IATEFL 2012 - Thursday - Twitter Symposium

After 3 hectic days, I felt I needed a lie in.  So I took one at the expense of missing Steven L Thorne rattle off on Awareness, appropriacy and living language use at a cracking pace.  When I did surface I went into Glasgow city centre rather than the SECC.  I bought a new shirt as I was running out of clean ones.  My head was also a little sore after last night's drinking. I subsequently lost the shir, same day.

Still, I got the SECC around midday and wandered around, again bumping into and chatting with people I had previously met.  I made more of an effort around the exhibition stands, too.  My first session of the day was Tessa Woodward's Thinking in the EFL class in Forth, the other main room in the 'armadillo' (Clyde Auditorium).  Having recently contributed to a Loop Input Micro-Teaching session at Warwick, it was good to see and hear the author of such teacher training ideas, where you demonstrate activities to use with students by first training the teachers in the same method.  There, I finally bumped into Sandy Millin, from International House, somewhere in the vacinity of Newcastle - and not from Guildford after all.

Sandy Millin Tweets at 100 words per minute

She had been tweeting constantly since the start of the week, although she would claim she tweeted long before that.  I think only Shaun Wilden, of ELTchat fame, could give her a run for her money in the tweeting stakes.   It's a good way of taking notes, but the way that I've seen Twitter used this week in terms of developing and maintaining a PLN (professional learning network) has convinced me of it's worth.  I also want an iPad now after the seeing the way that can be used on the go... and especially when I've been unable to access to SECC wi-fi using my laptop.

Talking of Twitter and Shaun Wilden.... the 'Continuous professional development through social networking symposium' (to give it its full title) was a packed session including 6 talks, where people could come and go.    Marisa Constantinides, from CELT Athens, opened up with a run through of #ELTchat, lots of stats and an introduction to hashtags.  Shaun, also from International House, asked the question, in a 'Life of Brian' style, 'What has #hashtagging ever done for us?'.  I must admit that I didn't stay for the rest, I had got the gist and I found that I didn't have the patience, all week, to sit down for over an hour at a time.


I wanted  a break before I met up with Jim Scrivener again and with opening plenary speaker, Adrian Underhill to discuss their concept of 'demand high teaching'.  It is not a paarticularly revelating theory and would probably ruffle some feathers of many language teachers.  The idea that you just can't get away with being in the same room as the learners and expecting them to learn using the communicative language approach.  He explains this more in this interview on glasgow online.

In the evening I went to the Glasgow School of Art to meet two of my former students, Chen YeeYang (Leo) and Zheng Li (Jenny), from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.  It was two years since they graduated and I left the programme, at the end of my 10 month contract there.  We went for a Chinese meal, but not hotpot (that came the next day).  Fellow Warwick MA students, Li Jing (Lindsay) and Hornby Scholar, Getachew Yitbarek, joined us.