Better late than never – I’ve finished my post about the second day of the LLAS e-learning symposium 2012 (#LLASelearn12). It’s been a busy week catching up with everything after spending Thursday and Friday in Southampton.
I particularly enjoyed Professor Claire Warwick (@clhw1)’s keynote entitled ‘Tweeting and teaching: how scholarly is social media?‘. It was really refreshing to listen to Prof. Warwick defend social media as a scholarly practice, as she meticulously dispelled one preconception after the next on the matter. Least I can say is that I wish I could make such a convincing -and so thoroughly informed- case when I try and defend the use of social media in general (and discussion forums in particular) in my job as a language tutor.
Other speakers included Margaret Southgate who gave a very insightful and up-to-date overview of blended language learning and Dr. Mark Stansfield who defended the value and useful of game-based learning. Game-based learning is a topic I’m always very curious to hear about as I haven’t yet seen another practitioner implement it in my (short) teaching career.
I was lucky enough to have my proposal accepted and the symposium and therefore gave a presentation entitled “Using social media for peer feedback in a translation class: a case-study“.
Although not yet available at the time of writing this post, a video recording of my presentation should shortly be posted on the LLAS website. In this talk, I looked at the set-up of our departmental social network and how I have been using it with my translation class for student peer-feedback. The results discussed are preliminary as the study will be concluded in March 2012.
I was very happy with the feedback I received and it was particularly useful to compare experiences with Andrea Zhok and Elena McNeilly from the University of Bristol, who have been working on a similar (though apparently far more successful) project to mine.
Next step now is finishing my study, hopefully with some useful findings. Fingers crossed…
Benoît Guilbaud 