MA TESOL

Gary is collaborating with Graham Stanley (MEd Ed Tech and TESOL graduate from 2004) to edit a special issue of the journal: International Journal of Computer Assisted Language Learning and Teaching due out in October 2010. This will feature articles that are connected to the IATEFL LTSIG Pre-Conference Event that was held physically in Harrogate and virtually on the AVALON Learning island in 2nd Life. Two of our students will also be writing articles: Simon Bibby (gradating 2010) and Rachel Lindner (working on her dissertation)

Open Education  is an online journal for articles and other pieces about distance and open education and educational technology. It’s the journal of the Hellenic Network for Open and Distance Education for our long time collaborators at the Hellenic Open University in Greece. They are keen for submissions in these fields from outside the Greek educational sphere. Any takers?

A recent graduate, Vida Zorko, has recently published an article in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology: http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/zorko.html

Technology Enhanced Learning against social exclusion

(deadline: 26 January 2010)

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are already part of our everyday life and key enablers for many activities, such as working environments, daily communications and relationships, handling of administrative affairs, etc. However, it is still necessary to encourage eInclusion, to promote ICT in order to enhance social inclusion in the knowledge society and to boost barrier-free technologies usable by all citizens.

In 2006, the Riga Declaration set a number of targets to promote an inclusive knowledge society for all European citizens. This was followed by an awareness and dissemination campaign in 2008 under the slogan: “eInclusion, be part of it!”. The year 2010 has been declared the European Year against Poverty and Social Exclusion, and among its objectives are:

Promoting inclusive labour markets;
Eradicating disadvantages in education and training;
Accessibility to adequate resources and services;
Promoting social inclusion of immigrants and minorities.

Education and training have an important role to play in the activities that enhance eInclusion, for example through the promotion of digital literacy, e-skills, integration and cultural diversity. This also brings considerable challenges, such as issues around accessibility, the promotion of education and training among excluded groups, and the development of new pedagogic models and methods for inclusive learning.

This special issue of eLearning Papers will examine how Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) can help individuals and institutions to fight against poverty and social exclusion. Three ways of social inclusion, made possible by TEL, will be considered in this issue:

Material inclusion: fight against poverty and the digital divide, contribute to “education for all”;
Physical inclusion: help disabled and geographically isolated populations to be “mobile”;
(Inter-)cultural inclusion: integration of minorities (Rroms), refugees and migrants, boost inter-generational relations, fight against discriminations.

Which strategies and pedagogical approaches can be applied through the use of technologies in order to contribute to these three categories? What is the role of, for example, foreign languages and/or intercultural education/citizenship in these approaches? Our hypothesis is that through
technologies people can find new ways of reflecting on the notions of inclusion/exclusion and gain a feeling of being included and integrated.

We are looking for articles and practical case descriptions with real life examples about how ICT have been already used for social inclusion in any of the three ways above mentioned.

The article submission closes on 26 January 2010. The provisional date of publication is the end of April 2010. See the author guidelines at: http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=collab_guide

Guest editors:

Fred Dervin, University of Turku, Finland

Christine Develotte, INRP, Lyon, France

Dear colleagues, it is my pleasure to announce the publication of the two following volumes on digital technologies and identity. Colleagues working on migration/ interculturality and new technologies will find them of special interest (cf. table of contents).
Best wishes
Fred Dervin

**********

* Digital Technologies of the Self – Yasmine Abbas and Fred Dervin (eds.).
Cambridge Scholars (2009).

- Information available at:
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Digital-Technologies-of-the-Self1-4438-1419-9.htm

- Introduction and table of contents:
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/978-1-4438-1419-5-sample.pdf

*********

* Technologies numériques du soi – Fred Dervin & Yasmine Abbas (éds.).
Paris : L’Harmattan (2009).

Information:
http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=29972&razSqlClone=1

Table of contents:
http://users.utu.fi/freder/technologies%20numriques%20du%20soi%20et.htm

Dr Fred Dervin,
Adjunct Professor (Sociology, University of Joensuu, Finland)
Adjunct Professor (Language and intercultural education, University of
Turku, Finland)

Website: http://users.utu.fi/freder/
Tel (office): +35823336041
Fax: +35823336560

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 19^th century medic and show them a hospital today, they wouldn’t recognise it, but if you showed a 19^th 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

There are so many options for communication out there and only so much time to actually make a contribution to our Web 2.0 world, so I have finally managed to bring together my Twitter psotings and my Facebook status. I knew this was possible, but have only just had the time to achieve it.  My tweets also appear on a widget on this blog, too. Now all I’ve got to do is make this post appear on a Comment Wall in Facebook and I might have cracked it

You may be interested in this new CALL journal. It doesn’t launch officially until next year, but it’s never too early to start submitting

www.igi-global.com/ijcallt