I’ve nominated TESOL’s Electronic Village Online (EVO) for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s competition of top technology innovators in higher education. They’re asking for votes and stories, so please add yours (for more about the competition, see below). If you’ve ever learned with the EVO team, please share your story. As with any threaded discussion, they ask that you “like” or reply to my initial post to vote for EVO. (Some site visitors are erroneously posting separate likes of the same person or group.)
Here’s the broad description provided of the competition by The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Nominees can come from any area within academe (teaching, libraries, scholarship, admissions, student life, online learning, etc.) or outside of it (companies, government, think tanks, publishing). Basically, we’re looking for people who are thinking big about how technology can change education “and putting their ideas into practice.”
Click here to vote.
I realize that some of you may not be in higher ed, and if you are in K-12, you don’t need to vote. Perhaps you’d like to nominate another worthy techie, school, or company. Feel free to do so. I just thought that the EVO merits a nomination. I don’t feel like I’m voting for myself, even though I’m on the coordination team, because it’s really about the current moderators, mentors, and other seasoned coordinators, and the time they devote to make it happen—and many professionals have been volunteering for the past 10 years!
Personally, my knowledge base for online learning and teaching has greatly benefited from my involvement with EVO for the past 2 years. I can’t think of any other organization, school, or company that has provided such a fantastic menu of learning opportunities, especially for free. EVO is an open source for learning and participants need not be TESOL members to join the sessions.
EVO has provided free professional development on integrating technology into the educational classroom for English language instructors worldwide for the past 11 years. It started as a special project in 1999 of TESOL’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section. Last year, around 1,100 teachers participated in the free online training sessions that take place annually in January and February.
Our goal is to allow learning anywhere, anytime, with as little expense as possible. Thus EVO moderators and mentors are all volunteers, and participants need only provide their own Internet access to take part in activities. Participants and experts engage in collaborative, online discussions or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. Here’s a listing of our 2012 sessions with powerful workshops on everything from digital storytelling to video productions on SecondLife to online mentoring and more.
