MCTE Reflection

Short reflection on MCTE Conference in Brainerd, MN--at Cragun's Resort (April 15, 2011)

I attended this conference for one brief cold Friday in April (the temp got down to 32 degrees!). We began with a brief continental breakfast and then Frank Sentwali, a hip-hop poet, performed. I thought he was great and am considering having him peform for my African-American Lit. class later this Fall. Then it was time for Jeff Stephenson, Laurie Lykken, and I to do our workshop on Vokis. We had about 21 attendees who listened to us talk about the different ways that we use Voki avatars in English classrooms and then tried to make Vokis on their own. Unfortunately, due to the slowness of the technology at the conference center we were at, the time the participants had to work was minimal. We ended up doing a lot of Q & A at the end while the participants worked. Overall, though, I think things worked out: when the evaluations came out for the breakout sessions, ours was one of the highest ranked! Who knew? After presenting at that session, we left to attend some breakout sessions. I caught the tail end of one on "Voice Threads, Book Trailers, and Nings"--interesting stuff, but they went too fast and it ended too early. I then moved to one on "Radio and Film Documentaries"; this was one of the better ones I saw. Great emphasis was placed on media production, which is a topic that intrigues me. (However, I wish more of these groups would talk about assessment.) Then we had a GREAT pasta lunch with Lorna Landvik, writer and comedienne, entertaining us. Her humor was regional and cute. After lunch, two more breakout sessions: one on "Online Tools to Inspire Literacy" and one on "Diigo--Online Notecards for Research." The "Online Tools" session, unfortunately, was (ironically) uninspired. The tips given were good, but the examples shown were quite weak. The one on "Diigo" was probably the best breakout session I saw at the conference. It was nicely focused, and, even though I was somewhat familiar with Diigo, this presentation made me want to use it even more. I see it as having great applicability for research-based writing courses, such as 1022 at Century (Composition 2). I then attended the quarterly MCTE meeting (and had a brief meeting with the MEJ editorial board as well--I am continuing with MCTE as editor of the Minnesota English Journal). At the day's end, we were served a good steak dinner and then my friends and I decided to go home the next day due to the horrid weather outside--the snow was pretty on the lake but too hard to drive in! So we left Saturday morning. I was glad that MCTE had a lot of technology options this year (unlike some years), but I do wish overall it had been a better conference. I feel I learned more from the 2010 conference in Duluth, but this one wasn't bad.