IATEFL Conference blog
I had intended to blog the conference on a daily basis, but lack of time and wireless made this difficult, so hear is a summary of main impressions.
I found the conference both stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. I attended mostly sessions on Ed Tech, as I guess you’d expect, and the plenaries. The ideas that were presented in sessions were certainly thought-provoking, but I do wish people would go back and look at the what has been produced and written before instead of starting off with each new technology as if nothing preceded it.
PCEs and IWBs
I didn’t make the Pre Conference Event (PCE) that was run by the Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (LTSIG) itself, only the tail end, but it looked very busy and there was a lively debate going on at the end about the value of interactive whiteboards (IWBs). There were clearly some divergent views about their value. The rest of the conference did feature further sessions on IWBs, but there certainly weren’t as many as last year, or the year before and although all the publishers now produce materials that run on them the zeitgeist seems to have moved on (more below). I did attend a session by Liz Fleet who works for the British Council in Jordan and who studied on Manchester’s MA DTCE and she had undertaken a study with teachers in the language centre. Her main conclusions were: there needs to more on-going training; time given for teachers to develop expertise, rather than the basic skills picked up on initial courses; support with new materials when they arrive from publishers; trouble-shooting training, i.e. teachers should be shown how to solve basic tech issues; that students should be brought up to the board as often as possible to engage with the material and at the same time the teacher should move away from the board and interact as much as possible with learners in the class; IWBS should be blanked when not being used, so as not to be distracting; combined with laptops or tablets to maximise the engagement. You should be able to download Liz Fleet’s ppt, or contact her, if you want more information from the Brighton Online website (not currently there). She offered access to her Manchester dissertation for those who want to get more detail.
Mobiles
The ed tech zeitgeist at this year’s conference was mobile and this started after the PCE with an extra evening event. The British Council’s own event was also about all things digital and inevitably featured mobile apps.
The initial set of presentations on mobiles focused mainly on the current state of apps for TESOL. The British Council have been involved in looking at mobile technologies for a while and have a number of apps available already. Neil Ballantyne (MA DTCE at Manchester) who is managing the development of apps for the British Council was responsible for the development of one of the first apps for the Smart Phone (iPhone in his case) and the British Council have repurposed quite a lot of their content into a number of new apps available on a number of different phone types.
There were also presentations from Tom Ottway who showed a vocabulary app, Cloud Bank, that had been developed with JISC funding. Caroline Moore and Paul Sweeney presented some of the findings from a white paper that they have been preparing about the mobile in ELT, which includes a survey of recently made apps and recommendations for the future. They talked about markets and growth and the fact that phones are much more common than other forms of technology throughout the world. All of this was interesting, but didn’t sound to me like there was much new in what was being said. My unease about the way that mobile apps were being touted as the next big thing continued to worry me throughout the conference and the apps being developed looked very similar to the kinds of materials that were produced for CDROM many years ago. Broderbund was the big name back then and it will be interesting to see if they have managed to repurpose those older materials into apps. I will check. There are of course elements of the software that is changed, you can download it immediately, it is usually free for the basic app, it’s much more interactive, location elements are also possible.
There were a number of other talks I went to about mobile learning (as people insist on calling it): Gavin Dudeney, Kalyan Chattopadhyay, Neil Ballantyne (again), Eric Baber. You can find most of these presentations online via the Brighton online website (not Kalyan’s) and Neil’s was actually videoed.
Gavin’s idea of mobility was much more general than the others and included a much broader range of tools in his mobile kitbag. He talked about Flip video cameras and digital audio recorders as well as phones and tablets.
I did come away wondering whether it was all hype and at the same time wanting to explore it for myself to get a better idea of what we should really be talking about here. I’d be interested in hearing about what others are doing with mobile technologies.
Gary Motteram
Interesting post, Gary.
Just out of interest, what have you seen or heard re. mobile*/handheld*/m-learning* (strike out as desired) that you do think is new? Or is it a case of it lots of things being rehashed to fit in a smaller device?
Hi Graham, thanks for your interest. I’m not sure that the software I’ve seen for ELT is new, but I have to admit I haven’t seen that much yet. I think the point that was raised a number of times from the publishers and by Martin Peacock of the British Council that they are able to re-package existing materials was an interesting indication of the kind of territory we are in and as Gavin Dudeney said in his talk at IATEFL, the material is workmanlike, but not transformative. It’s the same with apps like the Guardian newspaper app, I can download and read articles that I could get on the net or in the print newspaper. What is different I guess is when you can use the mobile device to do something different in a space, so the use of QR codes in museums, or translations of menus etc, or the way that you could run simulations with people who are on the move and feed that information back to others, or your teacher for assessment. I found this quote in a recent article that I think points to the difference for me:
“Learners who are not dependent on access to fixed computers can engage in activities that relate more closely to their current surroundings, sometimes crossing the border between formal and informal learning. This creates the potential for significant change in teaching and learning practices. (Kukulska-Hulme, 2009: 157)”
What is new? What is different?
Let us first differentiate ‘mobile’ devices from ‘mobile static’. For me, truly ‘mobile’ is can they be used in a single hand, while the person is on their feet. If require two hands, likely seated, then ‘mobile static’. From place X to place Y with same hardware.
Thus…
Mobile static: iPad2, (3 coming end of year perhaps) is essentially then just a lighter, souped up laptop.
TRULY mobile: cell phones, smartphones
What does this mean for usage, potentially then for learning? Users are on their feet. Standing or walking.
Walking Around gives rise to yes, as Gary says, the Augmented Reality aspect. Interfacing with the environment via the handheld. Tour guides, shopping, museums, hunting John and Sarah Connor type of thing (is research going on as it happens for wired, AR, contact lenses). Exciting possibilities. Classic cyberpunk lit becoming our realities.
While Standing – ‘stolen time’. Waiting, commuting, bit of faffing about between other things. Lengthier periods lend themselves to engaging in mobile static – notebook and Starbucks cuppa. As I see it, what this means for learning is that short bursts of learning, chunked challenges, or revision can be undertaken in this time. Crosswords are perfect for commutes – the Life 1.0 example is a perfect example. The Times Crossword effect. Or an easier one for most of us. For me: I do chess puzzles on the train on my phone.
Two real examples: a uni near me sends daily TOEFL questions to all students’ phones. Next semester (in a Dystopian Literature and Cinema course) I am sending questions to students the day of the lesson on their cell phones. Also will have students send their own prepped questions round. To get us thinking ahead of time, so students enter the room with a few thoughts having been swirling. Basic stuff of course – this educator needs a programmer.
Anyhow, such are some of my thoughts as I talk to students, read the increasing volume of literature in this field and look around me….
Thoughts?