Gaza online seminar series?
As reported in recent blog postings, PhD Education alumnus (from 1993), Professor Nazmi Al-Masri, from the Islamic University of Gaza, recently visited us as part of his UK trip to connect with colleagues (me included) from the AHRC-funded Researching Multilingually at Borders project –
http://researching-multilingually-at-borders.com
One idea that arose during Nazmi’s visit was that of our doctoral community developing a series (e.g. monthly) of online seminars for ourselves but with a Gazan audience in mind as well, i.e. seminars which via technology our Gazan researcher colleagues might either/both join us and/or eavesdrop (as it were) on our discussions.
None of the practicalities for this have yet been talked through so this is an initial message to see if any of you would be interested in contributing to, and participating in, such a series of small-scale events? Please add a comment to this posting if you are 🙂
It might be that we simply video the performances or it maybe we could, as Khwan did (for “Bringing it back home”) add an audio dimension to our ppts for each seminar? Either way, the idea would be to build up an online library/archive of such presentations for our own use as well as a contribution to the Gazan researcher community.
I hope that we would be able to join in with some presentations from Gaza in a similar way and that, in this way, we would all be learning from each other, and using technology to subvert the siege situation that currently limits Palestinian physical mobility.
Any thoughts?
R
I should have made it clear also that we’d be hoping that we could provide an audience for speakers from gaza also, i.e. a bilateral relationship between our two communities.
This sounds very interesting. Count me in!
That is a great idea, Richard! Like Achilleas, I am not sure whether my research topic
would be of interest to the TASOL community, but I would be happy to contribute to the series of online seminars.
Sounds like an interesting idea! What kind of topics do you have in mind, Richard?
I guess short presentations that have value for the presenter (e.g. allowing them to talk through an aspect of their research such as Eljee’s talk of restorying), for the LANTERN community, and for the wider audience of researchers we might engage with in Gaza as it develops its Teaching Arabic to Speakers of Other Languages (TASOL) online courses (and teacher education courses to support this development) ….
That’s a tentative yes from me. I am not quite sure about what I might contribute, bearing in mind the needs of the TASOL community, but I like the idea.