More responses to the 2008 KOTESOL conference.

kimchi-icecream did a great big blog entry about the KOTESOL conference, and asked that I give it a mention. I did a little one, hampered greatly by the fact that the KOTESOL website was down the day before and the day of the event. That is the first of many complaints by "ddeubel" on his EFL Classroom 2.0 - Teacher Talk blog. Though he says he'll continue to support the organization, take a quick look at some of the faults he found:

* a website that was down most of the time just prior to the conference. Ugh…. I didn’t even know my presentation room location until arrival. Registering online is not efficient and is really a pain.

* informing members about the little things. Like, where is the banquet? I never got any notification (and I paid for it) about where this was held. So I decided to not go..you can’t go somewhere you don’t know.

* no tailoring of presentations with rooms. Some dolt couldn’t even figure out that I was presenting on Text to Speech and would need a room with basic technology! At the same time I presented, someone was using the main hi tech room to give information about their college. Go figure? Same with many other presenters stuck in dirty , horrid rooms which fit barely 20 people and which WE PAID FOR THE PLEASURE OF PRESENTING! They dropped the ball here — I sat through a lecture on using videos and couldn’t even hear or see the screen of the presentee… (Sat. morning)

* I had to bring my own sound equipment! Yeah, so much for a conference about the Future of Learning!!! I mean, come on now. And then when I requested they provide it (I paid $132 (including membership dues) for the room and equipment), I was told that I had only requested a computer. That I should have written “speakers” under “other” on the forum…..And they argued and argued that I should not expect anything but a computer if they said they’d provide a computer for the room. So they finally said, all would be okay. WASN”T. I carried my own large speakers, my own laptop just in case and good thing! What a fiasco, further, the room was a pig stye, reprehensible and horrid.

There are a few other write-ups of the proceedings: from We've Got Seoul, from Joe Seoulman, from EFL Geek, a little mention on the Expat Korea board, and from kimchi-icecream himself. Here's another one by kimchi-icecream; an excerpt:

Anyways, long story short the group discussion presenter showed us a video of what I thought was a group discussion test--later on someone called him out on the video and he confessed it was actually a video of a group of students being assessed for placement in an English course with different level classes--it had nothing to do with a group discussion test. I then realized that the handout he had given everyone in the room was not a rubric for a group discussion test but rather for the group assessment process for class placement . . . seriously, WTF? The guy is presenting to a roomful of Masters in TESOL and Linguistics professors, and the rest of us who have varying degrees of training and experience teaching--and we PAID to hear him too . . . talk about committing reputation suicide!

After all of us in the room figured out that he was wasting our time with materials that HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS PRESENTATION TOPIC teachers in the room began lining up to take a bite . . . one guy behind me asked, "Do you have a copy of the rubric you used in your group discussion test that we could see?" Answer, "Uhm, no, not here. Sorry."

Read them for yourself to get their individual sets of pros and cons, but one of the day's themes seemed to be disorganization with a capital D through N. Oh, and food. Everybody ate lots of food in Itaewon for dinner.