TESOL 2010 - Day 1

Still trying to find time to post. I don't have time to do justice to everything I've seen, so a quick set of vaguely related observations:

• Compared to high-tech conferences, it's intimidating to discover all the subjects I haven't even begun to understand. I feel like a tourist here.
• This is an enormous conference. It's pretty easy to fill ten to twelve hours each day just with conference activities.
• As with technical conferences, there's an interesting dichotomy between the practical (teachers) and a academic.
• The one subject I've seen covered identically in both technical conferences and TESOL is plagiarism in the digital age.
• There is a fairly extensive linguistic study of electronic texts (text corpora) with regards to language acquisition, but there is little commercial application so far.

TESOL 2010 - Day 0

The official conference begins tomorrow, but the Pre-Conference Institute and the opening Luminary Speaker were held. I decided to walk over to the conference center early. The registration line was longer than I've seen at any conference before, but moved reasonably quickly. Compared to the technology conferences I've attended, this is large.

I signed up for one Pre-Conference Institute (PCI) session on Vocabulary and Authentic Texts. The original work was done with English students who were attending college and needed to deal with a large amount of new vocabulary in academic and other texts, though the concepts have been applied to other situations. We went through a number of vocabulary exercises and concepts that I found quite helpful, and could certainly be used in a computer setting. Most importantly, though, I had an opportunity to learn about many different settings in which English language teachers work.

The Luminary Speaker was Howard Gardner, discussing his ideas from his latest book, 5 Minds for the Future. I took lots of notes, but I'm already late to get to the opening session this morning.

TESOL 2010 - Day -1

The TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) conference starts tomorrow, and I just got into Boston. While I have flown, and even ridden the bus through the city now and again, it has been twenty years since I've walked the streets. That means that I haven't seen the place close up since the Big Dig. Let me rephrase that. I haven't seen the place close up since before the Big Dig started, so we're talking a really long time ago.

I got into the Park Plaza and asked the concierge whether there was a Legal Seafood or something similar nearby. "Out the door. To the right. Down to the end of the block." was his answer. There's a Legal Seafood there. After a meal of the Boston Scrod (something I don't get much of in California), I stopped at a Ben and Jerry's and took advantage of the remaining fifteen minutes of Free Cone Day. I walked back to the hotel, eating my ice cream in the cold and rain.

I love Boston!

Real language and technology-related postings later.