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