By Barbara Dieu · November 21, 2005
As the last sessions of the first Webheads in Action Online Convergence Bridges Across Cyberspace come to an end, I can finally get down to writing my impressions. It was a mega event, voluntarily organized by the webheads. 334 participants officially enrolled in the Convergence Moodle to attend one or a number of the 50 synchronous presentations webcasting examples of EFL/ESL practice worldwide. Chapeau to Vance Stevens (Abu Dhabi, UAE), who in the backstage, inspired all involved, created the opportunity for it to happen and herded the cats.
For those who could not turn up at our late synchronous WiAOC session at Alado last Saturday or would like to review it, we have published it online in the Dekita Article section. The slides illustrating it and the recording made can also be viewed and heard (requires WMP 9 or higher and Mozilla or IE)
Andy Pincon (Chicago, US) kindly hosted the event and Michael Coghlan (Adelaide, AU) emceed the talk. In spite of some minor technical glitches like some slides which would not move fast enough and loss of synchronicity at times (most probably due to Mercury retrograde), we had about 29 people from all over the world with us, among whom Caroline, a student of mine, who participated actively in the chat area and stayed with us until the very end.
Aaron contrasted the P2P model of network to the client-server architecture and drew an analogy between these and how our social institutions are structured. I translated the analogy to the reality of EFL f2f classrooms and online learning environments, described what P2P in EFL/ESL is like and explained how to practice this pedagogy through examples of blogging activities and other social networking tools which may help us create a more fluid and organic learning ecology online. Rudolf explained tagging and presented the Dekita Exchange Project, the soul of which is the P2P concept while the Del.ici.us tags are the synapses that send the information to the different cells allowing them to form interconnected circuits.
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