The 7th e-learning symposium from the Centre for languages, linguistics and area studies (LLAS) was held on Thursday & Friday January 2012 in Southampton University. The first day consisted of a series of workshops on learning technologies (programme).
Kevin Westbrook (@psassociates) gave two great talks about best practice in using Interactive WhiteBoards and Moodle. These proved a great opportunity for practitioners to share ideas and in some cases to have a look at one another’s institutional VLE.
The session which I found had the most relevance to area of interest was the workshop on Digital Literacy (or are we supposed to say Digital Literacies?) led by Fiona Harvey (@fionajharvey) and Lisa Harris (@lisaharris). This very engaging workshop brought a number of tutors and educational technologist to share their thoughts on the matter, some of which were captured live on a Google Document projected on the whiteboard. There were some really insightful contributions (especially from Lawal Muhammad, aka @l21_muhammad).
Julien Hamilton-Hart (@languageforall) also gave an impressive session on the creation of online video adventures for language learning.
Overall, the day proved very productive and was a really great opportunity to meet other language tutors and educational technologists. The Twitter hashtag (#LLASelearn12) provided a very good and rather dynamic backchannel for the day and allowed me to make a few connections. This was the second time I used Twitter for networking and backchanneling during a conference and I found myself much more at ease with it – and even got to explain how it worked to a couple of people!
Check back soon for some thoughts about the really exciting second day of the symposium! Thanks for reading.
Benoît Guilbaud 