Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Trip]

For those that went, what did you enjoy or not enjoy?

Enjoyed:

-Variety of speakers and topics
-Ideas that are proven, but not accepted by Koreans. It gives fodder and citations for bringing changes where needed in classes and administrations.
-Meeting people based on their interests in the field and similarities
-All the free books I'll get in the mail from publishers
-Networking and the possible future business connections

Did not enjoy:

-Some rooms had crappy setups and seats
-Suji's catering gave people high expectations, but the meat on their sandwiches was pathetic
-Presenters, especially famous ones, who discussed their thoughts about how ELT is changing, but did not offer concrete suggestions for the audience members' methods or activities in the classroom
-Presenters who read their wordy PPTs to the audience

[winterfall]

I'll just pop a quick reply.

Pros

Everything you mentioned.
- Tons of great speakers

Cons

- "Rushed" schedule. 15 minute break between lectures, even though there's tons of publishers you need to meet and greet and get the highly coveted samples

- Some low quality speakers that were making a presentation simply because it was an international conference and good exposure. I'm really surprised they actually were able to get in. Like presenting case study findings on what makes a good learner in Taiwan and the sample size was only 10, phd level learners. So obviously its gonna be really skewed and not really have much substance.

- Other low quality presenters were on interesting topics that lacked substance. They weren't at an advanced stage to actually be able to present meaningful findings. Like I mentioned above, the focus was on exposure and not research methodologies or variables.

- For things like this, you do an internal research workshop not at a conference meant to share research results.

[Bibbitybop]

[jlb]

I've posted on the good and the bad on my blog:

http://eslteacherinkorea.blogspot.com/2010/10/kotesol-conferencethe-bad.html

http://eslteacherinkorea.blogspot.com/2010/10/kotesol-conferencethe-good.html

[Trip]

[naturegirl321]

I was behind the scenes at the conference. After attending lots and lots of conferences in the past, I think I enjoy working behind the scenes rather than attending the workshops and plenaries. From what I did hear, only a few speakers were good, and it seems like there were a lot of sales pitches.

[murmanjake]

the rushed schedule was a con, and directional posters would have been helpful for navigating on that first day.

I'm excited about the potential use of corpuses(or corpora I guess). I'd never heard of them before and they seem like pretty amazing resources.

[naturegirl321]

[Some of the Mothers Said]

My third KOTESOL, and they seem to be getting worse. I always end up with a bag full of Nunan's crud, and some free pens.
Might I suggest that the seminars be broken up into two categories.

1) Educational
2) Infomercial

[naturegirl321]

The one and only one that I went to was a sales pitch. I was sorely disappointed that I didn't get any free stuff

Though if you search through the programme book, you can see which ones are sales pitches, granted, you will have to do some searching.

[winterfall]

[murmanjake]

[jlb]

I'm curious exactly how much sponsorship money Kotesol gets from these publishers? I hope it's a lot, considering they have a booth AND do presenations advertising their stuff.

[Epik_Teacher]

Went to one some years back, it was a major self promotion forum and snore-fest. Never went back..............

[Bibbitybop]