Don’t forget that if you can’t make it to Glasgow there is always the online conference.
The code to display this banner is:
<a title=”Glasgow Online” href=”http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7070/6845785061_c944660c90_o.png” alt=”Glasgow Online” width=”300″ height=”220″ border=”0″ /></a>
I took this from this promotional site: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/glasgow-promotion
Today sees the start of the Learning Technology Special Interest Group (LTSIG) of IATEFL Event in Marrakech, Morocco. You can catch up with all the detail on the LTSIG website and follow the event live via this Adobe Connect Room: http://
conference).
You can also see more links from the IATEFL Group on Facebook.
Posted in TESOL, The educational technologist
Tagged Conferences, Educational Technology & TESOL, IATEFL, ICT
The 5th International Symposium on Digital Technologies in Foreign Language Learning will be held on 31st March 2012.
Venue: Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall, Japan
Keynote Speaker: Professor James Paul Gee (Arizona State University, USA)
Call for Papers: 10th November 2011 – 31st January 2012
Contact: Dr Mark Peterson (digitalkyoto@gmail.com) Dr Michael Thomas (mthomas4@uclan.ac.uk)
Webpage: http://digitallanguagelearning.wikispaces.com
Call for Papers
Abstracts of no more than 250 words are now being accepted on the following or related themes:
Proposals will be accepted in the following categories: papers (20 minutes); poster sessions (ongoing); workshops (40 minutes). Abstracts should be sent to: digitalkyoto@gmail.com by no later than 31st January 2012. Successful participants will be notified of acceptance by 7th February 2012.
Posted in The educational technologist
Tagged Conferences, digital, Educational Technology & TESOL, ICT, TESOL
The Learning Technologies Special Interest Group (SIG), the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English (MATE) and The British Council, Morocco are pleased to announce the 1st International Conference of ICT in Education in Marrakech, Morocco from 8th-11th February 2012.
The CALL for papers is available on the LTSIG website. The cut off date for proposals is 16th December.
This will be an exciting and interesting event, taking place in North Africa at a time of momentous change, make sure that you can say that you were there!
Gary Motteram
Event Organiser for the LTSIG.
Posted in General links, TESOL, The educational technologist
Tagged Conferences, EdTech, Educational Technology & TESOL, IATEFL, ICT, TESOL
IATEFL next year is in Glasgow, from Tuesday 20 to Friday 23 March 2012.
If you’re thinking of going, ask yourself:
Adapted from an email from Herbert Puchta, Chair, Publications Committee, and Vice President, IATEFL
Posted by Gary Motteram
edgeblog 17
It seems a long time since edgeblog 16, the main reason for which is probably that the intervening period included a trip to Peru. I shall spare you the details of the wonderful traveling, awe-inspiring sights and sites, welcoming people and delicious food, even of the repeated headaches that moving around the high Andes brings about for some of us, but I must mention the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano that invited me to Lima in the first place to run some professional development workshops. It is a very large institution, with five branches across Lima, tens of thousands of students and hundreds of teachers.
Working with my friend and long-term collaborator, Bob Oprandy, we ran sessions introducing Cooperative Development and associated skills/attitudes to the teachers and supervisors there. The sound level produced by over two hundred teachers seriously engaged in pair-work in an underground room is pretty impressive, but even more impressive was the effort and energy that they put into exploring such a new approach to peer interaction and professional development. The commitment, the shrewdness of the questioning and the enthusiasm for the idea of seizing more personal autonomy in their teaching was, in a reflexive kind of a way, hugely inspiring and empowering for me.
Follow-up sessions with smaller groups of supervisors (around 20) were no less energising and allowed us to go more deeply and sensitively into procedures and potentials. It was all very satisfying. I came away hoping that some of this work might take root for some of the participants and that I might hear more about it.
Meanwhile, back here in Britain, a very successful BAAL Language Learning and Teaching SIG conference had taken place, organised by friends and ex-colleagues at Aston University, Birmingham. The theme was:
Theorising practice and practising theory: developing local pedagogies in language teaching
(There’s a back-story here about me making a mess over diary dates and commitments, but I have apologised a lot, still feel bad, and so I’ll just look the other way at this point.)
The organisers, Sue Garton and Nur Hooton, allowed me to send in a videoed presentation, entitled, ‘In search of the hybrid: Discourse analysis, TESOL methodology and cultural politics,’ which we have now posted on Manchester University’s server. I’m attaching to this edgeblog The Aston-BAAL_hout that accompanies the talk and the handout also includes the url for the video. My talk turns to a large extent around an analysis of the following article:
Zhang, X. & Head, K. (2010). Dealing with learner reticence in the speaking class. ELT Journal 64 (1), 1-9.
So, it would be even better if you could first read that article and think your own thoughts, or discuss them with colleagues, before going on to the talk.
Hey, I’ll tell you something else. While you’re out there in cyberspace, discovering new delights, I cannot recommend highly enough this recipe for Peach Pie. Peach Pie may not resonate for you the way it does for me, but all I can do is pass on my recommendation for this one as a high-summer treat. And when the weather is a little cooler, I may let you in to the source of last night’s Pork and Black Pudding Wellington, which was also magnificent in its own way.
I hope your summer (or winter, given my growing hemispherical sensitivity) is going well.
Best,
Julian
I have chased up the company Broderbund online and they are still producing educational software of the kind we are seeing today as apps on the mobile phone, but don’t appear to be producing apps themselves as of yet.
Gary Motteram
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
From Gary: The IATEFL conference starts today (15th April, 2011) with Pre-Conference Events. The main conference starts tomorrow. Don’t forget that if you can’t make it, you can follow it online. See the recent posting below.
I will be attempting to Tweet at least some of the sessions I go to and writing a couple of blog entries.
This is the post-TESOL Convention edgeblog in two ways. First, because I am just (a few hours ago) back from the convention in New Orleans. Second, because I am pretty sure that that was the last TESOL Convention that I shall attend.
The 2011 conference itself was the usual vortex of activity, with a range and depth of topics and speakers impossible to fathom and navigate with any sense of certainty regarding what one would discover. But how not to be intrigued by the sensationally named Shaknoza Abdurakhmanova speaking on the topic of using wikis in Uzbekistan, and posing the question: How do learners manage to use wikipages to improve their writing through collaborative projects without having internet access at the university, and what a teacher needs to do in such settings?
Jennifer Jenkins, whose views many of you will be familiar with from discussions arising out of Rob Drummond’s Article Interview, featured in our EDUC70020 module, gave a plenary on English as a Lingua Franca. More particularly related to my own interests, Alastair Pennycook’s abstract for his plenary ran as follows:
English is an impossible idea. It is plural, fuzzy, unbounded, mixed, emergent and indefinable. English can no longer be pinned down; it is set of ideas, aspirations, desires, hopes, and threats. This plenary asks what it is we are involved in when we teach English.
My own session, I have to tell you (Who else will?), went very well. It was explicitly dedicated to introducing my new book, The Reflexive Teacher Educator: Roots and Wings. With my friend, Phil Quirke, contributing some scripted heckling from the back of the room, we presented a dramatized performance of Chapter 1. We had a full house, with people standing at the door. They laughed in the right places, listened carefully, and asked some astute questions at the end. Feedback was very positive and the publishers (Routledge) sold all the copies they had taken along. What more can you ask? Ah well, yes, and I enjoyed myself. To give you an idea, I’ll attach to this message the script that Phil and I used, along with the accompanying Powerpoint , for which wondering acknowledgement must be paid to Eljee Javier. All that I can add is that, for the opening and closing passages, I did my best impersonation of Daniel Day-Lewis’ voice in ‘There will be blood,’ which I think was an impersonation of John Huston in ‘Chinatown.’ Anyway, Gary, who was kind enough to come along and support, said, with a shake of the head, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve,’ and I know he meant it in a good way. :>)
Having seen Baton Rouge, I now know why Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin were so keen to get out of it, and I have to confess that Lafayette is a lot more exciting in Lucinda Williams’ song that I found it, but then, her brother knows where all the best bars are. New Iberia was delightful, as was the electioneering sheriff, who shook my hand on the street and again that night in a restaurant, even though he must have known by then that I couldn’t vote.
If you have heard that New Orleans is full of live music, you won’t hear any contradiction from me. And some of it is good. Standout venues for me were Preservation Hall, as a living museum kind of gig, and Snug Harbour, a serious jazz venue where we saw a quintet led by Victor Goines and Delefeayo Marsalis play with apparently effortless virtuosity, startling creativity and a great deal of obviously enjoying themselves.
I got back here to discover that I am on strike, the union having called us out for two days in protest, most immediately, against the attack on our pension provision. It’s not really possible (although legally necessary) to separate that out from protest against the government’s overall approach to the economy, in which people’s pensions generally are being sacrificed to make up the losses caused by the financial services’ scandal, while the banks shovel our cash into their vaults and bankers pay themselves the bonuses they insist that they need, and against the overall attack on our system of higher education and the values on which it was built, since 1945, at least.
I shall use the ‘on strike’ time to catch up on emails and Blackboard. I’m not sure about the ethics of that, but it reduces my stress levels and means that I don’t cross any picket lines. Both of these seem good things and, in the words of Jim Steadman, ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’
Ha! I didn’t tell you about why that was probably my last TESOL Convention. Still, enough for now. That’ll have to wait till next time.
Best,
Julian
Posted in edgeblog
Tagged Conferences, distance education, doctoral community, Educational Technology & TESOL, English as a Lingua Franca, IATEFL, intercultural education, language teacher education, LTE at Manchester, LTE Group, MA EdTech & TESOL, MA Educational Technology & TESOL, MA TESOL, Talks, Teacher education, TESOL
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