Humor4u

Not a proper blog post this time but just a list of references and useful links I have compiled for a series of workshops I have been giving this summer. Ninety minutes is not enough for even an Introduction to... kind of workshop so I thought I'd put together a list for the participants to continue exploring the Lexical approach on their own. The workshops were commissioned by the British Council, hence a slight slant towards the British Council - BBC Teaching English website. The list has already come in handy for someone doing Lexis as a topic in one of her LSAs of module 2 of DELTA so I am sure it can be useful for many others too. Did I leave anything important out? Should anything else be included? Do let me know in the comments below. The list can also be accessed via this short link: http://bit.ly/LAref The presentation used to accompany the workshop can be found  HERE

I've written this article about preparing and giving presentations:

All of the videos have been posted from the various sessions I was in this year. Here they are, along with links to the slides. What's new in Android A presentation with  +Dan Sandler  that provides a quick overview of some of the larger features and new APIs in the L Developer Preview release and other new bits in the recent Androidosphere. There's also a really good deep-dive into Notifications, since Dan's the non-local expert on the subject. Slides (PDF) Material science This session, presented with  +Adam Powell , provides an overview of the engineering side of the Material design system. Many of the other sessions at Google I/O this year discussed the design side; this presentation covers the technical details of the APIs and the capabilities exposed by the framework for Android developers. Slides (PDF) Material witness I was happy to be joined once again by former Android developer and UI Toolkit team lead  +Romain Guy  for this talk on some of the new Ma...

Image by Peter Megyeri on Flickr (CC BY 2.0) My interest in experimental practice was piqued at the TESOL France’s last annual colloquium where I attended interesting sessions on the topic by Mike Harrison, and Christina Rebuffet-Broadus and Jennie Wright (see my conference report  HERE ) For those who have done the DELTA, experimental practice may be associated with trying out different, non-mainstream teaching methods or approaches, such as TPR or the Silent Way. But, as Christina Rebuffet-Broadus, co-author of Experimental Practice in ELT: Walk on the Wild Side which recently came out on the Round, assured me during a brief chat we had after her workshop at TESOL France, experimental practice can also be conducted on a micro-level. And this is what I have encouraged teachers to do on the in-service teacher training courses in vocabulary teaching I have been giving this year. As part of these INSETs teachers are usually required to submit a final paper showing evidence of ap...

Image by @sandymillin via eltpics on Flickr For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ( "Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ( "The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates). With Prof M. Hoey at the Lexical Conference in London, May 2013 (Photo by Ela Wassel) Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming, which grew out of his work...

If only post hoc analyses always brought out the inner skeptic in us all! Or came with red flashing lights instead of just a little token "caution" sentence buried somewhere.  Post hoc analysis is when researchers go looking for patterns in data. (Post hoc is Latin for "after this.") Testing for statistically significant associations is not by itself a way to sort out the true from the false. (More about that  here .) Still, many treat it as though it is - especially when they haven't been able to find a "significant" association, and turn to the bathwater to look for unexpected babies. Even when researchers know the scientific rules and limitations, funny things happen along the way to a final research report. It's the problem of  researchers' degrees of freedom : there's a lot of opportunity for picking and choosing, and changing horses mid-race. Researchers can succumb to the temptation of over-interpreting the value of what they'r...

In an earnest attempt to reach more people (or perhaps a desperate attempt to build up a larger audience) I though it would be good to post this reference to the existing five (5) episodes of the podcast that Tor Norbye  and I have been working on for the past several weeks. And by "working on," I mean we get together every 2-4 weeks, sit down with someone interesting on one of the Android development teams and talk about technology and APIs that interest us, and then let someone else figure out the tedious details of actually recording and posting the results. So it's not really work as much as work- related . The goal of the podcast from the beginning was to have conversations with engineers and teams that listeners might not otherwise know and to talk about details of features and functionality of the Android platform that might not be obvious from simply reading the documentation. Because, hey, who reads the docs anyway, right? So far we've released five (5!) epi...