For those not able to attend one of these events, here is a video of this year’s graduation ceremony. It’s rather long, but there are quite a lot of students in Education:
Posted in General links
People may find this resource of some use: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/elt_archive/catalogue
Posted in TESOL
For both the MA TESOL / EdTech & TESOL programmes and also PhD study, the LTE group attracts TESOL practitioners from many parts of the globe who bring to their studies and research complex contextual, linguistic and cultural resources. One fascinating outcome of this, an outcome which rarely receives much attention, is the possibilities arising for undertaking research bilingually even though the overall academic context at Manchester is English-medium.
For example, a TESOL practitioner from Taiwan, fluent in both Mandarin and English, might undertake interviews with her colleagues in Taiwan, interviews in which all participants are first language users of Mandarin. In such a case, the interviews might very appropriately be conducted in Mandarin. The issue that arises from this is that of when to translate the interview transcripts – as part of the transcription process in readiness for analysis? Or selectively after analysis in Mandarin in order to make the analysis process and findings available for an English-reading audience?
The following conference paper represents a first attempt to explore this area through supervisor / supervisee reflections on the Mandarin-English data / analysis in the doctoral studies by Xiaowei Zhou and Tzu-Hsuan Liu as supervised by Richard:
Fay, R. Zhou, X. and Liu, T-H. (forthcoming, 2010). Some complexities of bilingual and monolingual sites (of research and supervision) in narrative inquiry. Paper (to be) presented at “Narrative Matters 2010 – Exploring the narrative landscape: Issues, investigations, and interventions” to be hosted by the CIRN in Fredericton, May 20th – 22nd 2010, New Brunswick, Canada.
Building on this, there are plans, for July 2010, to hold a seminar on this theme in conjunction with Professor Mike Byram and his PhD students working bilingually at the University of Durham, UK.
Stop press: Jan 2010 – we (i.e. Richard, Xiaowei and Tzu-Hsuan) have also just put in the following article proposal for a special issue of TESOL quarterly on narrative and TESOL (for Sept 2011): “Undertaking narrative research bilingually in a TESOL context”.
Posted in Researching multilingually
Tagged Intercultural, MA TESOL, narrative, research methods
Narrative Inquiry (NI) has great potential for TESOL practitioners – such as those on the MA TESOL and MA EdTech & TESOL programmes – as they reflect on their own practice and their students’ second language learning biographies. NI is an area in which the LTE group has interests, especially Richard Fay, his PhD students, and his research collaborators elsewhere.
Four proposals from this group of narrative inquirists have been submitted for papers to be presented at “Narrative Matters 2010 – Exploring the narrative landscape: Issues, investigations, and interventions” to be hosted by the CIRN in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, May 20th – 22nd 2010:
Fay, R., Zhou, X. and Liu, T-H. (forthcoming, 2010). Undertaking narrative inquiry bilingually against a monolingual backdrop.
Halldórsdóttir, T. (forthcoming, 2010). Text and counterText: Beyond the Telling…
Javier, E. (forthcoming, 2010). Finding one’s own voice – Balancing the views of the researcher within narrative inquiry when exploring race and teacher identity in an EFL context.
Conference Details
The title of the 2010 conference is “Exploring the Narrative Landscape: Issues, Investigations, and Interventions.”
Keynote speakers include three well known scholars in narrative and related areas: Dr. Ruthellen Josselson, Dr. Kenneth Gergen, and Dr. Mary Gergen.
The conference is being organized by CIRN and will be held from May 20-22, 2010, at the Delta Hotel, Fredericton, NB, Canada – the same venue, in fact, where Narrative Matters 2002 and 2004 were held.
Feel free to check our website (www.stu.ca/cirn) for more information concerning the conference. Should you have any questions regarding the conference, please email us at narrativeconference@stu.ca
Posted in Narrative Inquiry
Tagged Intercultural, MA EdTech & TESOL, MA TESOL, narrative, Narrative Inquiry, TESOL
4th International Wireless Ready Symposium
Digital Asia: Language, Technology & Community
NUCB Graduate School (Fushimi Campus)
Nagoya University of Commerce & Business, Japan
Friday 19th February, 2010 (09:50 – 17:30)
Registration is now open for this event.
Please register online at: http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp/registerdesk.html
The program is now available at: http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp/flyerWRIV.pdf
More information about the event from our homepage: http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp
So what did I learn over the last two days at Online EDUCA?
Well I certainly got the impression that Web 2.0 is very much on the agenda and very much a part of the educational landscape (while we wait for Web 3.0 
). At the same time I learned that I really need to be careful about my online identity and the online identities of my children and my grandchildren. One talk (Margarita Perez-Garcia) pointed out that pictures of children put up on Flikr by proud parents are often harvested for use on pornography sites, a very sobering and disturbing thought. This is because the parents are not aware of what they are doing when they put photos on an open site with no control over who can access them. This was well linked in various talks to the theme of critical literacy, which should be very much on the curriculum for all people using the internet. At the same time as hearing the downside I also learned how students (Helen Keegan) through positive intervention into their digital lives can change their image on the web. Creating a blog, for example, that reflects how the students want to be seen on the web can make a big difference to what shows on a Google search about yourself. Take control. Shirley Williams also talked about some ‘tools’ they have created at Reading University to help students think about these issues: www.reading.ac.uk/thisisme.
I mentioned Lord Puttnam in my Tweets from the conference. He showed a very interesting video called: ‘We are the people‘, and this shows well what many other talks tried to show, that learning processes need re-thinking. We heard again that if you take a 19th century medic and show them a hospital today, they wouldn’t recognise it, but if you showed a 19th century university lecturer today’s teaching spaces they would feel at home. The London Grid for Learning (Brian Durrant), on the other hand, (schools appear to be much more ahead of the game than universities) looked like it was a well thought through project, fit for purpose; universities could learn from this kind of regional initiative. The key idea that I took away from this talk is that you should start with an idea and then build the technologies around it. Sounded like something I might say .
Gilly Salmon gave a thoughtful and effective overview of the history of education using the metaphor of a tree and it’s branches, saying that for universities to survive, we must make sure we nurture learning, whatever technology we use. She suggested we must be bold enough to stop doing some things to allow others to happen and that we need to make sure we partner with our learners to be sure that we take their needs into account. It’s well worth looking at Leicester’s media zoo and they also have a conference running in the early part of the New Year (2010).
I also saw the first evidence that learners of today are actually differently wired. Artur Dyro talked about work by Stanislaw Dylak. Maybe it’s always been there, but I’ve not seen anything quite like this before-pretty convincing. I want to follow this up.
I realise that our move towards using video in our distance learning materials is a good one, but that we need to be more creative about this and we need to get more learner content, we still need to engage with ideas through text, but video support this in better ways that we use it now.
Some links that might be useful:
autolearn.barcelonamedia.org — they have a plugin for Moodle that allows the construction of activities based around NLP.
www.evitaproject.org — sounds like they had some interesting ideas on creating educational games.
Here are some photos from the event: http://www.online-educa.com/media-picture-gallery. I think I can find myself here, but if anyone else can, in one go, I will find a prize for you
follow: RSS