I've just attended the Virtual Round Table (VRT), an annual online conference for language educators, which is held entirely using the high-end web conference solution, Adobe Connect. VRT began in November 2009 and there were two events held in 2010. Last year's event attracted 63 guest speakers (accumulated total 277) and 695 unique participants (total 2586). This year, over 70 speakers, many of whom had presented at previous VRT events, were squeezed into three days, with many concurrent sessions, 48+ hours of programming and using five virtual rooms in total.Many of the sessions were, for the first time, streamed live on Facebook (thanks to RCS Germany), while the recordings were made available not long after the sessions had taken place on the program page. Although I signed up as a member in order to leave comments, which required giving some basic details about myself, I did not have to do so in order to access the program, attend the sessions as a guest or access the subsequent recordings. These are freely available for anyone to watch back, making them a fabulous professional development opportunity for language educators around the world.
The conference is/was put together and expertly hosted by Heike Philp, whose infectious smile whenever she introduced a guest speaker made me smile too, along with Shelly Sanches Terrell, Berni Wall, Steven Herder and Jennifer Verschoor. It was also superbly moderated by other 'volunteers', some of whom gave talks themselves. Although some are the costs of this event, presumably the necessary subscriptions to Adobe, were covered by sponsors - ExamEnglish, CELT Athens, Gapfillers, EnglishCentral, English360 and Lingorilla - a lot the organisers' free time must surely have been invested in making sure the conference worked as smoothly and effectively as it did.
There was a big announcement, by Heike, during the welcome address that there is an intention to collate all of the recordings from this and previous events into one single expansive video resource, The Virtual RT Academy - here - somewhat inspired by the Khan Academy. This is work in progress with 100 links already and more than 500 recordings to be made available. Sessions are being categorised by type and, in keeping with the ethos of the conference itself, will be free to access.
Eleven 'keynote' presentations at this 6th event took place in the main venue ('Arthur' room) and featured presenters such as Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockly, Hayo Reinders, Thomas Strasser, Evelyn Izuierdo, Miguel Mendoza, Paul Driver, Joe Dale, Barbara Sakamoto and Steven Herder. Also in the main room were talks and discussions by Geoff Tranter on CEFR (see below), Judy Boyle on the humanitarian No Project: Global Anti-slavery/human trafficking campaign, and Katie Quartano with Paul Shaw, on Disabled Friendly Access. There were also themed 'break-out' rooms on teaching with technology, learner resources, using video, blended learning with English360, young learners and virtual worlds. In addition to this, there was a LatinCALL symposium (Friday) and an Asian Symposium (Sunday) each with up to three rooms of tailored sessions. One session on digital storytelling was, unfortunately, cancelled from Saturday afternoon, while another using photos was shifted to a Sunday slot.
Like any conference, I picked out a few things of interest beforehand. I attended some because I knew or had heard of the speakers and others which I just tried out. A couple were repeats of sessions that I had missed at IATEFL, Liverpool, this year, and which had not been recorded by the British Council Online team. Obviously, it was not possible to attend all sessions as many were concurrent, while the LatinCALL (South American) symposium and Asian symposium happened late at night and early in the morning, respectively. But, unlike at IATEFL, all sessions were recorded, for later, conducive viewing. I have recorded a few thoughts below about a handful of the sessions I attended*. As well as the sessions below, I also attended Mostafa Mohiuddin's descriptive introduction to the BC LearnEnglish website and learner autonomy, Fiona Mauchline's 'Take a picture and...' session about #ELTpics, and Marisa Constantinides' timely reminder (for me) about organising, curating and creating content. I also attended Sophia Mavridi's wonderfully coherent talk on 'e-safety', Janet Bianchini's excellent run through of Apps from A-Z and Paul Driver's phenomenal presentation, 'Embodiment, Technology and Locative Play' which left me speechless and dazzled many participants. This inspirational highlight is featured below. I heard about some of the other sessions that took place via the #vrtwebcon Twitter hashtag, such as one presenter who apparently rapped his way through a 'virtual workout'.
All of the sessions are currently available via the program page - here - and are also listed in full at the end of this post below, courtesy of the conference organisers.
*Embodiment, technology and locative play - Recording
What do hammers have to do with language learning? So began Paul Driver in his phenomenal presentation on Sunday. "Hitting the nail on the head" suggested one participant. "Using it to hit students with", joked another. The question was raised to introduced the concept of phenomenology, a term I last heard when I was a Sociology undergraduate over 10 years ago. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, had a theory about tools. When we use tools to fulfil a specific objective they become extensions of our body. A picture of a hammer is disconnected from ourselves, but when we use it to bang in a nail the actual hammer ceases to exist and becomes an extension of the person using it. If the hammer breaks it becomes an abstract object, separate from the person. This analogy was made to express the idea of how language is used to fulfil an authentic objective. When done effectively, you no longer focus on the language details but the idea being communicated. Often language is treated like a broken hammer, separate from ourselves. When you use language to communicate fluently and you are focusing on the motivations for communicating, the language itself becomes transparent.
Paul moved on to the notion of embodiment. He defined the Cartesian (e.g. Descartes) view of mind-body separation, that we live in our heads and that it is somehow separate from the body. Phenomenology rejects this, believing the mind and body have a symbiotic relationship and the way it reacts to the world around.
- "The phenomenological tradition emphasises the primacy of practical engagement over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Embodiment is not only a means of practical action, but an essential part of the deep structure of all knowing." as was outlined by two quotes on screen.
Paul also rejects the Cartesian view and showed a thought-provoking video, "Where Are We: an Embodied Approach to language development" - click here to see, which was created by himself. The essential point appeared to demonstrate the limitations of standard classrooms and how they conflict with the ideas of embodiment and multi-sensory engagement. Classrooms are not ideal for situating language learning, and neither are virtual environments, presumably simulated classrooms of Second Life, for example.
- "The body plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world. Embodiment is not just a state but an emergent quality of interactions."
Paul showed a picture of his classroom at the University of Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Portugal. It is big, bleak and cold-looking. It also happens to be Room 101, reflecting the infamous room of nightmares and torture in Orwell's 1984. Although entirely coincidental, this rooms 'embodies' (my word choice) a lot of Paul's issues with the limitations of the physical classroom space. In addition to all the desks facing the front, there is a elongated 'blackboard', with no apparent technology available. It is a room seemingly designed for lectures, with knowledge transmitted from the top down. It conflicts with ideas of social constructivism where knowledge is generated between us and among us.
Paul went on to ask what a pedagogy designed around the principles of embodied cognition would look like and how could it be put into practice Despite lots of talk about this at conferences, Paul says he has found little evidence of it happening in practice, with a break away from the physical confines of the classroom.
Paul went on to ask what a pedagogy designed around the principles of embodied cognition would look like and how could it be put into practice Despite lots of talk about this at conferences, Paul says he has found little evidence of it happening in practice, with a break away from the physical confines of the classroom.
Paul went on to demonstrate a number of projects he has developed over the years that have attempted to implement the theories outlined. To see these watch the recording (link above).
Towards the end of his session, Paul showed off his ELTons 2013 nominated SpyWalk: A Pervasive Game For Language Learners. This is an example of 'locative play' as mentioned in the session title. Pervasive gaming is situated in the three-dimensional real world. In practice, it is the city or the location in which the students reside. Using an iPhone hidden inside a briefcase, a live signal can be tracked using the students own smartphones or on Facebook, enabling to follow a spy around that city. The game has an espionage feel to it. The idea is to track the spy and capture him the moment he exchanges the briefcase with his 'evil partner'. None of the teams know who else is playing, other than their own team members. One of the objectives is to identify members of other team, take a photo and describe them, causing a certain level of paranoia as the game gets played. The briefcase iPhone has a camera filming all the time. The spy's objective is to identify the players following him. There are all sorts of game dynamics which creates a kind of cat and mouse scenario. It has been carried out with up to 60 students simultaneously. For more detail on the how the game works, the language possibilities that emerge and how the game finishes, watch the recording (link above). There is a promo clip, complete with film noir style soundtrack, embedded below, from a game played in Porto. Fascinating, innovative stuff.
*Digital Literacies - Recording
The opening session by Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly was on a topic first aired a year ago at the 5th VRT Webcon event. 'Digital Literacies', at that time, had already been a work in progress for a year, along with Mark Pegrum, with a view to publishing a book of the same title. One year on, that book has just been published by Pearson and was officially 'launched' at the IATEFL conference in Liverpool, in April. The presentation is now subtitled '...The Essential Guide'. Gavin asked what the participants thought Digital Literacy is before mentioning the original 3Rs core skills ('reading', '(w)riting, 'a(r)ithmatics) which have for a long time, at least in the UK, been the cornerstones of what it meant to be literate and numerate. Being online, however, has expanded the set of skills needed in education. One definition was criticised for the using the word 'computer', as this is now outdated. A second quote found on Wikipedia (below) was better because it included a lot of verbs.
A comparison was made between the second half of the quote and people who can speak the same language. Gavin drew parallels between technology, DL and what goes on in EFL, before stating he was "not a native speaker of technology because when [he] grew up all [he] had was a pocket calculator." The age and noun/verb distinctions of Prensky's discredited immigrants/natives dichotomy were pointed out before the more appropriate resident/visitor distinction was mentioned.
DLs were 'unpacked' into four areas of language (e.g. print, hypertext, multimedia), information (search, tagging), connections (personal, participatory) and a re-design or remix literacy. These were all briefly described and are discussed more fully in chapter one of the book. Also in that book are 50 activities grouped by area, then by type of literacy. Nicky later used Activity 36 in the session. This is a series of cards on the topic of digital safety using social networking sites, using the idea of personal and network literacy. She suggested that teachers need to be helping students develop their digital literacy skills and that activities in ELT can complement these quite well. Another activity (6 in book), which was also used, involved the topic of 'Txtspk' (textspeak) which raises awareness of codeswitching.
Gavin used the TPCK model to show how most teachers sit very comfortably with both pedagogical and content knowledge. Ideally we would wish to incorporate a layer of technological knowledge to the level of teachers' existing skills so that they are able to engage their subject using technologies. This, he suggests, has an implication for mainstream teacher training, in what needs to happen to get up to this desired TPCK level.
Having bought the book, but having missed Gavin's session at Liverpool, it was good to have this opportunity to see the authors explain some of the key concepts, even if I had read about them already in the book (and a draft version which I saw last year) with some experiential learning included, from Nicky.
*Mind The App - Recording
Thomas Strasser, presenting from Vienna, enthusiastically ran through a selection of inspiring tools to engage students. He began with an excellent quote from Mitchell Kapor about 'Getting information off the Internet [being] like taking a drink from a fire hydrant', suggesting there can be information overload. He focused on 'educational applications' - free, browser-based web tools which put the focus on didactics. He set up three domains - pedagogic, pragmatic and didactic. Firstly, there are the group dynamics, reflection, feedback and communicative needs of the classroom. Secondly, there are problems and practical concerns with institutional infrastructure. Thirdly, what happens when we get so hyped by a wish to use a tool that we lost track of the purpose of using it. His belief was that web tools should be 'quick and dirty', a term that I came across last year when I researched screencapture technology as used by learners. He particularly wanted to stress the importance of browser based tools rather than device specific apps, hence the session title, I guess.
His tools presented were the following:
- Tagxedo - beautiful word clouds, a 'pimped up' sister of Wordle. Great for shapes and colours. He demonstrated it using Martin Luther King's famous speech and the Wikipedia entry on Shakespeare. Highlighted the 'skip words' option to make guessing the source more difficult.
- Spreaker - similar to Audioboo. Can either upload existing files or record using 'broadcast' option. Can turn into radio shows, with an interface which mimics a mixing desk. Good speaking practice as students want to perfect their recordings. 10 hours total recording time. Easy to share. There is a potential here to deal with the digital literacy area of remixing and copyright.
- Padlet - improved version of 'Wallwisher'. Alternative is Lino-it. Interactive, mind-mapping, brainstorming surface. Demonstrated 'live' by generating a mind map for London, with participants adding photos and commenting. Embedding options. Can teach 'netiquette' (appropriate behaviour in a virtual setting).
- Flipsnack - 'pimps' students' text. Converts files into flipbooks. Not revolutionary, but looks good for collecting students' work. Apparently only PDF files can be uploaded, which if true would limit its potential.
*Online Lexical Tools - Recording
Leo started off by finding out participants' understanding of corpora and briefly displaying BYU-BNC, which is the British National Corpus, as hosted by Brigham Young University. It uses the same interface as COCA (Corpora of Contemporary American English), which is the tool that Scott did a 'Present Me' tutorial for and is also the tool that I am in the process of recording some screencasts for. BNC was used to show a verb collocation for the word 'advice'. He then moved onto more corpus-lite, user-friendly concordance tools, as featured on his blog's 'essential lexical tools' section. Firstly, he demonstrated the word 'major' using Just-The-Word, which gives visual representation of word frequency. Leo would draw students' attention to the most frequent collocations or explore near-synonyms, such as 'gift' and 'present'. Leo then asked participants to complete some phrases on the screen. He referred to (Michael Hoey's) theory of 'lexical priming' to do this. The tool that was used to examine the phrases and whether the participants' minds were, indeed, 'primed' is called Netspeak. The tools Phrase Up and Fraze.it. were also shown off. StringNet was also demonstrated. It is claimed to be different, an archive of mulit-word patterns. You can explore lexical and grammatical patterns. The noun, 'emphasis', was used as an example. Leo posed a question: How many different aspects of word/vocabulary knowledge are there? Nine, were stipulated. Research was mentioned which, unsurprisingly, showed that the form-meaning link receives most attention in textbooks. Three online dictionaries, including the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, were singled out as ones which use corpus examples. Two more tools which check word frequency, 'Word Count' and 'Google Books Ngram Viewer' were subsequently shown. The former was used to demonstrate that we can sometimes overestimate the frequency of certain words and underestimate the use of others, while the latter looks at word use over a long period of time, a tool which had first come to my attention via Johanna Stirling on her spelling blog. Leo finished by looking at the concordancer, Lextutor.ca and, finally, Concordle, a self-described 'not-so-pretty cousin' of Wordle. It was quite a breezy run through, in just over half an hour, of the main tools that can be used with or by students. Leo has since updated his essential lexical tools page - here - to accommodate the newer tools that he had not previously mentioned.
It still left me, however, with the unenviable task of trying to follow Scott Thornbury and finish off my screencasts for Russell Stannard on how COCA can be used in the class. And, talking of screencasting...
Screencasting: A dynamic and interactive way to provide feedback - Recording
Evelyn Izquierdo and Miguel Mendoza jointly presented on screencasting. They demonstrated a 5 week course that was run by the Electronic Village Organisation. On this course, teacher participants from around the world were shown how to create and host podcasts using a number of different tools (e.g. Audicity, Podomatic and Audioboo) and to create a blog to demonstrate their learning. After giving us a run through of the kinds of screencasting tools (eg ScreenR, Screenbird, Kazam) available on different platforms, examples of content from the 2011 course were shown. They explained how screencating was used to provide feedback on the participants' content and was later embedded onto the main blog, which also contained instructions and tutorials. They significantly acknowledged Russell Stannard's work on both the use of screencasting for tutorials and his research on using it for providing rich, engaging feedback. I admit that the word 'screencasting' drew me into this presentation and that having had the experience of having Russell as a personal tutor at Warwick last year, I wanted to see if his work was acknowledged, and so it was. Clearly an inspiration to Evelyn and Miguel. The benefits of being able to see as well as hear comments from a tutor were stated, along with the ability to replay the feedback. They stated that the feedback given was, perhaps, only a few minutes, but it was enough to steer the teachers in the right direction and to make sure that tasks were completed on time. At the end of their course, a podcasting 'fair' took place in which participants could comment on other participants' work.
*The Effects of Aural Input Enhancement On L2 Acquisition through Mobile Learning - Recording
The research carried out in Seoul came with some of those limitations attached. He painted a backdrop of Korean first year university students with limited access to English tuition, where the structure is very exam driven, focusing on formal aspects of the language, accuracy as opposed to fluency. The research needed to marry focus on form with focus on meaning. This meant attempting to direct learners' attention to form in an otherwise meaning-oriented context, where a teacher might pick up on a grammatical point during a conversation in class, for example. This focus on form can either be 'obtrusive', where learners are aware of it happening, or 'non-obtrusive'. This latter type was important as they didn't want to distract the students from focusing on the story meaning rather than grammar. One way to do this was to enhance the positive input. You manipulate the input language in such a way as to direct the learners' attention to a particular aspect. Previous research had focused on textual input enhancement, but the research wanted to investigate whether this could be done aurally. Could attention be drawn to a particular grammar point while listening to an audiobook?
So 72 pre-int/int Korean EFL learners were given an audiobook of Frankenstein. The target was the 'passive' construction. They manipulated the story, using Audacity, to identify 58 examples of the passive. For one group, a short pause was inserted. Another group received a version which slowed down for the construction, while a final group listened to an unmodified audio. They all sat a pre-test and a post-test which was a timed, intuition-based grammar judgement test. By using a non-obtrusive enhancement the learners were unlikely to develop any explicit knowledge of the structure. The results showed that all three groups improved between tests. Their apparent knowledge of the passive structure improved a little. But they found no difference between groups. So "their little plan failed". The amount of exposure might not have been enough, or that the enhancement was too unobstrusive. Indeed, it certainly seemed to me that the modifications were so slight that it was unsurprising that it would not have made any difference. The majority of the Paused Group said they noticed the pauses but not the reason why. Reinders went on to explain more about this in terms of failing to draw enough attention. One participant in the session suggested that they may have focused more on the pauses themselves rather than what came before.
Despite the apparent failings, the experiment did produce a significant level in students finishing the audiobook. The students previously did not do their homework. Indeed, some had listened to the audiobook several times. It increased 'time on task'. They also enjoyed it. Having spent a year teaching in Korea myself, I recognised the issue of task completion and enjoyment factor as opposed to explicit learning. The reason why they enjoyed it was simply because they were unaware of what they were supposed to be learning. So the unobtrusive element actually helped. Bizarre, but true. A real example of how a 'failed' experiment which actually produced some context specific positives.
*Is your B1 my B1? - Recording
The Central European Framework (CEFR) is only 12 years old, which I did not realise. For four or five years it became widely adopted, but discussion about it has, subsequently, died away. Geoff Tranter framed his talk 'ten things you... did not know' but could have been '...may not know' or '...always wanted to know'. His presentation lasted around 20 minutes.
With my limited understanding, I knew that the CEFR defines six language proficiency levels (A1 > C2), which covers all age groups, situations and purposes as outlined by Geoff's first point, but this raised a number of questions which he outlined. What does it mean for ESP? for children? What level are we in other languages? Should we not have a profile across [the four marco skills]? Does a level indicate a person's ability to perform in all 50 skill-based and linguistic categories for that level? CEFR priorities communication (action-based) over accuracy (knowledge-based) but how does that translate to the classroom? He usefully stated that a C2 definition does not include either pronunciation or intonation which proves that CEFR has nothing to do with native speaker competence. CEFR designates learners at B1/B2 level to be 'independent users', which raised a number of sub questions about the motivation needed to progress. It is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. However, it is used prescriptively by ministries and systems all over Europe, so is it being abused or misused? There are 39 translations, including native languages outside of Europe, such as Japanese and Korean. But did it even "swim" (get adopted) across the channel to the UK? Finally, there are hundreds of interpretations of CEFR. Because these may vary whose interpretation is correct and, therefore, returning to the original question, is my B1 your/my/their B1?
A subsequent, lengthy discussion was then framed by Geoff's streamlined questions, shown in the image below:
Heike (as moderator) was joined by Berni Wall and, later, by Vicky Saumell on screen and several other participants took part in the chat window. I am not going to summarise the discussion here but it can be viewed, as of 20 May, here. Suffice to say that Vicky (around 33 mins in) makes a lot of great points about the CEFR's value for teachers, answering some of the questions that Geoff posed, and explains what the situation is with coursebooks in Argentina.
Finally there was one question posed by Holly, in Idaho, who I interviewed last year for my dissertation, and who asked, via Heike:
"How can we, as teachers, take the students' focus off the level and more on their ability to actually use the language in a credible way? What is more important - whether the student can answer the phone confidently in English or whether he/she is level B1 or B2?"To which Berni replied, and I am paraphrasing here, that a focus on a particular level was the case with students focusing on their Cambridge exams or preparing for IELTS, quoting students who stated they didn't have any time to study English because they were studying for IELTS. This made everyone laugh.
To finish, I hope I have not misrepresented any of the speakers. So if any of those mentioned above happen to be reading this and I have misquoted you in some way, then please do feel to comment below. Or if you were involved in the event and have your own particular favourite session, I would be interested to know, too.
The 6th Virtual Round Table Web Conference on language learning technologies, 17-19 May 2013 welcomed an attendance of 628 participants in Adobe Connect and 155 participants on our livestream on facebook.
Facts and figures...
- 75 guest speakers
- 628 participants in Adobe Connect and
- 155 participants on Livestream on Facebook
- 2100 signed up on the homepage
- 57 sessions
- 40h of program of which were ...
- 13 keynotes
- 3 plenaries
- one unconference
- 43 presentations
- 2 workshops
- one musical performance
The conference is free of charge but not free of cost and we thank our sponsors and exhibitors: English360, EnglishCentral, Ex
For further information ....
[SUMMARY] http://www.virtual-
[PROGRAM] http://tinyurl.com/
[SPONSORS/EXHIBITORS] http://
NEW [VRT ACADEMY] http://www.virtual-round-
[CERTIFICATES OF ATTENDANCE] http://vrtwebcon.
Enjoy the recordings!
Your conference organisers:
Heike Philp, let’s talk online sprl
Shelly Sanchez Terrell
Berni Wall, RLI Gapfiller
Steven Herder, iTDi
Jennifer Verschoor, ARCALL
Shelly Sanchez Terrell
Berni Wall, RLI Gapfiller
Steven Herder, iTDi
Jennifer Verschoor, ARCALL
