Taiwan:          7.30 am – 8.30 am (Thursday)
Valencia:        1.30 am – 2.30 am (Thursday)
NY:                 7.30 pm – 8.30 pm
Chicago:         6.30 pm – 7.30 pm

REMOTE PRESENTERS:

Aiden Yeh

Aiden received her MSc Degree in English Language Teaching Management from the University of Surrey and TESOL (Teaching English as a Second of Other Lanaguage) Certificate from the University of Leicester. She is now teaching at  National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. She is very much interested in the use of technology in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms (CALL or Non-CALL class) and how it affects both teaching and learning. She is also a member of the Webheads, an online community of language teachers and practitioners, and a PhD student at the Uni. of Birmingham. Her research interests are English Language Teaching Management, teacher education, welfare and professional development.

Dafne Gonzalez

Dafne Gonzalez has been an English language teacher for 30 years, in Caracas, Venezuela (having worked in all levels of the educational system). She has taught methodology courses in a MSc in an Applied Linguistics Program at Universidad Simon Bolivar, where she is an Associate Professor. She has been involved in online teaching since 2002 when she joined Webheads in Action. Dafne has published articles in different international journals, and has presented at TESOL conferences, and at online and f2f e-learning events. As an active member of Webheads in Action, she is interested in the use of synchronous web tools for LL and teacher development. Dafne earned a B.A. in Modern Languages, and a MSc in Applied Linguistics. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation on ESP e-course design and evaluation at Universidad de Valencia, in Spain. She is a member of TESOL Technology Advisory Committee, and member of the Editorial Board of the Online ESL Mini Conference Newsletter. <http://www.eslminiconf.net/edboard.html>

Jonathan Finkelstein

Jonathan Finkelstein is a passionate educator, a creative technologist and an accomplished producer. He is focused on creating and deploying engaging, web-based and web-enhanced human environments, programs and curricula that foster learning, collaboration and community

Over the last several years, he has worked with numerous leading educational, corporate, and publishing organizations to build learning programs and communities online, including: Columbia University, the New York City Board of Education, New Visions for Public Schools, Harvard, Princeton, CalState University, Lehigh, Houghton Mifflin, NASA, MetLife, and The Princeton Review.

Most recently, Jonathan has acted as the Executive Producer and Director for two unique, interactive and standards-based K-12 humanities curricula. Working closely with Columbia Teacher's College and the Academy of American Poets, he helped create Poetry Live. Jonathan also built a coalition of renowned museums to design and deliver HistoryQuest.US, a program in which students become experts on local historical objects, and then teach remote peers in online virtual classrooms. Jonathan is also the co-creator LearningTimes.

Andy Pincon

Andrew Pincon is Chairman of the Inner City Computing Society a technology infrastructure provisioning, non-profit, providing design/build, turn-key infrastructure services to US Computer Training Centers (CTC) and the Chairman of the Digital Workforce Education Society. Mr. Pincon is also President and CEO of Alado Development, Ltd, a consulting engineering practice, with clients like the US Small Business Administration, The IL Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, OSHA, US Postal Service, Compaq Computer Corp. and Qwest Telecommunications. He is a member of Illinois Governor's Small Business Task Force and the Illinois eGovernment Working Group and on a number of other Chicago and Illinois technology committees. Mr. Pincon has over 30 years of international engineering and business experience.

Recommended Tools for Online Voice Interactions

• Yahoo Messenger <http://messenger.yahoo.com/> (free)
• the Wimba suite of tools <http://www.wimba.com/>
  • Voice Direct (voice chat)
  • voice email
  • voice boards (for threaded discussion)
• see more in table below

Relevant Websites

Staff and students from Athabasca University (Canada) have been evaluating collaborative web based tools and their progress reports can be seen at http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/. Click on audio for reports on web-conferencing tools.

This evaluation summary was last updated in December, 2001.

LearningTimes is an open community for education-minded people. It houses a range of tools for free use to educators:

• Wimba Voice Direct (for live, synchronous voice chat)
• Wimba Voice Boards (for asynchronous, voice based discussions)
• Wimba Voice Mail
• Elluminate virtual classroom

Membership of LearningTimes is free and quick. Go to http://www.learningtimes.org , and select register.

Once inside LearningTimes if you would like to subscribe to an email discussion list on the use of voice online hit the Listservs button and join up.

Australian Flexible Learning Leaders Program

• a description of this program can be found here: http://michaelcoghlan.net/fll/ffl_home.htm
• an ongoing journal of my study program is here: http://michaelcoghlan.net/fll/blog.htm

Synchronous  V Asynchronous

Example 1)

"We've been running successful web-based graduate-level public health programs since 1997. We do use some limited synchronous instruction in almost every course and find that students find it both beneficial and enjoyable. In fact, when we don't include it, there are normally complaints."

Kathy Gresh (Instructional Designer, Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health, Distance Education Division)

Example 2)

Case Study: Impact of ADDING a Synchronous technology

from Roger Hanley, The Alberta Distance Learning Center (http://www.adlc.ca/home/)

(see http://michaelcoghlan.net/fll/synch_asynch.htm for more on this issue)

• URL of this session: http://michaelcoghlan.net/edmedia/mcsession.htm
• Audio archive of live presentation:
  http://alothman-b.tripod.com/hawaii_wia.htm
• Short paper accompanying live presentation:
  http://michaelcoghlan.net/edmedia/short_paper.htm

Michael Coghlan June 25th, 2003 michaelc@chariot.net.au