04/10 - Harrogate, UK

Pre-Conference Events

This year for our PCE we offered a variant of an Un-Conference for our pre-conference event.

We are also ran a Virtual PCE (VPCE) in the six weeks that led up to the day of the PCE in Harrogate, on the theme of Web 2.0. During the VPCE we looked at a number of topics:

• Week 1 - Introductions
• Week 2 - Student Publishing with Blogs and Wikis
• Week 3 - Audio Tools
• Week 4 - Using Images & Video
• Week 5 - Virtual Meeting Places (including Virtual Classrooms and Virtual Worlds)
• Week 6 - Round-up

The VPCE is still open at http://iatefl-ltsig.ning.com/

On the day of the PCE itself, some people who took part in the VPCE were able to attend the face-to-face event (but we will also had a virtual presence as well), and we showed some of the activity we had been engaged in.

However, the main focus of the PCE day was to consider where we are now in the field of learning technologies and language learning and where we are going. Have we reached a time when learning technologies are a 'normalised' part of our practice, or is there still some way to go?

We asked three people - Stephen Bax, Scott Thornbury and Mark Pegrum - to help us with short focused presentations during the day at various points to seed the debate. Stephen and Scott were in Harrogate, Mark was online. Group leaders worked with conference participants to support the discussion of whatever questions were raised as part of the day; groups then reported back to the audience. Group leaders were asked to make a record of the event and write up the ideas for a special publication.

UN-CONFERENCE

Report on the LT SIG's Pre-Conference Event (PCE)
Harrogate, 7 April 2010
by Graham Stanley and Rodney Mantle


The key word for the PCE this year was "normalisation". Referring back to Stephen Bax's notion of CALL (2003), we decided to consider where we are now in the field of learning technologies and language learning and where we are going. Have we reached a time when learning technologies are a 'normalised' part of our practice, or is there still some way to go?

Envisioned as a 'unconference' event, with the focus on discussion of current practice by the people in the room, the PCE was facilitated by Gary Motteram and Graham Stanley, with three speakers to help us seed the debate during the day.

It was a day dominated by threes. Three speakers. Three parts to the day. And three screens at the front of the room. One of these was for the presenter's materials and displayed what people were saying about the PCE on Twitter. The other two were dedicated to showing the people in Harrogate what was going on in Second Life(http://www.secondlife.com). There, we were doing the same thing we were doing in the room in Harrogate: whatever the presenters said or showed was streamed live into this 3D virtual world, and then the participants would form discussion groups and debate what our latest presenter had talked about. Finally, a representative from each group (both in Harrogate and in Second Life) would summarise the main points that their group had mentioned.

We were also fortunate to have a number of rapporteurs  to help us. The volunteers were Burcu Akyol, Marisa Constantinides, Karenne Sylvester, and Shelly Terrell. and our guest presenters.  Kyle Mawer and Joe Pereira were also on hand, making sure things ran smoothly in Second Life.

Our first speaker was was the Mark Pegrum. Mark lives in Australia but joined us live in Second Life. He had prepared a video for us to watch and a draft chapter to read. At the end of the video, Mark posed 4 key questions about digital literacies at the end of the video, which were discussed by the  participants. His comments on varying kinds of literacy sparked an animated debate on levels of IT competence, particularly on the distinction between "techno-savvy" and "techno-literate" and the nature of remix or mashed-up literacy.  The challenge of techno-savvy students who had not yet learned how to evaluate what they found online was generally acknowledged; plagiarism is still a wide-spread problem. 

Our second presenter was Scott Thornbury, who concentrated on the need to ensure that the technological tail does not wag the pedagogical dog.  One  sub-topic was whether the teacher should start with a pedagogical theory and then establish which forms of technology best suited it or whether each of them should simply be scrutinised for its usefulness in the classroom situation. Another was money: do less costly forms of technology exist to do what you aim at?

Our final presenter, after lunch, was Stephen Bax, who started with the controversial "Technology in language teaching is a total waste of time and money ..."  Having further surprised us by pointing out that "technology" was not just electronic, but could also include chopsticks, he then continued his theme with: "... unless ..." the caveats included developing mechanisms for social sharing and cooperating. One focus of discussion was how new technology should be introduced: the top-down approach of many managements was criticised, but many agreed that the institutional framework must be right: preferably a leading teacher figure to set a model backed up by firm encouragement.

Two of the main discussion points that emerged  during the day were 1) which forms of technology would  become normalised (we discussed everything from online technologies such as VLEs, wikis and blogs to classroom technology, mainly represented by the Interactive Whiteboard)  and 2) which would become redundant. Surprisingly, language laboratories are, it seems, still useful to some.

After lunch, news of what had been happening in our PCE seemed to have spread and it became difficult to fit everyone in the room at Harrogate as our original 40 participants were joined by others from other SIGs. Around 75 different people also joined us throughout the day for discussions in Second Life. Some of these discussions were recorded and are available here:  http://tinyurl.com/2wpe7v9. Video footage of the summaries given by participants were recorded and will be made available to members on our website (http://ltsig.org.uk).

Throughout the day, our rapporteurs also took notes. It is hoped that some of the reflections will appear in this or subsequent issues of this newsletter. Some of  those present will also be contributing to a future special edition of the International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching.


Further Reading

Bax, S (2003) CALL - Past,Present and Future, available online at http://www.iateflcompsig.org.uk/media/callpresentpastandfuture.pdf

Pegrum, M (2010) Digital Literacies - where do we start? Video and presentation notes available from: http://e-language.wikispaces.com/mr3

Pegrum, M (2010) 'Modified, multiplied and (re-)mixed: Social media and digital literacies' (draft chapter)

LT SIG Programme

Our SIG programme took place on Friday 9th April, with the following sessions (where available click the link to watch the video recording) :-

• Richard Turnbull - Using Google Streetview as a window on the world
• Ozge Karaoglu & Shelly Terrell - Engaging lower primary students through Web 2.0 tools
• Sanaa Khabbar & Amal Abou-Setta - Facebook as a writing medium for students
• Joe Pereira - Avalon to Shakespeare: Language learning and teaching in virtual worlds
• Rachel Lindner & Vida Zorko - Computer-mediated intercultural exchanges between ESP students. Practical guidelines and insights
• Russell Stannard - Web 2.0 tools that make a difference
• LT SIG Open Forum

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