PANSIG Conference abstracts

PANSIG abstracts, a set on Flickr.

Over the weekend May 21-2 my local bunch of professional colleagues, in the guise of Shinshu JALT, are hosting the PAN-SIG (Special Interest Group) Conference.

There will be no less than 140 presentations from specialists in all corners of EFL classrooms; foreign and Japanese situations and in English AND Japanese. Real time translating will be available for many presentations, and an effort has been made to concentrate Japanese presentations relevant to JHS/HS teachers.

I have had a few late nights playing with every single word of every presenters' abstract to produce something called a word cloud. Very coolly (but please don't ask how) a canny bit of software generates an image with the text you have chosen, and recognises which words are used the most frequently. The more commonly a word had been used, the larger it presents in the image.

Can you see a common theme running through the images? I hope so....but if you can't, ain't no thang: shed some cash and come the conference. Cheaper than twitter & so much more fulfilling. You do not have to be a teacher to enjoy this "teachers talking about teaching English" fest - I really wish a lot of our parents will be interested enough to come. Anyway, check out the art and make a bee-line for Shindai if you are remotely interested. I would really appreciate any sharing you'd care to do to make sure we get a great turn out as well.

Via Flickr:
What is coming to Matsumoto May 21-2? A whole lot of English teachers to talk about their niche interests, share ideas and make new professional connections. What are they going to talk about?