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Burcu Akyol and I deep in conversation with Scott Thornbury while Beyza, Shelly & Elizabeth Anne are deep into another topic! Isli Boy is just looking as pretty as ever!
The great Karaoke evening organised by the fabulous Petra Pontner - here you can see Mike Harrison and Brad Patterson doing the boys' stuff on "Summer Nights" from "Grease" while Shelly, Anna, Vladka and more of us are bawling out the girl's lines!
With Shelly Terrell, Ken Wilson, Tara Benwell and Cecilia Lemos meeting up on the first evening at Brighton before the start of the conference! I loved meeting you all and especially Tara and Ceci who I hadn't met before! Very special people...
At the "Globe", the pub where we eneded up most of the evenings with Jamie Keddie and Isli Boy. Shaun WIlden and Richard Whiteside can be seen in the background.
Post Conference Note
The graceful, flawless hospitality with which Simon Greenall and his wife Jill Florent took us in (Shelly , Cecilia and myself) after Brighton and gave us three bright and sweetly memorable days in Oxford was the cherry on the cake of this trip. I was shaken out of the sorry illusion that Greeks are the masters of hospitality – sorry! We have been truly had here!
Suffice it to say I am already on a really strict diet to shed off Simon’s delicious cooking!
The weather was on our side too and so we enjoyed the glory of a beautiful English garden and some great walking tours (and shopping sprees with Ceci! ) around Oxford!
with Shelly & Cecilia - Simon looking a bit bemused by all this photographic activity
with Cecilia & Jill in the garden
One of Simon & Jill's feasts!
More IATEFL?
Have a look at this link which lists all the videotaped talks here: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2011/sessions/videos. And if you can’t make it to the next one in Glasgow, I hope I have given you an idea of how a great conference like this – and like ISTEK of course! – can bring us all closer together.
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Post Script
I will be adding more reports on other blogs as they come up!]]>
Categories: Conference Presentation Report
Marisa,
I’ve been greatly enjoying all the reflections and post about IATEFL, but yours had a special “flavor” for me 🙂
It was amazing getting to know you, spend time with you, get advice from you. I hope to meet you again soon.
On a more professional approach 😉 your post was great for me because I didn’t attend many of the sessions you mentioned, and following the links and reading about them really made me wish I could have been in more than one place at the same time!
Thanks for sharing Marisa!
Ceci
Dear Ceci,
I hope your dreams and aspirations for the future will bring us together real soon! It was great getting to know you, Ceci, you’re a gem!
Marisa
Thank you for sharing your experiences, insights, and many links. Consider me a tad jealous of your delightful conference and social gatherings. IATEFL seems like a very engaging, lively atmosphere. Perhaps I will find a way over next year.
Finally, you had with your first two lines since the gap between my vague intentions of writing about conferences and actual writing about conferences remains an annual self-disappointment. From my perspective, you’ve done an admirable job of concisely summarizing a stunning diverse range of presentations and discussions. Good job!
Thank you, Eric! I felt pretty guilty about not doing this – but, hey… if we all share a little here and there, it adds to the big picture.
Hope I get to meet you soon.
Marisa
As you wrote Marisa, it takes a lot of stamina to attend a 5 day IATEFL conference these days and you have more than captured that experience with your report here.
I like the way you divided your report up into a bit on your own session, the sessions you enjoyed, the links to other people’s reflections, meeting your PLN, the photos , the post-conference unwind in Oxford and the link to the IATEFL online site where we can watch the interviews that were made and some of the sessions.
I really think it’s useful to help other people to follow up what happened, as Ceci mentioned, and you are very good at being inclusive, always with an eye on community building and resource sharing.
How we share resources and give each other encouragement is for me one of the key aspects of participating in the online ELT community and you are one of the most empathetic people in this respect Marisa.
Thanks for the great report, glad you enjoyed a place where I enjoyed two very happy ELT years over 20 years ago and it’s through reports like yours that people who weren’t at the conference are brought much closer to what happened and are also encouraged to make use of the online resources connected to the conference.
We have a stream of materials available to us all online and a whole lot of faces behind those materials. There is more than ever a bigger need to help people and signpost people who are not so at ease with making their way around the vibrant ELT community ,which some of us feel very much a part of now, so that they too feel initiated into it and a part of it.
As at conferences, where first time conferences goers need a bit of help from more seasoned conference goers, we also need people to be doing this online. You are a great example of this!
Thanks Marisa!
Thank you so much, Mark, for your kind words. In fact, I would have written something about ISTEK, too, had you not done such a wonderful job of reporting it and doing exactly what you claim I’ve been doing in this post, only so much better!
You know you were a very special reporter – methinks you are developing a whole new genre here. And I look forward to more of this.
Meeting you and talking with you at ISTEK was very very special.
I am grateful to technology for making this happen.
And very happy that the people I have come to call my online community of passion have turned out to be such great human beings face to face as well.
Marisa
You had me at “living the experience became more important than reporting it”. This is exactly how I felt and you expressed it so perfectly in this post. It was almost like the lack of wifi was a blessing in disguise. I needed a few days of being unplugged to hang out with likeminded friends face-to-face. I feel like I already know you very well through ELTChat and VRT, but it was still great to hang out and see your personality shine in real life. Other than Lindsay’s it seems we went to different sessions, so I really enjoyed your summaries. Thank you for taking the time to reflect on an amazing journey. So when can I come to Greece?
Almost immediately! Your room is ready and waiting!
And WITH wifi, too!
🙂
You are a great person, Tara on and offline! Meeting you was very very good.
So start planning that trip!
Marisa
Hey Marisa, I keep putting my own IATEFL post off, and all these good posts reporting on it are not helping me!
I’m finding it hard to put into words what IATEFL was for me, and I think you’re right that the experience is/was exhausting!
I also have to agree that meeting people from Twitter and blogs for real was a particular highlight of the conference for me. Like you, though, the regret is to have had only such a fleeting time to talk to people. On to the next one!
On to the next one, indeed!
I think we should go for conferences with longer breaks next time round so we can all huddle together and talk!
Or may be we should organise our own individual tweet-up conf and we can all present PKs or short presentations – then get that out of the way and make some time for real discussions!
What do you think?
Should I organise one in Athens?
Hi Marissa – How lovely to read you – I can hear the seagulls again.
The slides you’ve added to that super post
braving-it-in-the-virtual-world
are really clear – and since I couldn’t say it there, I’m saying it here !
Thank you dear Elizabeth Ann!!!! It’s lovely to see you here and sorry about my unruly blog!
🙂
Marisa
Thank you for your lovely comment, dear Marisa! It was a pleasure seeing you again! 🙂
Işıl