To help you plan your participation the conference program schedule can be filtered by date, venue, session type, and session format using the Filter functions.
Filter by Date lets you look at a specific day of the program. Filter by Venue lets you look at the program by venue rooms where sessions are taking place. Filter by Type lets you look at the program by track. In addition to keynotes and breaks the program is made up of three main tracks or types of sessions Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies. Clicking on a type in Filter by Type lets you see only sessions of that type in the program schedule. In addition, Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies each have a set of associated topics. Topics appear when you hover over a type name in the Filter by Type area of Sched. Topics are clickable allowing you to further filter the program by topic. Session Format lets you view the program by types of sessions - Action Labs, Lightning Talks, Posters, Presentations, and World Cafes.
The conference program is rich and diverse representing the current state of open education around the world.
Much of the work of integrating openness in the language classroom goes largely unreported to the education community. Several factors contribute to this state of affairs. First, educators are willing to reuse content but generally have low awareness of OER and are more focused on pedagogical enhancement than in openness per se. Second, even those who are more engaged with OER tend to share a perception of their practice and the resources they use as highly contextualised and contingent, and therefore of little value for reuse (Beaven, 2018). Finally, educators are busy and there are currently few incentives or support for them to share their practice with the teaching community, particularly through publications.
This brief talk presents an openly published collection of case studies, New Case Studies of Openness in and beyond the Language Classroom, conceived to give practitioners a voice and a space to contribute their experiences to the open education community, thus surfacing some of the work currently being undertaken to integrate openness in language education. The volume was written by and for practitioners.
The concept of openness was widened to represent a mindset and a set of pedagogical values that make use of ‘the open nature of the internet’ to facilitate ‘significant change in education’ (Weller, 2017) and that acknowledge ‘the complex, actual and situated practices of teaching and learning’ (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018). Consequently, the open practice reported in this new publication extends to engaging with open communities and organisations outside education, and beginning to realise the potential of openness for connecting language learners with the richness of the world outside the classroom.
