No need to add anything here; this rousing post by George Siemens in his Connectivism blog is truly a gem. Here’s a quote:

Educators are a conflicted group. The intended outcome of our activities is a nebulous concept we define as “learning” (some type of change of state or potential in the learner). We assume that through pushing buttons and pulling levers in an intricate process we call “instruction”, we will be able to “create” learning. The best we have been able to do to date is create a series of guidelines and conditions in which learning might occur. Vygotsky, Bruner, Chickering, Bloom, Gagne, and others have sought to pry open the door of “making learning happen” through checklists and best practices. In the end, most educators will admit that we are really rather clueless about the whole learning thing. And we should be. We have taken the wrong approach. We are trying to achieve a task (learning) with a tool (teaching) in an artificial knowledge construct (courses). It’s all about us.

Read it all - please.

Just got back to the office today after some post-conference travel. Overall, the conference was an outstanding experience for me, both for the content of the projects presented, as well as the people I met. The format for this conference was basically six rooms with 6 different 25-minute presentations running simultaneously; as an attendee, you chose from this “menu” which of the 6 presentations was most interesting for you, attended, then switched to your next selected presentation, etc. We had two full days and one half day, for a total of about 150 presentations, of which you could attend 25. This format had advantages (a wide selection of interesting topics) and drawbacks (with only 25 minutes, it was difficult for many speakers to communicate their topic effectively - more on this later).

Over the next few days I’ll post on some conference highlights - here’s what’s coming:

+ Using corpora (resources) and concordancing for language learning and teaching. I attended an excellent full-day pre-conference workshop on this topic, led by Ylva Berglund and Sabine Braun, and was also able to attend some very interesting presentations on using corpora during the conference, including one by Ide O’Sullivan of CALS at the University of Limerick.

+ Using an “integrated language learning environment” that connects classroom-based learning with e-learning. One of the lead designers Piet Desmet presented this software platform. It’s great…and the closest thing I’ve seen to what we’re building here at English360.

+ Joan-Tomas Pujola of the University of Barcelona presented some excellent ideas on CALL application features that support learner autonomy.

+ Nurturing autonomy through tandem learning. This was an interesting case study presented by Katia Carraro from the RZB Language Resource Center (link in German) at Vienna University.

+ An analysis of conversational negotiation strategies in oral communication in an immersive virtual environment. This is some very cool research by Therese Örnberg from Umeå University, Sweden. (Therese has also blogged on her experience at the conference.)