SLanguages 2009 Conference in Second Life

Well, the SLanguages 2009 conference in Second Life is over. Phew! This was undoubtedly the best online conference that I have ever attended. I learned an enormous amount about teaching foreign languages in virtual worlds, and I even took part in a lesson for beginners in Spanish.

The conference ran for 24 hours from Friday 8 May to Saturday 9 May, with many of the 39 presentations being repeated so that people in different time zones could attend them without having to stay up all night. A total of 359 participants took part in the conference, with a peak of 91 in attendance concurrently on Friday evening.

If you missed it you can catch up here in Gavin Dudeney's blog:

http://slife.dudeney.com/?p=191

Graham Davies

"IWBs are useless. Discuss." (Quoting Scott Thornbury)

I picked up the title to this thread in Twitter. It comes from Scott Thornbury's contribution to the IATEFL 2009 blog:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/iwbs-are-useless-discuss

What do you think? I referred Scott to my mini-survey that I conducted in the autumn of 2008. Many teachers waxed lyrical about their IWBs:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/ICT_Effectiveness.doc

See also ICT4LT, Section 4, Module 1.4.

Scott, BTW, was interviewed by Nik Peachey in Second Life last week and managed to upset a few people about his apparently negative views on technology. But I didn't find his views particularly controversial. Like Scott, I have never regarded technology as the panacea, and I have expressed similar views in my article "Lessons from the past, lessons for the future":
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/coegdd1.htm