Caroline
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Homepage: http://www.constellata.com
Posts by Caroline
ESU 2010 Awards
Nov 10th
Winners of ESU Book and President's Award 2010
I went to Buckingham Palace yesterday for the presentation of the awards to the winners of the ESU Awards. It’s good to push the tourists aside to go through the front gates, have a good look at the furnishings and pictures, and see the Duke of Edinburgh in action (the royals have just started their own Facebook page with nearly 200,000 fans already).
There are two main categories, the Book Prize and the President’s Award for the use of new technology for English language learning and teaching. I have helped just the President’s Award since it began in 2003, and it’s been interesting to see the types and quality of entries since then. Although we’ve had some really excellent winners, we have often been disappointed by the quality of entries, especially in the last two years, when the winners, Live Mocha! in 2009, and Macmillan’s Global eWorkbook in 2010 were “head and shoulders” above the other entries. These entries include submissions from other major publishers in the UK and a few independents, they know who they are, and I hope they take the opportunity of getting feedback on their entries from the ESU. We were really disappointed at the poor usability and design of many entries (the two tend to be closely connected) and the really poor exploitation of interactive learning materials, lots of true/false or repetitive multiple choice exercises, and some publishers keep on just plonking print content into digital.
By contrast, the Book Awards had so many excellent entries the judges decided to share the main award between Macmillan’s Global and newcomer Abax Limited’s Fiction in Action: Whodunit with a commendation for CUP’s Collocations Extra and Macmillan (again) won best category for Teaching English Grammar.
TESOL 2011 presentation
Oct 19th
My presentation New Generation courseware: mobile learning in the language learning classroom has been accepted for the TESOL 2011 convention in New Orleans next March, http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/convention2011/# It will be based on my research between January and July 2010, but much updated after attending various conferences and events including Educa Online Berlin in December, Learning Without Frontiers in January 2011, and Southampton University’s eLearning Symposium.
No Future? The English Language Teaching Coursebook in the Digital Age
Oct 12th
The market for English Language Teaching aids is huge and growing rapidly. There are around one billion learners and eleven million teachers of English today. However, with the introduction of smart phones, ebook readers and tablet computer devices such as the iPad, learners’ expectations about how they access and use learning content have changed. But my recent research shows that the publishing sector has not implemented innovations accordingly. The traditional printed coursebook model could be outdated very quickly. I will be presenting on my research findings at Online Educa Berlin 2010 on 3 December, and outline how content producers should investigate the needs of learners, teachers and institutions, consider the latest thinking in language learning methodology and develop new products and business models. More…
