On Sunday 15 September, I gave a webinar presentation using Adobe Connect as part of a series of online events hosted by the IATEFL Learning Technologies Special Interest Group. The webinar was moderated by Heike Philp, the new online events organiser. The slides are embedded below while the recording is available (to LTSIG members only) - here - under the events archive.
It was my first experience of being a presenter to an IATEFL audience. Despite some early audio issues, it seemed to go OK. 50 or so participants turned up, with many contributing in the chat window. This was a view of the webinar as seen by the LTSIG treasurer, Sophia Mavridi, and the view from my end:
screenshot: Sophia Mavridi - @SophiaMav
My view from home
Abstract:
Most of us have to,
at some point, use ICT or web tools as part of our practice, but how autonomous
are we when it comes to learning those tools?
To what extent do we teach ourselves and to what extent do we learn from
others? What training do we expect, if
any? How can we create our own autonomy?
This webinar is intended to build on research carried out for a master’s
dissertation. Hopefully, it will also provide
an up-to-date snapshot of current practice and you will be invited to participate
in adding to this research for possible further publication.
"So, it's (nearly) April and the things you say don't seem as certain as on Hogmanay". So sang Glasgow band, Deacon Blue on one of their lesser known tracks, Twist & Shout, in 1991. I've added a new blogroll to this two year old blog, which I have titled 'Fellow Hoodlums', which is the album from which the song 'Twist & Shout' came. In addition, the title track has been going around my head all week as I walk through the city centre, with its mentions of the Clyde, St Enochs, Buchanan Street etc.I consider it appropriate to use this title because I met a load of new bloggers at Glasgow in the past week. Deacon Blue are famously from the city and it kind of refers to the comment made by closing time plenary speaker, Derek Dick (aka Fish), about us being 'rock 'n' roll teachers', not the kind of teachers he used to dislike as a kid.This twist of opinion towards (presumably school) teachers came when his teacher, 'Jimi' Hendrix called a Genesis album, 'rubbish'. I'll try not to say it made him shout, but oooh, i just did! It was interesting to hear him describe writing 'Kayleigh', his most famous lyric, and getting that 'BAM!' feeling - like a hand grenade to the heart - both in the plenary and in the pre-conference interview.
Fish was an inspired choice by iatefl president, Eric Barber, to close the conference. Not everyone in the room would have heard of him but I, for one, remember purchasing 'Misplaced Childhood' by Marillion in the 80s and going back to 'Script For A Jester's Tear' after that. I subsequently bought 'Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors', Fish's debut album on cassette, soon after it came out, in 1990. Fish sang 3 songs from this album - A State of Mind, Family Business and The Company. The latter, a self-described drinking song ended with getting the whole auditorium to dance like 'fairyland creatures'. OK, I cannot claim to be his biggest fan, far from it. Plenty of my friends are bigger fans... but when Fish mentioned meeting Peter Gabriel, my favourite artist of all time, he made a reference to being disappointed to meeting Gabriel when he was young. I had no such disappointment today, and you can see the photo below on this post. Fish's closing plenary can be seen in full here. The sound quality is not great on some of the songs, especially 'A State Of Mind'. I have uploaded this song myself, along with closing song, 'The Company'. You can just about see me recording at around 56.55 into the BCGO video, around the 'russian choir/ballet dancers' bit and again around 57.36. Please check out the end of this post for my recording. ->
< Fish on stage at iatefl >
On the final day of the conference I made up slightly for a self-imposed half-day on the penulatimate day. At least I managed to catch the plenary session this time,ProfessorJames E. Zull. Thanks to the brilliantly free, accessible and frequently updated British Council Glasgow Online site, however, I watched it from my hotel over an extended breakfast, whilst blogging my thoughts on the previous couple of days. Fortunately Mr Dull's (excuse me, I apologise) Mr Zull's slow-paced delivery gave me many pregnant pauses with which to write stuff.The Professor of Biology and Founding Director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) gave the penultimate plenary session. It was actually rather good, a biological explanation via the brain for language learning. But it was a direct contrast to Steven Thorne's lightning speed delivery in the previous plenary on Thursday.
Steven Bukin delivers a whole load of iPad ideas for the classroom.
Over in Leven, Steven Bukin demonstrated the many uses of teaching with an iPad. Technology is great when it works and for the most part it worked for his presentation. The clearest benefit of a teacher using an iPad to teach is the mobility it gives him or her to wander around the classroom and still control the whiteboard or projector, as Steven showed. There are also a number of cool apps, synonymous with apple products generally as we know, which he also demonstrated. Most of these are free or a couple of dollars, as he put it. However, we must remember, that iPads should only be used if they are going to benefit learning. It is not simple enough just to use them because you have access to them. In some well-funded institution, there is the strong possibility of making a sweeping gesture and buying their students iPads to replace laptops - I'm thinking of places in the middle east in particular. They will become more and more widespread but we must always remember the use of them that counts.
I begun to watch Paul Louis in Dochart demonstrating the use of moodle to support English for Academic Purposes projects. It seemed very well researched and well presented, but I left to join the lively discussion going on in Alsh. Here, Silvana Richardson was presenting four sacred cows. Nothing stirs language teachers more than trying to put tried and tested beliefs to the sword. Here, she laid out her sacred cows as shown in the photo below. Amongst many other opinions, I particular remember the statistic about 95-98% of students cannot 'infer meaning from context'. She expressed this as borderline impossible unless the students are higher-intermediate or above. This is startling, if indeed true, as the idea of building up knowledge and meaning of unknown words using the surrounding words is quite an established thing to do from an elementary level upwards. As Silvana said, if you want Spanish students to know the meaning of the world 'table' you can ask them to look up the word in a translation dictionary 'messi' or you can give them an English dictionary with its description of 'A flat horizontal slab or board, usually supported by one or more legs, on which objects may be placed...' etc etc.
4 Sacred Cows from Silvana Richardson (Bell)
After Silvana it was a quick pop to the room next door to see my Celta trainer from three years ago, Carole 'Anne' Robinson. This was about 'personalisation', getting more out of our students' with a number of simple methods. Carole seems to like the Dogme approach and that 'emergent language' can come from the student. She also recognises coursebook limitations and how the two might be reconciled.
What's the meaning of this, asks Carole 'Anne' Robinson?
The end of a fabulous, inspiring week for everyone!
Final thoughts. This has been one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life, something I tweeted as I came back on the train from Glasgow. I've been in great 'company'. Not just at the conference. Everyone I have met in Glasgow has been very friendly - even the homeless and the drunks. And no, I didn't receive aye fond 'Glasgow Kiss' at any point. A Glasgow taxi driver even dropped me off the Holiday Inn and 30 minutes later returned having been across the city and back. I had dropped my Unibus Pass - worth over £100 to me - he didn't accept my offer of a reward but I was incredibly grateful. WHAT.AN.AMAZING.WEEK !
With Derek 'Fish' Dick
Here are 2 songs, 'A State of Mind' and 'The Company', by Fish, which I recorded with my own camera.
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.
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:
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.
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:
