The first week was devoted to the convention, lively diner outings with the webheads and my own presentation on Open and Participatory Media in Language Learning, at 7:30 am on Saturday, an ungodly hour to draw even the staunchest enthusiasts. Thank you Nina and Rita for being there.

From the presentations I attended, I would like to highlight two:

• Suresh Canagarajah’splenary opening keynote “Worlds of Practice: in search of a community , which Carla Arena has documented in pictures

and

• Randi Harlev’s paper presentation: Challenging Assumptions: Tools for Tesol Teacher Education.

I had come across some of Suresh’s work and referred to him in my work and workshop before realizing he was Tesol’s Quarterly Editor !

Through an engaging personal narrative, spiced with humorous and irreverent comments, Suresh introduced and illustrated Etienne Wenger’s concepts of participation vs reification, designed vs emergent, identification vs negotiability and local vs global. He also mentioned the duality and tensions inherent in boundary practice (“introducing elements from one practice to another”), the multi-faceted identity of multi-lingual teachers and the role of the broker, i.e., multi-membership and action in different communities. Tongue-in-cheek, he challenged a number of current centralized practices and non-questioned Tesol mores.

Randi linked back to some of the same concepts in her presentation and urged teachers to bear in mind the role of assumptions in guiding teaching and learning so as to better understand specific choices in the classroom and how they can conflict with new learning or provide possibilities for innovation. She encouraged teachers to explore and examine their own assumptions and connect them to acts of meaning. Some of the authors mentioned were Edgar Schein, Michael Halliday and Devon Woods

We had three memorable powows with the webheads among the many other get togethers at pubs and presentations or conversations at the conference.

The first, called up by Michael Coghlan (staying in New York with Jonathan Finkelstein, president of Learning Times) and booked by Rita Zeinstejer happened at an Irish pub on Tuesday. It was a small intimate meeting as many wias were still not in town or had just arrived. Bronwyn Stuckey, from CPsquare, stayed in NY after the AERA convention especially for this meet up. I had met and been generously hosted by Bron during my stay in Sydney earlier this year so it was a pleasure to see her again, chat and share the room.

Nina Liakos opened the Wia in NY wiki and organized the second diner at Thai Ponsgri. More than 24 wias were there and the evening rolled on in shared laughter and heated discussions.

On Thursday night, Carla booked at the Becco, whose waiters tried hard to accommodate the increasing number of arrivals and orders. Dennis Oliver’s roses were the high point of the diner, from which Moira, in her shiny black vampire coat, “led me astray” with the invitation to join Roger Drury and his partner David for the jazz show at the Blue Note and a late drink at the Slaughtered Lamb. I felt definitely bleary-eyed and washed-out the following morning…lol

I used Twitter to arrange a meeting with Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim f2f at the Satellite Academy, where they invited me to take part of their weekly Writing Project encounter. Vance Stevens decided to join us at the last minute and we also had the pleasure to meet Gina Moss and Ken Stein.

Paul had interviewed me online for Teachers Teaching Teachers, a weekly webcast on the EdTechTalk channel of the WorldBridges network. My 8th grade students also interacted with some of their classes during the Edubridges Elgg project in 2006. He and Susan are presently experimenting with Hypertextopia and how students’ writing changes in this online environment.

On Saturday, I visited João and Daniela, two ex-students of mine from the Lycée who got married, had a baby and are now installed in NY, working and doing their PhD. I had not seen them for at least 10 years, so it was nice to listen to their impressions and stories. I also spent a good many hours in Central Par that day, walking and photographing , enjoying the balmy spring weather, flowers and activities and, finally exhausted, sat down for lunch at the MET. Sunday was family meeting with my cousin who drove me around and took me for lunch to a typical immigrant Polish restaurant in Lower East Side.

Through Twitter, I also learnt George Siemens happened to be in NY (with his wife Karen) for a conference. We arranged to meet on Tuesday night for diner. Michael Coghlan, with whom I did most of the sightseeing tours on Monday and Tuesday, joined us as well at the French Toast uptown. After acknowledging men often employ war metaphors in their discourse, we embarked on a dense conversation on what it takes to make a revolution and how the wider access to information brought about by the Internet requires new approaches to how people interact with it and connect with each other. According to George, what is known is a function of how it’s connected/related to other known elements and the value of this is not inherent but contextual. Information becomes knowledge through our connection with others. This is nothing new, however, the revolutionary idea is that it is now open and extended to a larger number of citizens and not just an elite. This will lead to systemic changes which will affect how we view teaching, determine content and curriculum and how we accredit learning.

This was definitely an event jam-packed with activities, meetings and connections, which may spark new action patterns.

The guide can be downloaded from the Counterpoint, the cultural relations think tank of the British Council.

Now that WordPress offers an import and export feature, I have moved all the content from all my blogs to Wide Open Spaces.

Open house. See you there !

On the post pages of WordPress, we will have the personal sharing items, which will then appear in the Orchard whereas on the WordPress static pages, we will have more structured homework pieces, like presenting an article or an item done in class in a more controlled way. These will be also published on the web so that students not only keep a record of their work  but also practise to sum up a piece of reading by connecting it to other related Web content, embed links to extend the meaning, find photos to illustrate it, produce little videos…  We will try to make these page posts as open to comments as possible as well but they will not clutter the Orchard with repetitive class content.

 On the blog pages of my own class blog, I will try to model while on the static pages I will list the classes that are participating in the Exchange , post the instructions given in class for them to accomplish this work and their own class work. The idea again is to keep a record of the progression and to make ther colleagues aware of what is happening in the backstage. It is also a way to check how much of this is being incorporated to the students’ personal  posts in the blogs.

My students are not at university level yet. They are from 13-17, are still learning the language and their parents have paid their bus fare to arrive at an expected destination (the baccalaureat) at a certain time.  They can get there as well by riding their own bikes, but inside the system we are today, many fear this may take much longer and will need a discipline and involvement they are not prepared to engage in.

 I will try combine both the bus ride and stops for some exercise. Hopefully, I can convey the idea that riding a bike is not only enjoyable and safe but will keep them fit and give them insights that would not be revealed if driven all the time. The new perspectives can be shared and further explored by contact with other people they will meet along the way.

Eric has also just opened an ExtremeTechnoELT community on Moodle housing a number of different discussion fora for advanced of IT in ELT. Not for newbies or the faint-hearted.

[podcasting][ELT]

A quick update from this side of the world . Our school year has just started and I have taken to blogging with my classes again

I have plugged my 39 10th graders (2 classes) into the ECML Project which can be carried either in English or in French.Check my blog and the blogroll. Each class has 3 x 50′ a week, one of them in the computer room with half the class each time so I am planning to carry on the project until the end of the year and insert blogging/photoblogging /podcasting and digital story-telling during this time.
I have already spent two classes in the computer room to open accounts with ECML , Flickr and Bloglines. They have chosen their templates and given a title to their blog. They are supposed to post their introductions this week and the system allows me to moderate the posts, so I can correct them before they go out. What I have done is to copy their productions to Word, correct using Track Change and notes, send them back . They then repost it on their blogs and I publish them.
Because I have not closed my students´comment area and we are not going to use the blogs for blanket assignments, I have opened my classrooms to interact with the world (P2P-EFL-ESL-X) . They are listed on the Dekita Exchange page so any of you can connect to them. Give them a week to post their intros. You may ask your own stds to post a comment. You know how rewarding this can be.
My 12th graders and I will be participating in the Young Women Caucasus Project and communicating with exchange students from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia later in March. For people interested in starting blogging with more advanced students, reading and commenting this is a project worth joining.

Aaron Campbell posted about it onDekita after Peter outlined the project for us at the Blogstreams Salon.

This year my 39 10th graders will be participating in the project, interacting not only with students from different European countries who are also hosted there but also with the rest of the world through the P2P-EFL-ESL-X system. The ECML project hosts blogs in French and in English.

[blogging]
[P2P-EFL-ESL-X]