 I'm tending to teach to this side, so I'm really aware that there's a whole group out there that, I guess it's because it's like that it is. So I must be more aware of that. I'm going to begin by getting some information over to you about the to diverse opinions concerning technology. ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, dyna dyna'n gwneud i'r wych, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n leithio'n gwneud i'nw'r bod i'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond Neil Postman yw'r gweithio'n 60-lu sy'n tecno'n lleol iawn yn y cyllid o'r ymlawf, ac wrth i ddaethau, yn dweud i'r newid yr holl hwnnw a'u ffordd o'r lleolio traddithio'n gyffredigol. Mae'r cwntrall y rhaid yn ddweud i'r bywyd yma. Felly, ydych chi'n fwyaf amddai, yn y dyn ni, yn ystafell hwnnw, o'r teulu cyffinio a'r byw yn gweithio'n sgrifennu am y cyfnodol. A rydw i'n hynny ymweld yr ysgol yn y cyfnodol yn ei gweithio cyfnodol. Ond Llyriad, yn y ddwy'n gweithio, sy'n sefydlu sy'n golygu cyfnodol o'r newid yn ysgrifennu'n ddwyledd ac yn ymdweithio'n cyffinodol o'r newid o'r newid o'r creu'n gweithio'n ddwyledd o'r gweithio'n cyffinodol a gyda'r studiadau gwahanol i siŵr wrth iddo, dwi'n gwneud hyn, di'n rŵr? Having looked at that, if there's anything you would like to check up on, we have the references at the end and you can have a look at that at the luck of postman and Laurieard, but we'll go quickly on I think. We just didn't want to talk much about theory, so that was more or less it Now we will tell you who we are, how our co-operation has now begun, and then we will concentrate on fiddell conferencing and other activities that are connected to the programmes and courses we are involved in. I will quickly go to presenting my institution at Masaryck University, the second largest university in the Czech Republic. gyda ceisio roedd 50,000 o'r siwr, ac ydy'r Llangwt ddiddordeb yn ymdillag ymddillog. Oherwydd y gallwn ychydig wedi bod 9,000 o'r siwr. Wrth gwrs, oherwydd 100 o'r ddechrau. Felly, we teach English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Latin and Czech for Foreigners. And we're involved in activities of course of teaching in research. We specialize in these innovations, well use of ICT testing and European language portfolio. And then, we take part in a lot of projects. Some of them we're going to talk about. Aberystwyth, o Aber. I downloaded this. Aberystwyth University is located by the sea in one in three residents stay from the university. They come, they like it, they stay. The area has beautiful coastlines, beaches and mountains as well as a lively social scene. Within 130 years experience under internationally renowned research facilities, Aberystwyth is a great choice if you are serious about study and you don't mind living two and a half hours from civilisation. Our language centre is very small, even smaller since we now no longer do in sessionals but we concentrate on pre-university courses. The students in our classes are divided by language level and by special subject level depending on their intention to go to graduate or undergraduate courses. That's us. Okay and if you want to know how we got together, well it was through the RASMUS programme, European programme. First our students started to go to Aberystwyth and Aberystwyth students to Brno. The next year teaching mobility started and because we watched what the other teachers were doing, we were helping with feedback and also, well of course, did a lot of teaching and we realised that the team teaching could be a very nice idea. So the next step was to try to team teach in some new environment and that was video conferencing. That's why actually we started to work together. One of the first projects that we worked on was the Invite project. It was our first combined research project with funding coming from the EU. It was driven by business needs and of relevance for us is that the funding enabled us to begin our video conference and to move it forward in terms of the equipment that we needed and also the collaboration that we needed to get together for. This is a conference and through these and such other conferences we could present our collaborative findings and work as a team. This unified our teaching and learning and gave us an opportunity to host the Douglas conference in this year. Compact is a new project with EU funding, but specifically for the Czech Republic. Are we out of this this time? Yes. We'll just pay you. It's a huge over a hundred plus people involved in course development and other things and the leaders are from Masarick language department. So you're it. Are you? Yes. Okay. But why I'm interested is allows us through the funding to collaborate further and to keep on our small university, great huge university collaborative liaising. Okay. So that was let's say the introduction about we are how we started to work together, how it is possible that we could work together and that we hopefully will continue in this. And now we're getting to the second part for the most important one. And it is to look at video conference and as such, we will try to have a look at it from a lot of different perspectives. So we call it video conferencing. You will see that we will talk a lot of different activities around. But well, video conferencing would be the central focal point. If we should think about the aim of our courses, it is to develop language and communication skills in an intercultural setting in real situations. You will see through the seminar that we really tend to push everything towards reality so that we do not have any like active situations, but a real situation for them. And also the intercultural aspect is very, very important, especially for our university because we are in Central Europe, located, well, we are an interior country. So it means that if we get foreigners, they are mostly from surrounding countries or from the East, so we do not get that variety of cultures in classes is the situation that I burst with. Yes, so both our needs are satisfied really. In terms of style, we wanted our classes to become one class. We didn't want one over there, one over there, you taught, you taught, we wanted it to be one class. A virtual face-to-face. So we were looking at dispensing with that screen or being able to go beyond the screen and interact two dimensionally. The structure? Yes, just before I go to the structure, a very important thing here is that most of the tasks are student driven. Of course, we start with certain input at the beginning and encouragement, but more and more throughout the course, it is students who are actually dictating what is going to happen. And now I'm moving to the structure. We do a really wide range of activities and the structure can be from very traditional lectures to experimental asymmetric sessions. What we mean by asymmetric? Almost everything, because, for example, in Aberystwyth, the students there, they have 20 hours per week of English. Hours have two hours per week. They have, I mean of English, they have, let's say, a very different level of English than ours. Ours are already with certain academic expertise in Aberystwyth without pre-university students usually. Then, for example, the multicultural setting is completely different in Aberystwyth. Everybody is in English, well speaking environment, in very intercultural setting in Brno. It is completely different situation. So this asymmetry is so different. Also the institutions are very different. And we would just like to show you that despite all those differences, it is not that complicated, not that difficult to create a course that works and that can be fruitful for both ends. And then within that structure we divide our activities into two bigger branches. One of them is synchronous activities and we will talk about video conferencing, Skyping and face-to-face sessions. And the others are asynchronous activities and we will mention emailing, blogging, forums and Moodle. At this point it is very important to say that maybe you have noticed some of you who came before we started that there was a video conferencing session playing going on. So we record all the video conferencing sessions and students can access it online. So you can see this is last year thing like this is every other week. They had it in the first term and then in the second term every week. So whenever they, for example, miss a class, they do not understand something in the class or they need to come back to some discussion or something, they can always go back and they can see what was going on. And that's both ends. The students in Messerick, students in Aber can all access the online. Yep. OK. And now we will show you a few examples. When I said that the diversity of courses is really huge, then we'll show you a few things that are in our courses or that can appear in our courses. The first one that I'm going to show is a traditional lecture. If you think about traditional lecturing via video conferencing, there are basically two types. The first one is that there is one teacher at one end lecturing or giving a seminar to students at the other end. Or there can be a teacher at one end with their students at that end plus the students in the other end. OK. What we are going to show here is work with text. It's about argument effect here. The teacher chose the possibility that he was showing computer. Well, the presentation mode, what was the text was in the computer. So you will hear only his voice. And here you can see that this is the group of students listening to him. Now, we want to say that the quality, what you can see here, is much, much lower than in reality. I'm sure that those of you who are involved in video conferencing, you know that it's like almost face-to-face thing if you have these big images of your colleagues at the other end. And one important aspect is it's turning a private endeavour, writing, and the students usually have one teacher as their audience, as their reader, into a public domain. So everybody is looking at that. Everybody is having a say on what is happening. Now, all of this at this stage is what I would know for all given information. Information that you already know. And as we start the next paragraph, this approach to writing below, this is referenced to the given information. Now, where are you going to playing argument structures and drafting them, and anything that needs... Okay, I don't think we need to go on. Simply this is the very traditional, very basic use. But then we do a lot of other activities, and students, typically in our courses, they are taught how to give presentations, for example. So at the end of certain courses, they give their presentations, and they can choose what they would like to talk about and how they're going to talk about it. So what you will see is that a student who is... It was Jason. Yep, Jason from Hong Kong, who is giving his presentation, has chosen a different style that he was, of course, he wanted to show his PowerPoint presentation, but he also wanted to use his body language. So he just did it in this way. All his pictures were pretty big, so we could see everything. Of course, if you have different systems, you can have, like in one window, the person talking in another window, you can have a presentation going on, and in the third window, you can have, let's say, the audience, but it depends on the systems you are working with. Our system has... Both our systems have document cameras. You can put anything onto it. You can put anything onto it, press a button, and it goes directly to the other venue. So that you can have students reading off the same page. The computer, with one press of a button, it can go to the other venue and you see the computer. Jason didn't want just the computer, because usually you can't see his face. So he said, I'm going to do this. So he orchestrated this, I think. Yep. A cute girl showing her fists to you with words, say, M-D-M-A. It looks like a kids' TV program. Rotsi. And Lesiana would. This one, another Hawaiian girl. Looks quite sad, but I don't know why. Say, no drugs. If you think you can drop the drugs, go. I don't think so. OK. So you can see that you can be giving, again, traditional, let's say, PowerPoint presentations to others. Very important is to say that usually once they get used to video conferencing students, we try to build teams of both ends. That it is not that students at one end would be giving a presentation to students at the other end, but that the team that is going to give the presentation is composed of students of both ends together. So they have to cooperate together to prepare it, to distribute that, let's say, functions, the timing and everything. And then they go like one end, then the other end, one end, then the other end. Well, they simply have to organise it. Lots of social networking going on there with the various other forums. We'll show that later. Yes, we'll show that later. Now, a very important thing, as we said, that later on we are mostly student driven, the students can tell us, the teachers, whether they need our help or they don't. So when they are preparing their activities, it doesn't have to be just presentation, they can prepare anything they like, they just tell us, well, the topic will be like this, and could you do this for us or that for us, or they can just tell us, well, just wait and see. So you will just see here two examples. One is when students of Masarig University prepared an activity for students in Aberystwyth, and you will just see how they start this in the very beginning. Is everybody there? Yes, there are people here. Okay, try. Oh, it's missing. The student called Rock is missing. Well, that doesn't matter. And reading the questions for you, and showing them to you, so you can read them yourself as well. Okay, and then after that, you will have, like, a minute to discuss them, or think about them, and then we will start discussing them altogether. Okay, so you can see that this is not us teachers, well, presenting the things, but the students. You can see also that it's very important to say that students are very flexible. Whenever something doesn't work the way they've prepared, there is no problem for them to say, well, it doesn't matter, we'll do it differently. Well, we've prepared something, but let's do it differently. So, that's one of the aspects that's very good for us to know, or that we have the feeling that then we can be quite, well, we have to be flexible, but, I mean, we can be relaxed that we know that when something doesn't work that the students will say, okay, what shall I do now? I will do nothing. No, they will never do that. They will always try. I think an anecdote here is that you were very, or you said to me that, I think it was last year, that it's the only class that you teach where the students call you liable. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, it does lower any of the formality and the students become, we become part of the learning process, really. It's very important to say that in the Czech Republic, we are, I think, similar to other Central European countries, the teachers are called very formal way like Mr Teacher, or, in my case, it would be at university Dr Shtipanak. But, and they would never dare to call me liable in my, well, in Czech environment, but once we switch into English, because it's so real, and there is Janis, there is Joe, there is, well, there was Joe, there is John or somebody else, it is quite natural that they simply take the cultural aspect of it, and they call me liable. And then, after the session, when they switch into Czech, they go into Dr Shtipanak again, because it's a Czech environment. So, that's one thing that is very important about the culture, how it influences the reality of the situation, the culture, because when I teach the classes that are formal, well, the regular face-to-face sessions, they would never think of calling me liable, because it's the Czech setting, Czech group in Czech class, nothing changes, but in video conferencing, the culture changes. OK. Another example here, it's an example of the feeling of telepresence. We just said at the beginning that we wanted students to see, or to feel that this is one space, one class, but we never realised how easy again it is for them to feel this, because they were preparing their activities, and one of the activity was this group was presenting drama therapy, and I didn't know what they had prepared. So, at one point, they just said this, and we were, like, both teachers, were completely surprised that it is so easy, and you will see what I'm talking about. He was a little shocked here, he doesn't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. We'll sort of make space here. Is it just for us or for them as well? No, we just want to make an imaging circle, so our group will make a half-of-circle, and your group will make a second half-of-circle. Okay, so it was as easy as that. I mean, you are, well, here, they are there, and if I, as a teacher, was thinking, well, how to make it real, how to make a circle or something, I would be thinking how to prepare them for it. No, just let's make a circle. We'll be half, and you will be another half, and it's as easy as that. And they were doing activities that one person was going after another, and it was really smooth that the last one in Bruno simply finished her activity, and the first one in Aberystwyth started was like in real circle. So it's great that we can actually rely on students that they can come up with any activity, and that's why we say that we feel that almost everything is possible through video conferencing. The only problem is we have to then, as teachers assess, whether it is effective for our course or for language learning or other activities, because many of those things are fun, great fun, and they say it's great, it's cool, it's great fun, but then we have to think, okay, it's good that it is fun, but do you learn, or how much do you learn in that process? Okay, then I'll just get very fast into the Skype talking. All of us know what Skype is. We use it for teacher-teacher communication when emailing is not enough, and we need to discuss something. Students use it again in the normal way. After the sessions, if they need to talk about something, they simply go to Skype or any other desktop video conferencing, and they discuss the things. It's different to video conferencing. Skype, you can see a picture and it goes over to your computer. It's ideal for one talking to one, but one talking to many or many talking to many, it's not an ideal use of technology, and we're aware of that. So if you're thinking, hey, wow, I could do this with my Skype, it could, but it wouldn't be as interactive, it wouldn't be as robust as it would be if you were video conferencing. First the quality is much lower, then you can hardly produce the sense of that one space there because the technical, let's say, solution is somehow different. This is just an example how we use it, simply if we need any experts or specialists coming to our classes, and they do not have video conferencing facility, we just use it through Skype that they are on Skype, and you can see that, well, this is the small group here of our students. It will never be as smooth as in video conferencing, but where you can see the faces in the group, in the class. Okay, I think it's done. There's no point in that, the key areas, I'm all a little confused about the open spaces of the... Okay, I just will. All of us know Skype things. Yes, definitely. Let's do you get the idea that I know all about this, and I know how to put in plugs and do all this, and that, oh gosh, how do you start that? Don't think that I'm a techie, or that even, Libor is a techie. Studied history. We're not, we really are not, we're trying to understand how best people learn and what best fits that learning environment. And when mistakes happen, when we crash things and we can't get online, we've rolled with the blows so that we're no longer, well, I don't think, are we scared? Well, no. No, not always. Maybe not always. So we have classes between the video conferences, so we have a class to prepare for the video conference, and then we have our video conference. Mainly, I think we developed because the level of student understanding is quite less, is a lot less, actually, than in the Masarick University. And when we're giving our in-class, initially the students online were very reticent. They were, oh wow, and wouldn't speak, and oh look what I look like. And so it took away from that one class. So we bought this neat piece of kit. Has everyone seen a flip? This is so easy to use. That's it on. You flip at the side there. That tells you you're ready. This then tells you it's filming. And you can say, hello everybody, how are you? And the students can then interact with that. They can start and say what they think. And then that comes off and it's simple. Play it back. And if you want to play it back, using the computer or using large screen, it's this, jam it in there, the students see themselves. So they get that, they get feedback and they can go into tutorials and they can see all this happening. Sorry, Libor. Okay, so we're not showing the videos. So maybe we'll get some videos of the students because with them, because it is such a non-invasive instrument that students easily forget about its presence. And then when they see themselves, they can analyse what's going on a bit more easily than if they see themselves in huge screens and they're just really thinking about the camera, which is there. And you can see the students are not really aware that they're on screen anymore. Okay, so this would be the synchronous activities we are using in our courses. Now let's move to the asynchronous activities. And the first is emailing. Of course, we don't have to talk about the fact that we all are using email. This is just two things that we want to say. As teachers, you have to be ready for an enormous frequency of emailing within that team teaching, especially in times at the beginning of the course when you have to discuss what actually is going to happen and then usually before the class and after the class. You can say I just want to show you the world, this is two days in November, the fourth and the fifth, okay? And there are 11 messages from Janice, probably 11 from me too, to Janice. So it's just that day when we have a video conference or the day before or the day after when we need to organise everything. So as teachers, if you are going to use it, be ready for this excessive emailing sometimes. It is our lifeline. It's when we email each other sometimes in a panic. What happened today? Where were your students? And we could get online. Oh yes, someone stole one of the computers so they locked us out and we couldn't get in. That's why you couldn't get hold of us today. So all these kind of things are emailed and we keep them and we use them as our research to take it on, to say what should we do in the case of. So emails are very, very important part of our course. And we can also, for example, check, what were we doing last year this time? Are we at the similar stage or are we doing completely different things? So this is about teachers, about students. We can't say what's going on whether they email or not. If they email, it's good but we do not know anything about it. And because we would like to know what they do, sometimes we also need to evaluate their writing skills. So we needed a different space or different environment and we started to experiment with blogs. So as you can see, the blogs we were using in 2006 and 2007, it has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. Yes, one of the advantages was that the students were reacting and interacting with each other. It was, they set up their own blog and they started to use it formally and informally for things that we had asked them to do and also to hush around, I guess. And it was the informal formal that really was problematic for us, I think. Yes, yes. The problem was that, for example, we set a task or something and or they were to write something which is meant to be formal and then immediately they, for example, switched into where is it, yes, pictures of Thai food and you were as a teacher, you were simply looking for the things which were like the task that the students were supposed to do but of course you didn't mind these activities but we wanted a more organised space. We needed to assess. We needed to use that as an assessment tool and it wasn't really happening. Yes, that was one thing. Another thing is that blogging is not meant a tool for group communication at one time. So, for example, after a session, when students got all of them and logged in, well, the blog didn't accept it so it's collapsed and all the students were writing, well, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And we just logged in a few hours later and said, no, it works, everything is okay. It's only when, I don't know, 20 or 15 people or 30 getting in there. And it was a public domain meaning that anyone could react to it. So it was really hard work getting through to find out what we needed to assess the students. So that's why we started to use forums which was an improvement in that way that saw in that respect that we definitely knew what was for us and what was not for us. It felt like a blackboard. Yeah, well, I don't know maybe. Definitely at this point, it was, for example, when a summary writing was assigned, I knew when I entered this thread I could see that students were writing their paragraphs summaries of the discussion. I knew that I didn't have to get into that thread because, well, party, they are organizing a party, it's great, but I don't have to be involved. Also, but what we found was very good that, as we said at the beginning, in video conferencing, we do not deal only with video conferencing but our aim was to develop all the communication skills. And we realized that other students are using all those communication tools. They may not be effective in using them. And we could see that, for example, this is a group comparing fairytales in different cultures and we could see what different students did. We asked them or we told them that if they want us before their presentation to know, well, if they want us to know something, they can post all those materials there and we will read it before the session and they can rely on the fact that we know about it. So some of the students, for example, sent just a, well, just a Georgian tale so that we would read that and that would be enough. But others, for example, would produce this. Okay. So then when we analyzed it, so, well, do you think that students would simply sit before your presentation go through all of those links to watch all of those fairytales that are accessible online? Was that a realistic situation? Then, of course, after the analysis, she realized that, yes, that is why nobody actually got to those links because, yeah, that's what students do. And we could also see a very good example here, for example, Masahiro and his Japanese fairytales. There is a very short introduction of the characteristics, very short fairytale and two links. Simply very realistic, yes, students read it, students knew everything what they needed to know. So it was also very good for the analysis that the students could look at, okay, this works. Everybody was reading this, but nobody was going into those hundreds and hundreds of links. Okay. So that was very good. Also, we use it, and I'm not going to get in there now. With forums, you can use it in more advanced tasks like peer reviews, for example, that they have that we use it with both graduates when they read their texts or abstracts and then the others peer review and comment on that. So the forums prove to be very good, but there is one big but on forums, you need administrator because it is not just you as a teacher who could be administrating the thing. Well, you could, but it's completely different kind of work. So the first thing was about, well, our administrator was funded from the project. The Masaric University forum is funded by the Masaric University, so it's no problem, but we need it again something more complex. And that's why we tried, and it was last year, we tried virtual learning environment model. I don't know if... Five minutes, thank you. That some of you may know what it's enabled, let's say, oh, sorry, was a wide range of activities. Could you just say a few things I would get in there? Yeah, the Moodle also needed an administrator, but it was more organised, it was more teacher friendly, so that we could get in and we could have a look at what the students were doing. They could interact with it, they could add things that or they could be, they could go to some of the assignments, they could go to getting to know your place, they could go to some of the lectures that we had, we'd get Hofcedr and culture and stereotypes and they could go in there and interact with those, so it was really good. Unfortunately, Aberystwyth had a bit of a meltdown with its computers and they're putting an enormous firewall, so at the moment we have to send everything to Libor and he has to put it on, which is a bit unfortunate, but I still prefer it, I still prefer it to any of the other social networking things that we've had. So, for example, what we do more than in the forums, we can say that it is wiki activities or web quests and other things, but those of you who know these virtual learning environments know that, well, there are a lot of more activities we can use. Okay. So, you can see from all the things that we do that the video conference is not a standalone, it's not something that is video conferencing, it's all intertwined and fluid with all the other social networking tools. It just can't be on its own without your email, it can't be without a forum so the students can be in touch after, so all that goes together to make some hole out of the experience of sharing and having a virtual classroom. And if you ask what students think about it, most of them or most of the feedback is really positive. Usually at the beginning, all of them are very conscious about their looks mostly. Then sometimes you can see that they're complaining about the shortage of time. They have, for their speaking, talking sometimes. Usually later on they just think, okay, teachers, just leave. We can do it ourselves and we can just enjoy it and we don't need you at all. But mostly what is positive that it is a lot of things about those cultural differences. They share ideas, then compare cultures and it is very much important really for Masaruch University. But also sometimes they say, yes, it's very good that we talk and write in our, let's say informal environment but it is, well... At a high level of English, yes. And recently it's been, for the first time last year when they were saying, well, it will actually be very good for our CVs that we have the skill that we can feed our conference. Cos we didn't say that they actually go and they run the video conference. They're training and then they invite people to produce the video conference and to participate. So they do get practical info. So this is more or less it. We wanted to share the wide range of activities we've been working on. And if you are interested you can of course ask many questions we can go into. We can go into detail in any aspect of this. Just one last comment is about future ideas. Yes, we are in contact through diverse and through the various tech educational conferences we're in touch with more people and we're going to try and move out of just the two of us. I think you've already done that. You're in Quebec already aren't you? And so these, we're going into other places to get other places online. So that's something that we're doing and particularly through diverse. For the video conference setup in Japan, Korea and China where a lot of our students come from we'd love to video conference especially for students coming in. What do they need to know? What's the need? How can we ease them in? But the time difference is becoming a huge problem. But we've tried with time difference like workable time difference is nine hours is the maximum we tried because it's like a big, well morning nine-ish in that's one zone and let's say seven in the afternoon well in the evening in the other zone for example in our country seven o'clock in the evening is still okay for having a class so that the nine hours difference is not a terrible problem. Well we hope our passion has transferred into you and that it was transparent that we're very excited about this and that you will also catch the bug and want to do it. Any thing else? Very much.