This year’s JALTCALL 2009 was held at Toyo Gakuen University, Hongo Campus, pretty much across the street from the Tokyo Dome. I thought it was one of the better JALTCALLs, in spite of the title of my presentation getting hacked off in the handy daily sheet of events. Let’s work on that one, okay (it happened in the web site submission area last year, too)?
On that note, on to the conference. Even though I arrived early, I skipped the opening ceremony. My presentation was in the opening slot, and I wanted to give the equipment a try-out before things got started. I knew from the presenters’ information that I wouldn’t be able to get the Internet up and running on any computer I took along, so I left my office’s MacBook in the drawer. I put together the most basic of PowerPoint slides, with no designs, colors, or transitions in the hopes that the available PC would run my presentation and the notes I added; no such luck. It was a good thing I printed out a copy of my slides and notes. I also made jpegs of the slides, just in case. It was a small turnout; can I blame the clipped title on the event sheet? If you want more information on my presentation, here you go.
What follows are some random notes from some of the presentations I attended. Any criticisms are meant to be constructive. If they come off as anything but, I’m sorry! This online communication can be challenging, but I find getting this information out can be useful for me and my regular reader. 
After my gig, I saw Robert Chartrand, of Kurume University, talk about the (CALL?) lab he put together using 16 Gb iPod Touches! All the iPods are kept in a locked cabinet and have a berth for storing and charging. Each unit has a number and all the students in each course are assigned a corresponding iPod number for ease of tracking. A variety of realistic materials are used, including movies and music from YouTube. When asked (by me, and I’m paraphrasing ) we learned the reason for using iPods vs. computers, Robert told us that installing iPods is cheaper and saves a lot of desktop space. Both were big factors since there was a budget limit and the room is relatively small. I think using iPods under these constraints is a good idea, but with batteries scheduled to run out after 2-3 years of heavy use, a budget will be needed to either replace the batteries or iPods.
Next up was Charles Browne talking about vocabulary assessment. Some of the vocabulary information was review for me, but the figures demonstrate that students with low levels of English need to focus on basic vocabulary. These figures bear repeating:
50% of just about any text you read or hear is made up of 100 words.
75% is 1,000 words.
81% is 2,000 words.
95% is 5,000 words.
98% is 8,000 words.
Charles’ research indicates that too many students here in Japan are trying to learn vocabulary at the higher levels, rather than their own proper level. This shotgun approach is leaving too many holes in students’ vocabularies. Charles pointed out that Japanese middle schools are mostly focusing on the first 1,000 words; this is a very good thing. The problems begin in high school where 77% of the vocabulary comes from the first 5,000 level list! This jump is causing frustration in students who often find the task of learning high school English too difficult. Charles and his partner have put together the Word Engine web site to find students’ levels and give them an edge to learning the vocabulary they need. I got a card for a free account, so I hope to be able to review it some day.
Joseph Poulshock and Frank Tuzi talked about the the lack of non-fiction books in the graded reader market. They have put together a number of such texts in a variety of areas at their BeeOasis site. I’m sorry, but that’s about all I have in my notes. This was a broad presentation, but the materials look quite promising.
Paul Daniels, one of the moodle programming gurus in Japan, is working on embedding Flash-based audio in moodle. We often have to use outside materials for collecting our students’ audio projects, so this addition can help us consolidate more of what we do. The requirements are a bit hefty, however, in that some kind of media server is required to deliver the goods. These packages include Adobe Flash Media Server, Wowza Media Server Pro, and Red5 (open source). Since each moodle module using the Flash player needs some or a lot of tweaking to work, the maintenance bar is a bit high for this one. As moodle gets debugged and improved, each of the Flash-enabled modules requires modification. I’ll have to hold off on this one for a bit, but it looks very promising!
They keynote speaker was Mark Warschauer from the University of Irvine who talked about several written text areas: blogs, wikipedia, automated essay scoring with AWE, and text scaffolding software. My notes are a bit scarce here; I just sat back and enjoyed the talk. The focus on written text was not because of any great needs in Japan, it just shows what is currently going on in the U.S. The party after Mark’s talk was one of the better I’ve been to. The food was good and plentiful, and I got a chance to talk with the keynote speaker. It turns out we are both Lakers fans (grats to them!) 
Sunday morning started off with Tom Robb talking about embedding videos into CLOZE quizzes to check students’ listening. I missed the first 10 minutes because I got turned around on the way to the site. It turned out to be a very important 10 minutes because I missed the instructions on what to do. I wasn’t able to put together my own set up, but from what I saw, it looks like a good way to add some listening through video to your courses.
Andrew Boon and Colin Skeates talked about using instant text messaging in research development. They demonstrated how live texting by someone in need of help in researching and focusing on their work can be of benefit. The “listener” is able to read and comment in real time. They had some technical problems (no Internet for outside computers, and, as far as I could tell, their tethering system wouldn’t cooperate), so they did it live in the room. I thought it was a clever Plan B, but the length of watching each other type went a bit too far. I think 5 minutes or so of live typing worked well, but after that my mind began to wander. I found myself multitasking and even tweeting about the the presentation and the conference. I think some text and analysis from past IM sessions would have served us much better. Having written that, I had a couple of revelations during the presentation. What they were demonstrating was absolutely brilliant! Not only does the “speaker” get to think out loud, as it were, but the speaker gets a written record of what was discussed. Keeping a record of what was discussed is often a problem for me (see my lack of notes scattered throughout this), so this could be a way to solve it.
Jennifer Rice and Matthew Rooks talked about using the social networking site Ning for creating blogging communities. Ning is one of the more flexible social networking sites I’ve seen, and there are lots of tools for a teacher to put together public or private communities. If you’re not hosting something yourself already, Ning may be an option.
I guess the most surprising presentation was the last one I saw on Sunday. Bill White and Shawn White (no relation we were told; I thought they were twins ) talked about PortaCALL, using applications from Portable Apps that are pre-configured for particular courses and/or activities. How this works is streamlined applications, designed to be used on USB drives, are bundled together for a course and all the bookmarks and addons are set up beforehand. Students download the package and install them on their USB drives. Doing this allows teachers to work with the tools they are used to and need for their courses. Quite often computer labs do not have much in the way of software and are locked down, preventing the installation of what is missing. I’ll be looking into this one a bit more. Thanks!
All in all a good conference! Thanks to the staff for putting it together. During the party Mark Warschauer said that he was very impressed with how well organized it was and how smoothly it all went. He noted that the U.S. doesn’t have such a focused group of English teachers dedicated to CALL. Wow!
