Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
I’ve been flat-out the past couple of weeks preparing for the EuroCALL conference. As postgraduate students, we can apply for funding to attend one overseas conference during our degree if we are accepted to present there. My proposals for a paper and a poster were accepted by EuroCALL, and so I’m off to Spain on Sunday!
This trip has been months in the planning. Years, even. I’ve always wanted to go to Europe, and this is a great opportunity. Although the university funding only partially pays for expenses, without it I’d not be going at all, so I am very grateful!
I will blog more about my paper presentation later, but it’s my Poster (with a capital ‘P’!) that has been occupying my time recently. Mimpi, my cat, has been a lot of help as you can see.
And the finished product:
In order to demonstrate the value-addedness of digital media, I’ve included an iPod with 5 audio tracks and a digital photo frame with a few photos. I had thought about attaching an iRiver with video footage, but the menu system on those cheap players is too complex for a poster. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible so that “viewers” can just press a button rather than having to scroll through layered menus.
I found constructing this poster to be a useful way of planning my methodology chapter, and visualising it in a different way. The challenge of incorporating audio-visual material alongside static, written text was also interesting. The aim, after all, is to value-add and not just to “add”. In this, I’m guided by Coffey et al. (2006, p. 19) who tell us:
“…multimodal research is not simply a mosaic, which adds together various separate forms of modes of data (including visual data). The contemporary technological environment potentially widens the opportunities for multimedia (re)presentation of data and for the emergence of new multi-semiotic forms of analysis and argument – enabling the innovative inclusion of film and video, still images, documentary materials, sound clips, online and other digital data alongside textual representations”
And so I’m enabled to include these on a poster.
We’ll see what the response is.
You can see the full poster as a Scribd document here.
Posted in Conferences | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
I’m going to be live-blogging from the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Association Conference which begins Thursday this week. The conference proper is for three days, and you can follow along and join in here! We’ll also be tweeting using the tag #AFMLTA09 
Posted in Conferences | No Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2009
Reading my public blog posts it may seem that all I do is report on conferences after the fact. I generally do take the time to sit, process, reflect, and write after these intensive events and this is the result. I am doing the same for my own research, but it is on a private “backchannel” (more on backchannels in a moment). My next blog post will be about my work in progress, but until then, here is another conference report.
I attended Educause Australasia on May 04 and 05 in Perth, my home city. Educause is a non-profit organisation “…whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting intelligent use of information technology.” And so although it was not entirely aligned with my own research interests, being very-much K-12 focused, it was still relevant because I am a higher education student engaging with information technologies in order to undertake my research and studies. In other words, I am practicing what “they” are preaching, and exploring how the theory works in practice (on a shoestring student budget).
Many of the streams of the conference were obviously aimed towards the “senior decision makers” identified on the conference website blurb. The high registration fees also made this a somewhat exclusive event, and perhaps had an impact on attendance numbers. I was lucky to receive a student registration to the conference, and this enabled me to give a poster presentation on my own work in progress and also be part of a panel presentation entitled Personal Learning Environments: What Works for Librarians, representing the library-user voice.
View the Google Docs presentation here
Our presentation was very well received. I had only met one of the other panel members in person before the conference as we had done our planning as a group over two Skype sessions. During the first session, we set up a wiki site to aid our planning, and in second a presentation using Google Docs which we edited during the Skype call. I then “prettied it up” later on, but kept the slide content the same. PowerPoint/slide presentations are a useful way to structure and plan a presentation, and helps get presenters into “presentation space”. Google Docs is a great way of managing/facilitating this “space” for a group effort, even if it does not end up being used. I edited the slides during the presentation itself based on audience responses to our question, “What do you want to know?” We then revisited those questions towards the end of our “chat”. In fact, the audience were our co-presenters throughout the panel presentation and made it both interactive and dynamic. Our presentation was more of a discussion in this way, and it is a format I would like to repeat.
The "backchannel" during our "PLE for Librarians" presentation
The image above is taken from the CoverItLive recording of the second day of the conference relayed through http://librariansinteract.info. Using CoverItLive was a new experience for me. I was vaguely familiar with the tool, having heard about it in the blogosphere, but had never used it as a participant. CoverItLive works by having streams of content from a variety of sources fed into the one place for presentation/embedment in a blog/website/wiki/etc. It is also possible to update from the CoverItLive tool itself, and respond to comments/questions from people who may be “listening in” (”viewing in?”) remotely.
CoverItLive was a convenient way to manage a filtered backchannel during the conference. Twitter * was used by many of the conference participants, and although the official #edaust09 tag helped manage the conversations (we trended under “swine flu” and above “Wolverine” at one stage!), tweets were both formal and informal, and sometimes difficult to keep up with. CoverItLive made the conversations (more) manageable for relaying conference plenaries and concurrent sessions. At times I found myself physically in one presentation but following another! That said, use of Twitter enabled a sense of community and comradeship (”I’m on my way to #edaust09″; “Looking forward to #edaust09″; etc.) and helped speed up and strengthen the formulation of new frolleagues and so the combination of the two was very effective for me.
Much has been said about the benefits and disadvantages of formal and informal backchannels during conferences, especially Twitter. It is only recently that they have become more normalised, however, and only a few years ago I would feel very much like a naughty school child “playing up” at the back of the room whilst using them. In my view, participation in a backchannel represents more on-task engagement than off, and a deeper engagement with the proceedings than would otherwise be possible: one is commenting and reflecting in situ for a particular audience. However, I also found backchannel participation during #edaust09 quite demanding and that it represented surface-level learning. I found myself relaying information rather than commenting or critiquing it, and that I had no time to write my own notes. The notes I took were intended for others, and I missed the meta-note-taking that I usually write: the notes about my notes and the jotting of ideas as they occur, sparked by something in a presentation. Many conference tweets were similar: we relayed the main points; made comments about presentation style; organised meet-ups and lunches; and threw in a few quick polls. Critical discussion of issues and themes presented in the sessions rarely occurred. That said, this was not unique to the backchannel: questions were rarely asked “in real life” either. This is where the skills of a moderator, “critical friend,” or provocateur would come in handy - someone needs to ask the hard questions either in real life or in the virtual one, or both.
It was an intensive two days for me, and a very worthwhile experience. The content may not have been new, but the process of participation and engagement certainly was.
Posted in Conferences | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 1st, 2008
Last year, during the “coursework year” of my programme, I attended a lot of conferences on ICTs and education in order to get a good understanding of current trends, research and practice whilst putting together my own research proposal. 2007 was a steep learning curve for me in terms of educational technologies, but as I was also teaching high school Indonesian part-time at the same time, I was able to experiment with some of the things I learned about with my own students. Conference attendance also gave me a good introduction to “conferences” and the “conference circuit,” at least within Australia. Generally, I wasn’t too impressed: so many conference paper presentations over-use PowerPoint, under-use narrative, and leave the audience with little to take away with them. There was a lot of talk about the potential of ICTs, but not a lot of practice.
When I heard that the joint Asia Pacific Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (APACALL) / Pacific Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (PacCALL) conference would be held in Indonesia, in both Jakarta and Yogyakarta, I leapt at the opportunity to attend. I’ve just arrived back, and feel refreshed and inspired from an amazing couple of weeks. Globalisation and Localisation in CALL (GLoCALL) was a “good conference” (and for me, a great one!), that lasted for four days. Being so specific to my research area, I gained a lot from it both in terms of current research and practice and in terms of presentation style and expectations. There was a big emphasis on digital storytelling throughout the conference and I discovered that digital storytelling practitioners practice what they preach! When we talk about engaging learners in the classroom, shouldn’t that transfer to engaging conference attendees? It certainly did in this case. The plenary speakers, Debra Hoven and Phil Hubbard, were also excellent presenters and their work was pas for the audience. The audience, after all, was quite a mix: a lot of expat academics (mostly teaching ESL and EFL), a number of local teachers (mainly employed by the conference co-organiser and sponsor Higher Learning); and comprised those new to CALL as well as old-hands. There were only two major disappointments for me: that none of the presentations I attended had full papers available, and that it was difficult to choose sessions without having them being broken into “streams” of practitioner/theory.
Although it was incredibly stressful battling to finish my paper and then changing my presentation at the last minute to be more hands-on (considering my audience), I discovered that yes, I am working in a field that I enjoy and one full of amazing people. GLoCALL had just the right mix of rigour and friendliness, and of support and critique. So what makes a “good conference”? “Cutting-edge” information (yet still with practical application), networking opportunities, formal-yet-informal atmosphere, high-quality presentations, and something pas for you. The problem is knowing that it will be pas before you attend. With the number of photos, blog sites, conference proceedings etc. posted to the internet after an annual conference, this is becoming easier and easier to determine. Bring on GLoCALL 2009 Chiang Mai, I say!
Read Mark Pegrum’s blog post on the Jakarta conference:
http://elanguage.edublogs.org/2008/11/09/international-connections/
See the photobook from my trip:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8404251/Pennys-travels-in-Indonesia-2008
See my conference slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/pcoutas/an-invite-to-my-ball
Posted in Conferences | 3 Comments »
