Image Conference

This is a belated, short post on my recent trip to Barcelona (8-9 June).  It was my first time to visit the city and I took in some of the tourist sites on the second day, but my main reason for going was to attend the Image Conference. I did the whole thing on the cheap, getting a return air ticket from Birmingham for less than £100 and staying in a shared dormitory at the Sant Jordi Sagrada Familia Hostel, 3 nights for around 70 Euros.  Not ideal, but economical, functional and close to the conference venue.

The Image Conference - main site here - took place at UAB Idiomes, part of the historical, world heritage site of Casa Convelescencia, on Saturday 8 June.  It was billed as the first conference exclusively on the use of short films, images and gaming in English language teaching.  It also included the potential for TV clips, courtesy of Steve Muir. Unfortunately I missed his session.  I heard it, but I chose to venture next door for Paul Driver's excellent session on 'Pervasive Playfulness and Mobile Technologies for Embodied Language Learning', which covered a lot of theory and inventive practice that I wrote about on my earlier Virtual Web Conference post. 

There were a great number of creative ideas shared by the presenters. Most memorable for me was Ian James' excellent run through of ways and tools for using pictures, in 'Photo Opportunities'.

I also took away a better understanding of the conservative nature of many coursebooks, courtesy of Lindsay Clandfield's talk.  Needless to say, he mentioned the PARSNIP analogy, those items which are no-go areas for publishers - politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms (such as communism or atheism) and pork - see also Scott Thornbury's T is for Taboo.  I worked through some of Lindsay's activities with Steve Muir and closing plenary speaker, Ben Goldstein. 

A highlight came right at the beginning, with Jamie Keddie's take on using images.  Especially memorable are his 'picture telling' techniques for withholding information.  He invites the listener/learner to picture something in their head by gradually building up the image, bit by bit, starting with 'an authoritative, robust wall'.  The piece of paper he refers to does not show the image, but are actually his notes. A particularly striking and recent image, 'The Woman In The Red Dress' from the Gezi Park protests in Turkey was used to demonstrate this.  He also demonstrated the Tracing and Sketching (Graphite) app, which can draw outlines of pictures, and Picasa to add text.  The image used can be found easily online. In the example here - there are four images taken seconds apart.  The top-right image, chosen by Jamie, was the one that has been most widely circulated.  Jamie asked whether our perceptions of the image changes if the person being sprayed was male or looked aggressive rather than seemingly quite passive.  Why is the top-right image the most powerful? This is something to elicit from the learners.  Jamie's lesson plan for this image is on lessonstream - here.

I also attended conference organiser, Kieran Donaghy's session on 'short and sweet' films, Mark McKinnon, in 'The Embodied Voice', demonstrating how a clip from the film 'Witness' might be used, and Ben Goldstein's closing plenary, 'A History of Video in ELT'.   By this point, I was fading.  I had not been in the best of health going into this and I did not record or take notes of the sessions. It was a bit of a blur.  The main room was live streamed but I've seen the recordings uploaded as yet.  It would be nice to watch back some of the sessions and catch up with those I missed, such as John Hughes' and Kyle Mawer's sessions.   The Image Conference site does have various participants' experiences to read here.  

On the Sunday, I went sightseeing...