Aug 13 2010
1. Susan Brown’s home page
Susan has been working at Manchester University for three years and is herself a recent graduate of the MA in Educational technology & TESOL (having formerly worked as a teacher and in the trade publishing sector representing Russian authors). She teaches on the MA in Educational Technology and TESOL and on the BA in Language Literacy and Commmunication at the School of Education.
Her interests centre on the roles of distributed and blended learning in language education. She is interested in the ways that ’social software’ such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and virtual world tools might be harnessed to respond to the specificities of different distributed and blended teaching contexts, an interest she shares with Gary Motteram. She is working alongside Gary Motteram and other European partners on the European Union funded project AVALON which seeks to explore the potential of Second Life in language education and ways of effectively harnessing that potential.
Susan is also interested in computer mediated communication (CMC)and aspects of ‘appropriate discourse’ in CMC. She works with Richard Fay and Diane Slaouti on a collaborative computer mediated intercultural communication project with project participants from the University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria),the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and a language institution in Montevideo (Uruguay).
Articles
2008 “Understanding evoked context: An analytical framework” (in preparation)
Conference papers
2009 “Web 2.0 innovation across disciplines: Exploring perceptions and encouraging uptake” Cal 09: Learning in digital worlds, Brighton
2008 “Understanding ‘context-in-mind’ and its influence on the way teachers evaluate technology: A Cultural Historical Activity Theory perspective”. Ecologies of Diversities: The developmental and historical interarticulation of human meditational forms. Iscar, San Diego.
2007 (with Gary Motteram) “Social software and Teacher Education” EDEN, Naples Italy.
2007 “Teacher perceptions of the ‘affordances’ of social software for language education in their teaching contexts” LLas conference,University of Southampton.
2006 (with Milena Katsarska) Computer Mediated Intercultural Communication between Manchester and Plovdiv. Students’ perspectives and experience. Intercultural conference,University of Plovdiv
Book chapters
2008, (with Gary Motteram) “A Context-Based Approach to Web 2.0 and Language Education”. In Handbook of Research on Web 2.0 and Second Language Learning (ed Thomas, M).IGI Global publication, PA, USA.