1. Preply is one of the bigger online tutorial organisations. Their Online Teaching Conference 2024 starts this Thursday, 24th October, https://preply-tutors-conference-2024.vfairs.com/
PDF of programme below and here’s the high-octane blurb:
Unlock your career potential: Connect, learn & grow. Get ready for three days of unmissable talks from leading minds in the teaching industry. Our conference gives teachers worldwide the chance to discover insights, techniques, and cutting-edge tools to take their teaching and career to new heights. We’ve also prepared a number of virtual meetups, Q&A sessions, and goodie bags to help you get the most out of the event. Completely free, catering for eight languages, and open to all teachers worldwide – you’re going to want to be there.
2. Well intentioned, certainly, the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact https://www.un.org/techenvoy/global-digital-compact
The preamble states
1. Digital technologies are dramatically transforming our world. They offer immense potential benefits for the well-being and advancement of people and societies and for our planet. They hold out the promise of accelerating the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
2. We can only achieve this through strengthened international cooperation that closes all digital divides between and within countries. We recognize the challenges that these divides pose for many countries, in particular developing countries, which have pressing development needs and limited resources.
3. We recognize that the pace and power of emerging technologies are creating new possibilities but also new risks for humanity, some of which are not yet fully known. We recognize the need to identify and mitigate risks and to ensure human oversight of technology in ways that advance sustainable development and the full enjoyment of human rights.
4. Our goal is an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe and secure digital future for all. This Global Digital Compact sets out the objectives, principles, commitments and actions we undertake to achieve it in the non-military domain.
5. We have strong foundations on which to build. Our digital cooperation rests on international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, international human rights law and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We remain committed to the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society reflected in the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action and the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society. The United Nations provides a critical platform for the global digital cooperation we need, and we will harness existing processes to do so.
6. Our cooperation must be agile and adaptable to the rapidly changing digital landscape. As Governments, we will work in collaboration and partnership with the private sector, civil society, international organizations, the technical and academic communities and all other stakeholders, within their respective roles and responsibilities, to realize the digital future we seek.
PDF of full text below.
3. JELI is the open-access Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology and has just published its fourth issue https://jelipub.com/
The Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology (JELI) is an international peer-reviewed academic journal (online-only) that publishes rigorous scholarship that advances inquiries in issues related to ideology, language, and education. Although articles are written in English, the journal welcomes studies dealing with the teaching and learning of languages other than English as well. JELI invites cutting-edge research from around the world with sound and diverse methodological designs and innovative implications for teaching multiple languages or any one language as a first, second, or third language. The journal is open-access, and the published articles are freely available to anyone.
Their most downloaded article thus far has been Ideologies of Mother Tongue at an Indian University: From Stage to Discussion by Christina P. Davis & Chaise LaDousa PDF below. https://jelipub.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/davisladousa_2023_ideologies_of_mother.pdf
The concept of mother tongue gained salience in India in the mid-nineteenth century and has been central to language and education policy, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and lay conceptions of language. While scholars have outlined the multiple meanings and uses of the term, we move the analysis of mother tongue from its possibilities to moments of practice.
(How does JELI manage with quite such a large editorial board, I wonder?)
4. There’s an ECML BarCamp on AI for Language Education from 16:00 to 18:00 UK time on Tuesday, 5th November, for which I think places might be limited, hence this early notice.
Flyer here (and below) https://www.ecml.at/Portals/1/7MTP/AI-Lang/documents/AI%20Lang_invitation-BarCamp1%205nov24.pdf?ver=2024-10-07-165315-707
registration here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd6x72-3fDUcyJWQpFTOjhKcb53TfpDqbnfd-L-nYc19xVAAA/viewform
and more on the AI for language education project here https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2024-2027/AIforlanguageeducation/tabid/5856/language/en-GB/Default.aspx
Just in case you need it, like I did, more on the etymology of the term BarCamp here! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
5. And, finally, Dish, a weekly podcast dinner party https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dish/id1626354833
Not all the guests will be known to listeners outside the UK, but Damian Lewis, Anna Maxwell Martin, Mary Berry and Stanley Tucci may be?
Roy Cross's Blog 