Press Releases
Virtual World Language Education Comes of Age: SLanguages Turns 3
Barcelona, Spain, 26 January 2009 - - the “SLanguages” conference will celebrate its 3rd year exploring the use of virtual worlds in language education. The event takes place within the 3D virtual world “Second Life” on 8 – 9 May 2009...
SLanguages 2008: Virtual Conference Explores New Frontiers in Language Learning
Barcelona, Spain, 17 March 2008 - - SLanguages 2008 is a 24-hour multilingual conference to celebrate and investigate the use of 3D virtual worlds for language education. The event will be held in Second Life on 23-24 May 2008...
Conference Description
The SLanguages Conference brings together practitioners and researchers in the field of language education in Second Life for a 24-hour event to celebrate languages and cultures within the 3D virtual world.
Summary of SLanguages 2010
On Friday and Saturday, 15-16 October 2010, the SLanguages 2010 conference took place over a period of 24h.
A newly founded committee took over the work from Gavin Dudeney and with the help of Carol Rainbow [Carolrb Roux] set out to conquer the most technically challenging quest ever: to run a conference in Second Life.
And what a team effort this turned out to be.
The 24h conference saw...
- 47 guest speakers offering 42 sessions
- 377 unique avatars and 78 unique visitors in the Adobe
ConnectPro room (not sure how many were in both venues) enjoyed....
- 19 presentations
- 3 plenaries and 1 unconference
- 8 workshops
- 2 theatre plays
- 5 tours
- 1 Dogme session
- 2 demo lessons
- 1 party
Most of the recordings have now been published but they are by no means perfect. We lost 3 recordings and one we could recover by asking the presenter for a repeat session. In Adobe the visuals of the recordings are not as good as the actual screensharing. The audio in Adobe is very good but only as good as the audio in Second Life and overmodulated, choppy and missing audio in SL is quite normal. Taking all of this into account, I think the recording team of 8 volunteers worked hard on the backstage and they had done a tremendous job. Some higher quality videos are being produced as we speak.
I am beginning to think that Adobe's recording are not good enough for the purpose of archiving this precious content. However, using virtual classroom technology as a 'virtual window' into a virtual world is certainly an 'ease of access point'. In fact, to find a technical or a pedagogical solution to ease the access to 3D worlds was one of the goals of the AVALON project. AVALON stands for 'Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline'. This appraoch has successfully been piloted at this conference.
The hashtag for the SLanguages conference is #slang10 and the general tag is - from now onwards - #vlang, as it was decided by the educators during the closing panel.
May we express our thanks for the following contributions:
...Alexandra and Annette for their fabulous teaching tool stand.
...Randall for the venues, teleporters and support staff board
What Attendees Said
"SLanguages 2008 represented a high-water mark for Second Life based educational conferences. It was well-organized, well-executed, and highly effective. The presentations were relevant, well-chosen, and provided an excellent representation of where education is and will be in Second Life. SLanguages 2009 is on my calendar already. SLanguages and EduNation rock!" - Chris Surridge, The eLearning Project.
"SLanguages 2008 was even better than last year and showed that language education in virtual worlds has come of age! It was just fantastic to see so many great examples of how virtual worlds are changing the way we learn languages" - Howard Vickers, Avatar Languages.
“Thank you for the "all-in-all" excellent organization of SLanguages 2007!”
“An inspiring event. It was great to see educators from across the globe generously sharing their experience - an illustration in itself of the educational benefits of SL!”
“One day seminars have inherent difficulties in real life: there’s only room for 4/5 sessions so how broad / deep? One dud session can cast a pall over the whole day etc. This held up VERY well. Congrats.”
“An inspiring event. It was great to see educators from across the globe generously sharing their experience - an illustration in itself of the educational benefits of SL!”
“I was excited to be part of this conference. I can't help thinking that, in the future, we'll look back on it as the start (or part of the start) of something important in education.”
“Would love to see this event happen next year...and the next...and the next...;)”
Background Information
Please visit our Videos, Images and Logos page.
Contact
Gary Motteram
School of Education
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK
M13 9PL
gary.motteram@manchester.ac.uk
