanation, with complex metalanguage. Not to say it's a bad website, but I'd be more likely to use it as a resource to be adapted for classroom use rather than recommending it to my students.
The site that I looked at that seemed to provide most opportunities for 1-7 was the HKU Writing Machine. I looked at the pages on writing introductions, and liked the way it moved from analysis of form and function through to analysis of own errors (using a previously written introduction) through to output in the form of a revised introduction, followed up by self-analysis against a checklist of questions. It seemed to be a thoughtfully constructed and sequenced set of tasks that took learners through the steps needed to achieve the task. I do wonder, though, how many of my students would take the time to diligently work their way through the different steps.
One thing I do find about trawling through the online materials is that it is a trawl ie very time consuming in terms of locating resources that are useful and appropriate. There is also so much written text to deal with. Personally I feel that a lot of these resources need teacher mediation/guidance in order for learners to get the most out of them. I'm not sure what this says about me and learner autonomy though! I did like Alex's idea of asking students to assess websites or activities as a way of helping direct students' learning.