And sorry for the late answer but I was wrestling with my PC about the new show that is finally online now: http://www.edukwest.com

Your post reminded me of one of my favourite Cartoon series in the 80ies: Galaxy Rangers. In the title song it says: “No guts, no glory. No pain, no gain”. I think this is very true for eteaching these days. Maybe I should make it the theme song of the ETCon .

To be honest I did expect most of the problems, not the server crash but being knocked out of the meeting I was quite sure about. And as I am still teaching online every day I got kind of “numb” to those problems. If you cannot change it, accept, adapt or die.

But it is great to hear from someone with so much experience like you have that it was not a complete desaster .

See you on the next ETCon,
Kirsten

You are right in saying that virtual classroom needs to get a lot more stable in order to become main stream.

We are all still very much pioneers in this field and you are certainly one of those pioneers with a lot of guts. What impressed me most was your stoic response to all of the technical challenges.

When the VC crashed the first time, you came back online and continued with your presentation in a very calm and controlled manner. At no time did you lose you temper, neither did you swear at the technology.

Prior to the meeting you took great care in preparation and organisation and you diligently uploaded all of the slides. You were well prepared and then you had to do the upload all over again after the crash. At no time did we hear you sigh nor groan and you simply got on with it.

After the second major crash you immediately used Twitter as Plan B and accepted Koichi’s help. Koichi himself was showing himself hospitable and then again, you showed your great strength of staying fully in control although by then you must have been thoroughly exhausted because what you staged there was a marvel in multi-tasking, a live online marathon and you were still able to run the sprint with the panel discussion to the finish.

The next day you were not overly apologetic. The opposite, a wonderfully positive tweet after the supergau with a cheerful “Morning all! I'm happy to see that some have stayed late for #etcon and are already up discussing again. Have a great #teachertuesday ”.

Yes, you are certainly right in saying that virtual classrooms still need to become a lot more stable in order to be usable and yet I am glad that you did not wait to stage the ETCon until the technology is out of beta. (Personally I think it never fully will be )

Like somebody said: “I don’t mind my computer crashing every now and again. I just thank God, that Bill Gates never went into the airlines industry.”

In your case, the failing technology showed your greatest strength.

My compliments.

I find it abhorrent that we can so casually put conversation topics like this in our textbooks. It shows a real lack of sensitivity in my opinion.

It took a woman running out of a class in tears for me to realize this by the way.

With “leisure” I meant a normal conversation course that does not lead to a certification. Because besides the content, the client is king and I cannot say: “We have to talk about this, because it is your level!” Well, I could but then this would be the last I'd say to this client .

Levels A1, A2 and B1 do not include such topics, the focus is 'all leisure,' so to say. starting from B2, the student should be able to discuss a whole variety of topics and delicate matters, as in any advanced program, to master the language from all points of view.

That's the tricky part in conversational classes, choosing the right topics. As you know, I am very focussed on this type of teaching and from my experience these are topics that are absolute killers.
Most american students don't even want to talk about politics, not even the theory about political systems without going into parties etc. So if you (I) could lose a student with a relatively harmless topic like this I don't even want to imagine what happens if I'd say “Today's topic: Abortion”.

But of course, you are right that if a student wants to take one of the european tests like DELF, TestDAF etc he needs to know about it. But for a “leisure” course, which most courses are, I would strictly leave them out.

Ok, back to the main topic, but we should discuss this in another thread.

The problems for platforms is that they cannot offer all the tools out on the market. And on the other hand not all tools that might be interesting are compatible with a platform system.

Take Prezi as an example. Like Koichi said: Prezi blows PowerPoint out of the water. That's true but you cannot use it in a virtual classroom.

VoiceThread is a great tool for discussions after the class. But there is no way to embed it on the platforms.

The list goes on. I think Myngle did a great job offering slides to their teachers. If they don't use them they are at least a good inspiration to do something similar on your own or something completely different.

And I am still a big lover of text books, so are my students. They love the fact to have a real book at home that works without electricity and they can take notes with a pen in.

We are still in a transition phase and noone really knows how long this phase will take. But I do think it is long enough to come up with solutions that might die out in a couple of years but right now do still work.

Step One: Test students on a range of content that might be covered in today's lesson.
Step Two: based on the test the system determines what the student needs to learn.
Step Three: The system dynamically assembles a number of slides using learning objects in the database. These slides only address what the student needs to learn as determined by the test.

Let's call this slide system 2.0. And because it is a dynamically compiled system, the teacher who uses this system would have to be REALLY GOOD and would in the best of worlds be paid accordingly.