Archive for the ‘EVENTS’ Category
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
At SLanguages 2009 I gave a presentation on Dogme language teaching and its relevance to virtual world language education. Here is the presentation as text…
I have been using virtual worlds such as Second Life for approximately two years and during this time I have done some interesting and engaging activities with students. However, I have also being looking for methodologies to draw upon to ensure that these activities are pedagogically sound and beneficial to the students’ learning. More recently I have taken a closer look at Dogme ELT as a pedagogy to guide these virtual world activities and Dogme has stood out as an approach that has much to offer virtual world language learning because of its focus on real life communication as the basis for developing language competencies.
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Sunday, July 5th, 2009
One of our students, Pierre Moussy, has been using the 3d virtual world, Second Life, to gain conversation practice. His presentation below was given at the SLanguages conference (for language education in virtual worlds); you can listen to Pierre’s presentation and follow his PowerPoint. Pierre’s talk is especially interesting because it gives us some insights into how languages learners actually use second life to talk with others in a foreign language. It also shows us how they benefit from such experiences and how language teachers can better guide their students so that they gain the most from virtual worlds.
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Posted in ACTIVITIES, AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, EVENTS, PEDAGOGY | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
Last Thursday I met with other language educators in Second Life to discuss Augmented Reality Language Learning and in particular the ideas and suggestions I presented in the “Augmented Reality Language Learning – virtual worlds meet m-learning” blog post last week.
Photo of Dennis’ Villa in Second Life (image by Sanja).
Carol Rainbow kindly recorded the audio of the meeting and you can listen to it on Blip.TV or download/play this mp3 recording of the discussion about Augmented Reality Language Learning in Second Life.
The event took place at Dennis’ villa on EduNation – so thank you Dennis for hosting the meeting. And thank you to all for attending and making it such a interesting conversation.
I think you can only hear 3 voices (most participated via text-chat within Second Life) and they are of Dennis Newson, Scott Thornbury and me.
Posted in ACTIVITIES, AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, EVENTS, PEDAGOGY | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
SLanguages 2009 will take place on 8 & 9 May. I will be giving a presentation together with Pierre Moussy, a student at Avatar Languages. Pierre will be presenting his experiences with practicing his English in Second Life, whereas I will focus on how language educators can best guide language learners with using virtual worlds to practice their languages. Here is the abstract…
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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
SLanguages 2009 will take place on 8 & 9 May. I will be giving a presentation about the Dogme ELT movement and how its approach to language teaching has a lot to offer language educators using virtual worlds. Here is the abstract…
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Posted in AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, EVENTS | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Jeremy Harmer, author of many ELT books, will be talking in Second Life on Sunday 3 May at 18.00 (GMT), which is 11.00 PST.
Jeremy Harmer gave a presentation last year in Second Life (as part of the EduCation@EduNation series) about how teachers perceive their work and their teaching practice. It will be interesting to see his thoughts about Second Life language education in this interview with Nik Peachey..
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Monday, April 20th, 2009
Scott Thornbury, co-founder of the Dogme ELT movement along with Luke Meddings, will be talking in Second Life on Sunday 26 April at 18.00 (GMT), which is 11.00 PST.
Dogme and Second Life are a very interesting combination and have a lot to offer each other. It will be extremely interesting to listen to Scott Thornbury’s comments on virtual worlds.
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Friday, March 13th, 2009
There is online conference coverage of the 43rd IATEFL Conference. Here is what the website says about it…
The Cardiff Online website is now live at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009
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Sunday, January 4th, 2009
The presentation for SLanguages 2009 is ready – it will be a great event and I am looking forward to it already…
Feel free to embed this on your blog and link to www.slanguages.net.
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Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
Conferences in virtual worlds are quite the fashion now, but it seems that the choice of world is quite important. The National Science Foundation held a conference in World of Warcraft and saw all its (virtual) attendees killed during the event!
Second Life is a far more peaceful venue for the SLanguages conference – and I’m sure the 2009 event will be just as safe as the last two, where not a single avatar was lost in action.
To bring his point to a fine head, Bainbridge recently conducted a scientific conference in a game world to discuss research in game worlds. Certainly it was the ultimate of demonstrations, virtually speaking. The conference was the first ever held in “World of Warcraft” (”WoW”) and it had its upsides: None of the scientists had to physically travel and none had to buy any additional hardware. But it also had its downsides: Not everyone was familiar with the game; newbie levels limited access to key meeting places in the game world; in-game chat communications require a minimum typing speed of 50wpm; and, newbies are the natural diet for any number of monsters in the game. |
| Several attendees met their deaths, as in plural, on the way to the various conference dinners, events and meeting places. A few gave up after one or more resurrections. All of the near-300 attendees ended up “dead” at the end of the conference. The recently deceased lauded the success of the entire operation. |
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