IATEFL 2012 - Wednesday - Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy

Wednesday was the busiest day of the week for trying to get around the conference and catching as many people as possible.  Even then, I failed.  I regret not catching Sandy Millin, Lulu Campbell or Maria Heron from NILE giving their talks.   I caught Diana Laurillard's plenary on supporting the teacher as innovative learning designer from the back rows, as I was a little late.  Her plenary is shown in full below:

Ana speaks

I then attended two of my fellow Warwick MA students' presentations. The first was Ana Ines Salvi on 'Combining autonomy-oriented pedagogy and practioner research via exploratory practice.   Ana was one of two International House John Haycraft Classroom Exploration Scholarship Winners - the other being Sandy Millin.  The first part of her talk is embedded below and the other parts are on You Tube. Click on the links at the end or follow the links from my YT links at the bottom of this blog:




I recorded the whole presentation at Ana's request.  It was well attended by some big names. This included including Leni Dam (see below), who Ana mentioned just before the Learner Autonomy co-ordinator walked into the room, and David and Jane Willis, amongst many others.

with Leni Dam after Ana's talk

The second of my two fellow students' presentations was Jo Gakonga on developing a virtual classroom for pre-Celta trainees.  I went to support Jo in her session, which was attended, amongst many others, by one of Jo's heroine's Catherine Walter and by one of my ex-Celta trainers, Carole Robinson, from NILE. 


Inbetween these two sessions,  I did what I said I wouldn't do and went to see my personal tutor, Russell Stannard, speak in Lomond to around 400 people.  The main reason for going was to see if he played a clip of a presentation which I made for my ICT in ELT blog.  He ran out of time but he gave me a mention and the link is on the slideshare he uploaded about the talk.   He is really milking the 'easy peasy lemon squeezy' catchphrase now!  The final section of his presentation on the 'Connected Classroom', is embedded below. Here he focuses on the cloud-based asynchronous tool, MyBrainshark.

The other two videos can be found on YouTube. Follow the link to my YouTube channel on the Wibiya bar at the bottom of the blog page.



and here is the slideshare presentation from Russell, which includes a shout out to my own Brainshark timeline presentation and a link to my other blog:

Iatefl

View more PowerPoint from Russell Stannard 

No chance to hang around, as over to Gavin Dudeney's much anticipated History of IT: From CALL to EdTech.  This was quite a personal run-through of IT history as seen through Gavin's eyes, with more than a shot of humour.  He started in the same place as me, with a ZX81 in 1981, moving onto a Commodore.  Except I seemed to spend about 10 years away from computers between 1988 and 1998 - I'm not sure what accounts for this - before finally getting a gimme from Anglia Poly when I was an undergradaute.  I was, therefore, quite late into the second age of personal computers, laptops and, subsequently, mobiles and tablets.  I'm still trying to catch up, although I am getting there very quickly.

Here is Gavin's presentation in full which I able to embed from the British Council Glasgow Online site, as I am a registered blogger:

Again, no chance to hang around, as I was off to see a 15 minute presentation on working in the United Arab Emirates, followed by an interview for Zayed University with Wayne Jones.   Because I was 'in the zone' and buzzing with IT and learner autonomy concepts, I breezed through the interview, even forgetting to ask how much the job paid.   We shall see if something comes of it, although I wouldn't be able to start until January 2013.

I was quite interested to see John Gray and Richard Smith doing their ELT coursebooks symposium, but instead I took a bit of time off, hanging out in the Crowne Plaza hotel.  I should have gone to see uber-tweeter, Sandy Millin, in Boisdale, but it was too late when I realised I had missed the start.  Reports on Twitter were complimentary.

With Jim Scrivener (Bell)

Macmillan Ferry boat party

With Anthony Gaughan

Take your partners... Wednesday night on the Ferry

So I left SECC earlier than expected, heading down to the Macmillan party on the Ferry.  This was the best night of the week.  A packed boat with scottish dancing, free wine and just about every famous name at the conference.  I ended up talking with two delegates from Hamburg before latching onto Ana, who was flying high on adrenalin after her presentation, and another Warwick postgraduate, Samaneh Zandian from Iran.  We subsequently met Ela Wassell from Poland + her husband.   At the suggestion of Jim Scrivener, the six of us went to look for something to eat, finally ending up in Thai Orchid, after a strange wander around the city. 

A great day and night, but a hangover the next day. My fault for not having the watermelon juice like everyone else (see below):

After the Ferry, at Thai Orchid

 
Finally, here's Russell Stannard being interviewed on the Glasgow Online site 
about his session: