A final thougt

A tag cloud from my posts on Poznan.

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And so the end is near....

So, today is my last day at AMU. I can't believe that it has gone so quickly and I could quite happily stay longer. Just starting to get into the swing of things and now it's time to go home :-( It has been a great experience and I've been made to feel part of the team by Prof Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski and Dr Michał Remiszewski as well as the other staff at IFA.

I'm currently looking at some work being done by Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski that 'provides a platform for annotated concordancing activities for EAP learners and teachers' http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~ifaconc/ We're meeting up later, my final session, to go through the project in more detail.



However, my Erasmus trip is not completely over. On Wednesday we had some technical problems with the Second Life session so we have rescheduled it for a couple of weeks time. I wonder if you can get expenses for going into SL?

Is teaching online different?

So, my final session with the MA ICT in EFL class and my final presentation of my stay here. They are a very nice group of students and it has been a pleasure to work with them, albeit briefly. This session was about what similarities and differences there may be between teaching online and teaching in a more traditional classroom situation.

MA ICT for EFL - Is teaching online different

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

It was an interesting session but I'm not sure if I 'performed' as well as the week before. I felt I got pretty waffley in the second half of the lecture when talking about blogging. We some very interesting discussions though, particularly towards the end when there was quite a debate on what constitutes a 'real' conversation. One student proposed that she liked the idea of using blogs for teaching and learning writing in English, as the 'conversation' between the blogger and those making comments would be more 'real' than in a rather more 'artificial' traditional writing exercise. This sparked another student who felt that any such 'conversation' could not be real in the way that a face-to-face conversation is. The debate flowed back and forth and interestingly mirrored some of the conversations the IFA staff had had about what it means to meet. All very interesting stuff that I left Prof Sobkowiak to deal with later in the course :-)

Research, development and IPR?

Today, as well as planning for tomorrow's lecture for the MA ICT in EFL class, I had a chance to look at some very interesting work being done by Dr. Michał Remiszewski Assistant professor in the Department of Computer Assisted English Linguistics here at IFA, AMU.

He's working on a powerful assessment tool, which has great potential for teaching as well as providing a good deal of research material. I'll be very interested to see where this goes. It also led to an interesting debate on universities attitudes to Intellectual Property Rights. A recurring theme around the world I think.

More than just lecture notes........

After fighting my way past the librarians (actually I've discovered it's just one who appears to be evil and all the others are actually very nice and helpful. Maybe all libraries have to employ at least one Evil Librarian? Is it a job title? Is it a vocation? Can you do Evil Librarianship Studies?) I put the finishing touches to today's lecture. I was asked to talk about how you can use a VLE for more than just lecture notes and also if I could use some real examples that I had taught with.

I talked about the TRIO Critical Thinking module I taught a while back and none of it was particularly new - thinking about the context(s) the learning will take place in, starting with the assessment and working back to the activities, socialising the students into the learning environment, getting the students to do the work, learning being a social activity and obviously the technology coming last in the process.

More than just lecture notes........

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

Once again after the lecture there was a really lively discussion that continued for around 45 minutes and covered the nature of learning, the role and future of teaching, what we mean by communication and the assumptions we make when talking about various forms of communication, virtual worlds and student perceptions of learning. It even got a little heated at one point, which is always the sign of a real debate :-) As with all good discussions it continued in the pub over a beer.

Sunshine, opera, beer and of course some work

Poland is almost back to normal now as the official period of mourning is over, although many of the TV channels seem to be still devoted to it. The weekend was quite strange, as I thought Sunday, the day of the funeral, would be very quiet indeed. In fact the old town was full of Poles eating, drinking and enjoying the sunshine. Maybe they had all got a bit stir crazy with the wall to wall TV coverage? The weekend was very pleasant with a bit of sightseeing, an excellent version of Don Giovani, lots of good Polish food with far too much fine Polish beer with friends.

Back to work and today is a preparation day for me and I've been spending most of it in the Library (What is it with (some) librarins? All some of them need is a uniform, maybe a hat!) working on this weeks lectures and presentations. Topics include: How do online teaching and traditional teaching differ, a case study of a level one online module and Blackboard vs Moodle - I think we all know the answer to that one. Well, most of us do anyway :-)

So only a week left :-( Although given what's going on with the ash........