Prof. Dr. Vance Stevens Learning2gether.net
Vance Stevens lives in Penang, Malaysia. Founder/coordinator of Webheads in Action and Learning2gether.net, he has produced over 435 episodes since 2010. He is On the Internet section editor of TESL-EJ. and has over 150 publications, many available at http://vancestevens.com/papers/, dealing with students using computers to learn languages and teachers learning to teach using technology by engaging in communities of practice and in participatory cultures. He has helped coordinate TESOL/CALL-IS Electronic Village Online (EVO) since 2003, and has co-moderated EVO Minecraft MOOC for the past 6 years. He was recently awarded the 2019 CALL Research Conference Lifetime Achievement Award.
Presentation: An analysis of two decades of EVO moderators’ decisions on platforms facilitating online distributed learning
EVO moderators have been conducting free and open online 5-week workshops in January-February every year since 2001. The all-volunteer moderators of these workshops must choose a platform for mounting each session, and the choices made of suitable online tools to best accomplish their goals can be instructive for colleagues wishing to host their own online courses and communities online. The recent loss of Google+ Communities, Yahoo! Groups, and other online platforms heavily used by educators for facilitating online communities of practice has impacted Electronic Village Online moderators and their ability to find robust, stable, free, and open platforms for hosting projects promoting collaborative and shared learning in distributed CoPs. This presentation analyses decisions made by EVO moderators over the 20 years that EVO has been in existence, and the choices they have made in coming up with serviceable tools despite the occasional sudden loss of many of these platforms.
Workshop: