Tuesday next week I’ll be teaching a class in HUMlab on virtuality. I will introduce different examples of virtual environments and relevant research topics (for example identity, community, embodiment, communication, presence etc.), and initiate a discussion on the concept ‘virtual’. The students will also get to test some different platforms and engage in discussions online. One of the things I would like to bring up is the view that gender doesn’t matter in cyberspace, and counter this with the common request for information about ASL (Age/Sex/Location). Does anyone know of research dealing with this that I could refer to?

Stephanie has been working like crazy over the last week to prepare for moving the HUMlab blogs from Movable Type to Wordpress. Politely, she also suggested that this might be a good time for a template change (I’ve been using more or less the same template from the beginning) and she kindly volunteered to help me with this. Here’s the result now! I really like the new look of my blog, and especially the more personal banner. There are a few more things that need some tweaking (for example, some of my earlier posts have been drastically shortened), but so far, I’m very excited! Many thanks to Stephanie!

In the newsletter eLearning News there is a piece summarizing my thoughts concerning ICT and constructivist language learning, presented in my degree project for teacher’s education. There is an English version in the interaQtive blog. I’m glad to see that there is still some interest in the topics discussed in this not so recent paper!

I’ve recently come across two blogs written by people connected to my university: Poducation: Get poducated (in Swedish) and FREPA.BLOG: On e-learning and learning technology (in English and Swedish). Well worth to check out!

Back from EUROCALL in Granada, I am now full of impressions from examples of the most recent advances in the area of Computer Assisted Language Learning. It was a real pleasure being involved in the EUROCALL 2006 blog, since we had a quite responsive crowd reading and commenting. Many of the discussions in the blog generated replies with good pointers which I will need to check out further. See, for example, posts and discussions concerning podcasting, multimodal challenges, moblogging and constructivist learning.

Since I was blogging, I tried to visit presentations on varied topics, but as always I ended up visiting quite a few within the CMC strand. The presentation by Breffni O’Rourke was especially useful in relation to my own research. He told us about his experiment with using eye-tracking equipment to get a better insight into where students focus their attention. In my multitasking pilot, I was only able to judge this by referring to highlighted window, and eye-tracking data would, as I noted in my article on the subject, be much more accurate. He made some good points about how output logs don’t give us all relevant information, and also showed how he could use the tracking to explain language learning behavior. This reminded me of the work of a previous colleague of mine, Eva Lindgren, who wrote her thesis on revisions in writing, using the method of keystroke logging.

I also tried to visit a few presentations on the topic of podcasting, since we’re looking into ways of incorporating this in our teaching at the department. Over lunch today I will get some more input regarding this, as I will be attending a lunch meeting arranged by the Center for Educational Technology on the topic. Should be interesting!

At the moment I’m in beautiful Granada for the EUROCALL 2006 conference, which is just about to start. You will be able to follow the conference in the EUROCALL 2006 blog, where I will be blogging together with some 10 other conference participants. Here you will also be able to interact with others via a Blobber chat and the voice interaction system Talkspace. It should be a fun and interesting experience for all involved!