Category: News

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IATEFL 2011 Brighton, UK

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I’m going to be attending IATEFL 2011 from the comfort of my own home this year. To be honest I’d rather be there in person, but as a technology enthusiast I am very pleased to have the chance to attend the conference virtually.

Anyone who can’t go this year should definately check out the amazing things on offer for those people who wish to attend virtually.

Below are the links you need, and also the IATEFL livestream video.

Watch live streaming video from iateflonline at livestream.com

Visit the Brighton Online conference site here.

The conference will be kicking off with live coverage of the opening ceremony and plenaries at 09:00 to 17:00 BST from the 15th to 19th of April. I really hope everyone, be they real life or virtual delegates, has a great time and a big thank you to all the organisers, presenters and professionals whose hard work makes it possible each year.

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ELTons 2011

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Good news! The British Council’s prestigious ELTon Award for Innovation in ELT has shortlsisted my colleagues and I from Kaplan International Colleges’ Learning Innovations department for our work on the distance online course which we created. Very pleased to be on the shortlist, the winner will be announced at the ceremony on the 23rd of February.

Click here for a list of other shortlisted applicants and to see the ELTon awards’ website.

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Services Update

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Engnet-education was previously based in London, England and served clients in both London, Oxford and Cambridge as well as online clients and providing online resources. Now, engnet-education’s main operations will be based in Japan. I have moved back to Tokyo in order to accept a teaching position at Sophia University, and as such I will not be able to personally attend schools in the UK on a regular basis, although I still intend to attend annual conferences such as IATEFL and EUROCALL, as well as the bi-annual Antwerp CALL conference. However, engnet-education will still be able to continue its UK operations thanks to several well trained and experienced colleagues who are also well suited to offer training days and consultations. Also, VOIP (Video Over Internet Protocol) consultations can easily be arranged if one of our UK agents is not available or you are not based in Japan or the UK. Basically, we are expanding!

This is very exciting for me, as the founder of engnet-education, for many reasons. First, I’ve been astounded by the success of the company and am very grateful to all my clients for the positive responses, feedback and of course for their valued custom in the first place! Most of the clients who have used our services came to see our IATEFL presentation in 2010: Setting up Self-Access for students through eLearning. For those who did not attend, the full presentation is available to watch on Vimeo and there is a write up in the IATEFL 2010 Conference Selections book, as well as a forthcoming expansion article in English Teaching Professional. Sadly, neither I nor any engnet-education representatives will be present at IATEFL this year, but we will certainly be back for 2012.

Another reason why the move to Japan is exciting is that it offers the chance for new challenges, new connections and new working relationships in what is certainly an amazing country for language teaching, most notably English Language which is what I specialise in. Although the Eikaiwa (Private Language School) industry is a little rocky, there are still lots of schools out there, not to mention the state and private Junior and High-School sections. It is also a great joy for me to be working at Sophia University, a leading Foreign Language Education institute and one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. It has long been an ambition of mine to teach Academic English in Japan and this year that dream will be realised.

Japan is a country with an interesting relationship with English. This is a theme which I shall be exploring in a more dedicated section of the site all about eLearning and Language Learning in general here in Japan. There are many Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) specialists here, such as Glenn Stockwell and Lawrence Anthony, creator of AntConc the free concordancing software. Not to mention Thomas Robb and of course the well-established Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT) CALL Special Interest Group, with its own peer reviewed journal, conference and chapter events. Very much looking forward to participating there after having been a member for so long.

Despite the current economic climate, both globally and in Japan specifically, English Language Education is still of high importance in Japan, and so at engnet-education we are pleased to be able to offer our services to an industry which very much needs to stay on top of innovations in learning and teaching. We are also officially launching a new arm of the company, engnet-academy, which will provide both online and blended learning solutions to coroporate clients for their English Language Learning needs. We are also branching out further into materials development, producing a range of interactions for my former employee Kaplan International.

So, as you can see, 2011 certainly looks set to be a busy year for engnet-education. If you would like to learn more about what we are doing, or would like to get involved please send us an email, we would love to hear from you.

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Moodle 2.0

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The moodle.org site is now using Moodle 2.0. Interestingly, it looks and functions in much the same way. This is a good sign as it shows that the new platform will be able to slide neatly over any current production sites using Moodle 1.9. There was a very interesting review in the Wired section of The Language Teacher (JALT newsletter), Ted O’Neill wrote an article entitled “What’s new for instructors in Moodle 2.0?” all about the benefits of Moolde 2.0. The release notes provide a useful summary, but I will summarise some of the core new features and their benefits for institutions.

Moodle 2.0 will install directly over an existing Moodle 1.9 installation and maintain course and category structure. It should also be able to allow course restore from backed up courses that come out of Moodle 1.9. This is not currently available with the current release candidate, but it is planned for the stable version of Moodle 2.1.

Moodle 1.9 had a severe limitation for administrators as it did not support site-level groups. This made it extremely difficult for institutions, such as my employer, who had multiple schools but with students enrolled on the same course. Moodle 2.0 supports ‘cohorts’ which will provide a solution to this issue.

Activity locking was a popular plugin for Moodle 1.8 but it wasn’t supported in later builds. This feature has been incorporated into the Moodle 2.0 main code and allows you to add conditions or pre-requistites to your courses, thus preventing students from doing activities in an arbitrary order. This will have a huge effect on the way eLearning courses are designed and delivered in Moodle, as the new conditional activities allow you to set tests and revisions or final assessments which build on previous activities and ensure students have done all the preparation work first.

Along with these developments Moodle 2.0 will also offer better SCORM compliancy, although it does not completely support SCORM 2004, this functionality is available as a commercial plugin called SCORM Cloud, which allows fully integrated SCORM compatibility. The new build will also feature an improved theme management system, which will allow users to put RSS themes and blocks on their profile page and support server-side caching making it more efficient for CSS 3, HTML 5 and Java Script. The way Moodle 2.0 is navigated is different as well, with a navigation bar which can either be expanded or collapsed much like in Blackboard Vista.

There will still be a range of 3rd party open source and commercial plugins, one of particular interest being the Adobe Connect integration.

You can read the full Moodle 2.0 release notes here, and download the release candidate here.

All in all, these developments should only help strengthen Moodle’s position in the global VLE market and bring it into the new decade of what promises to be an exciting time for the education sector as a whole and language learning and teaching in particular, as instructional technologies become more adept at providing socio-collaborative learning environments.

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SLanguages 2010

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This year’s SLanguages Conferences kicked off yesterday on October the 15th at 18:00 with a great plenary featuring Gavin Dudeney [Dudeney Ge], Heike Philp [Gwen Gwasi], Marisa Constantinides [Marisolde Orellana] , Randall Sadler [Randall Renoir] and moderated by Gary Motteram [Gwared Morgwain]. At first there were 18 or so delegates in the Holodec, but after a while there were over 50! There were also more delegates who attended via Adobe Connect.

The conference was very educational from both a technical and pedagogic point of view, and as it is free to attend it is definitely worth a look. The program is available here and to access it simply login to Second Life and head for the EduNation island.

You can read more about the conference here at http://www.slanguages.net/home.php. This is the fourth SLanguages Conference, which is held annually in-world. It runs for 24 hours so it’s well worth taking a look, even if you’re totally new to Second Life.

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Antwerp CALL 2010: Motivation and Beyond

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This year I attended the CALL journal’s bi-annual conference in Antwerp, Belgium. The conference is held at the University of Antwerp in the Linguapolis department and was organised by Joseph Colpaert, the general editor of the CALL Journal. There were some fantastic presentations and sessions this year. Below is a brief overview of the event and some links to the original site. There are also links to the presentation given by myself and the audio file so you can listen online, although you may prefer to watch the video from EUROCALL 2010 where I presented the same study.

Day One: 18th August 2010

Keynote: Ema Ushioda

Ema Ushioda is one of the big names in L2 Motivation research, having written several books and numerous articles on the subject. Her speech summarised the present state of L2 motivational theories, starting with Gardner and his work in defining Instrumental and Integrative orientations, and moving to Dörnyei (2009) and the L2 Motivational Self System He states that this theory “represents a major reformation” (ibid: 9) of previous L2 motivational theory because it incorporates theories of the self from mainstream psychological literature whilst maintaining the roots of previous L2 approaches. Ushioda contextualised these theories to CALL by stating that the way hyper-media and ICT have blurred the boundaries between cultures is especially significant to CALL and the L2 Motivational Self System attempts to accommodate this by allowing for a deeper understanding of the L2 self. Within this system the Ideal L2 self is predominantly defined as a “desire to reduce the discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves” (ibid: 29) and as such incorporates both integrative and internalised instrumental components of motivation. In contrast, the Ought to L2 self has a focus on avoiding negative outcomes, such as failure or embarrassment or being able to meet with social expectations. Dörnyei argues that “the self approach allows us to think BIG” (ibid: 39) and as such it has the flexibility to approach a multicultural and globalised view of L2 motivation which is necessary for understanding motivations for using CALL.

You can access the PowerPoints and handout for the session here

References

Dörnyei, Z. (2009) ‘The L2 Motivational Self System’ in Dörnyei, Z. and Ushioda, E. Motivation, language identity and the L2 self Bristol: Multilingual Matters (pp. 9 -42)