Thursday, April 17, 2008

Joe Lo Bianco to open online IYL seminar series

Jo Lo Bianco, the doyen of language policy and planning in Australia, the man who authored the National Language Policy of 1987 and who has worked tirelessly for languages all his career has agreed to open our online seminar series to celebrate IYL on 16 April 2008 at 19.30 Australian Eastern Standard time.

We can only host forty log-ons at a time on my university's Adobe Connect system and let's face it, even with that many not everyone can have a say. All sessions will be recorded and available on archive. Please email pmahnken@usc.edu.au if you are interested in participating.

If you are interested in offering a presentation (I recommend maximum 30 minutes for the address and 30 minutes for interaction/discussion, use the same email, tell me your proposed topic, send me your favourite portrait photo, and have a peek at http://callisto.usc.edu.au/languages to learn how to use the system. Enter as a guest and you will find I often have it set to grant all comers presenter status so you can mess around a bit. You need a headset (preferably) but speakers and microphone will do. Just speakers if you only intend to listen in. You can always use the text chat box to pose questions. Webcam is optional, only adds to bandwidth demand without great gain. Online conferencing will be a massive channel for foreign language learning in this century so it doesn't hurt to learn about it now.

Jo Lo Bianco wrote a forthright article in the Age newspaper on 26 March, A language is a window to another world. It says much more than the title indicates to me. See Joe's profile page at the University of Melbourne.

Phillip

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