Brighton is a place that is close to my heart. I had my first British ELT job in

Brighton  at the Regent School of English between 1987 and 1989.  I started an English through pop music option in the afternoon, took the students to see The Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, the House of Love, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine and many others at the Escape Club, the Zap Club and the Brighton Centre itself where this year’s IATEFL concert is taking place  and I bought my first ever flat in Regency Square overlooking the sea on the top floor of the closest Regency building to the sea on the left in Landseer House (65/66 Regency Square).

Better together

After following ISTEK in Istanbul online last year and IATEFL Harrogate online on my own last year, albeit in the company of many tweeters round the world, I thought that this year we should do an event in Budapest where we actually watched bits of Brighton online in the company of other IATEFL Hungary members.

We talked about it at one of our  meetings in the autumn and we found out that there was another big ELT conference on the same day as the Saturday of the IATEFL conference in Brighton, the annual NYESZE/OUP  language schools conference. We decided to try and combine the two events.

You can see the programme here of the whole conference.  We ended up with a one hour 50 minute slot in the afternoon and both the British Council Hungary and IATEFL Hungary promoted and advertised the event.

People could drop in and out and at any time and altogether we probably had an audience of about 40  throughout the afternoon.

We showed one recorded interview with Gavin Dudeney and two live interviews with Luke Meddings and Peter Grundy. I had been tweeting with Luke throughout the morning to see if he could organise an interview at the time that we had our session in Budapest and I was very happy that it all worked out and I’m very grateful to Luke for his part in this.

We had hoped to have a live link up through skype with our IATEFL Hungary representative at the conference, Németh Nóra,  but her phone died on her just when we wanted to speak.

“The wifi just died in the middle of my skype chat with Tamas :(”  This however didn’t detract from the overall spirit of the event.

On the whole, we tried to give a flavour of the atmosphere of Brighton, show the possibilities of teacher development through hooking up to events like this, and to communicate a positive attitude to online interaction in general through twitter and blogs.

Lőrincz Tamás, Csíky Anna (IATEFL-H committee members), Gergely Zita (British Council) and myself (IATEFL-H Culture and Literature SIG co-ordinator)  moderated the event, the Director of the

BritishCouncil, Simon Ingram-Hill and his wife Ann Rossiter attended along with  IATEFL- Hungary President Lindner Zsuzsa.  Everybody contributed in different ways to the success of the event, we had snacks, drinks and a nicely decorated room and IATEFL Hungary members , if they wanted to, could just come to this part of the whole conference free of charge.

Feedback from three teachers who were there

These were the views of three of the teachers who came to our event:

“It’s remarkable to be part of what must now be a global audience for an international ELT conference. During our two hours at the IBS, we saw three great live interviews with leading figures from the world of teaching methodology, and were able to interact in real-time with conference participants via Twitter. It was also great to see so many familiar faces (as well as a few new ones) at the IBS. It was a shame we couldn’t speak to Nóra while she was at the event.”  Philip Saxon

“To be honest I didn’t know what to expect from the session. I’d already been familiar with Brightonline, Twitter, #eltchat, using social media, PLN, etc. The new thing for me was how others, you, Anna, Tamás, Elek and others use all the things available through the Internet in terms of professional development. Probably it was your enthusiasm that added quite a lot to the experience. It was like how watching a football game at home is different from watching it with your buddies at the bar. I live in a small town, I’m not sure but I guess I am the only one around here with such “symptoms” (having a PLN), isolated though, boohoo :'(, it was definitely inspiring to meet like-minded people.
I’m constantly thinking about how similar sessions could be carried out in the future. It was amazing, your enthusiasm is just contagious!”   Barbara Bujtás

“It was a fantastic experience to follow Brighton Online at the NYESZE conference, it was great to see how online tools can be used and not only talked or read about. The British Council and IATEFL Hungary provided not only the technical background but a cozy atmosphere for this event. With the help of Mark and Tamás ‘we’ commented on the online inteviews, it was a real interactive event. Mark’s excitement was sooooo powerful that all of us got enthusiastic too.  I would like to take part in such an event next year again and will encourage others to attend it as well!”  Agnes Bach

Thoughts for the future

For me this was one of the most exciting events I have been involved in in my 15 year involvement with IATEFL

Hungary.  I think that doing a beam back from the big IATEFL conference and watching it should be a regular feature in the calendar of all teacher associations . It doesn’t cost much money but it does require enthusiasm and commitment. It could happen anywhere and it is a fantastic opportunity to come together with a group of teachers and experience the biggest ELT event in Europe.

Beth Cagnol, President of TESOL France tweeted this yesterday

“My colleagues at #TESOLFR had better be watching #IATEFL online. http://t.co/StOqz6V That’s a presidential order!! :-)”

There are two more days to go, I will be watching on my own from now, with fellow tweeters worldwide, but on Saturday afternoon the feeling of watching it with up to 40 other teachers in a pleasant environment with drinks and snacks was wonderful!

We are natural villagers

My overall feeling of our event in the words of Douglas Adams is this:

“We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is  changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”

Yesterday we tasted a bit of Brighton, not the fish and chips, not the sea air or the squarks of the seagulls but in a way we were there.

20th century Fox presents

Finally, at the beginning of our afternoon session, to warm everybody up, we  showed Lindsay Clandfield’s video of  IATEFLFenia. The  lengendary British band of the sixties made a film in Brighton called Quadrophenia and this was Lindsay’s clever take on it.