Jury

Dóra Bereti

Dóra Bereti is a second year student on the trilingual Master program Learning and Development in Multicultural and Multilingual Contexts at the University of Luxembourg, where her research field is Media, Interaction and Design. She is focusing on group practices of meaning-making and mobile technology use in Museums, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the learning process in an art-mediated context.

She already holds a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Szeged in Hungary, where her thesis subject was Art Philosophy. She also had a minor in Ethics and European Studies and is a Press Photographer. Since 2010 she has been the student assistant of Prof. Karin Priem and is now a research assistant on the Language Learning and Social Media - 6 Key Dialogues project at the University’s Research on Development, Interaction, Cognition and Activity Laboratory (Dica-lab). Dora is the leader and designer (with Katerina Zourou) of the "Social media use in formal language teaching contexts" competition.

Laia Canals

I graduated with a BA in Spanish Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1997. While I was studying for my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (which I obtained in 2007), I took part in several research projects as a research assistant at RISLUS (Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Settings). Among them, I was involved in a research project on dialectal leveling within six Spanish dialects, indicating the rise of a New York City Spanish and Latino identity; another project was an intervention project aimed at enhancing literacy skills in bilingual pre-schoolers. I currently hold a postdoctoral researcher and professor position at the Departament de Didàctica de la Llengua i de la Literatura i de les Ciències Socials, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Raphaela Häuse

Raphaela Häuser studied history, French and German at Cologne University. Language learning using social media is a subject she deals with every day at the German Courses Department of Deutsche Welle. Her duties here include management of the Facebook page “Learn German with Deutsche Welle”, which won an Edublog Award in 2010 in the category “Best educational use of a social network”.

Links:

www.dw-world.de/germancourses
www.facebook.com/dw.learngerman

Zsuzsa Kis

Dr. Zsuzsa Kis is a young researcher. She obtained her PhD in French literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and at the University of Szeged, Hungary in 2010. She has taken part in many national and international conferences and has been awarded a fellowship by the French Government.

Zsuzsa works in a high school in Marseille where she is teaching French as a foreign language, focusing on the difficulties of immigrants with acquisition of the language and also giving them literacy classes.

Charles Max

Charles Max is a Professor in Educational Sciences, specializing in the learning sciences focusing on learning with educational media at the University of Luxembourg. Having a background in early learning and special needs education within multicultural contexts, with a ten year record as a practitioner in the field (teacher, inspector), he is a specialist in the area of socio-cultural theory, activity theory and developmental work research, focusing on competence development, the monitoring of professional growth and the implementation of change and development in diversified settings.

He is the scientific head and co-designer of the innovative Bachelor’s programme in educational sciences, Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education, a programme for initial teacher training, and has been active in the set-up of the research priority programs in the Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg ("Learning for Life in the 21st century", "Building Excellence in Education") since its creation in 2003. He is the co-founder of the "Unit for Sociocultural Research on Learning and Development" at the UL and is co-heading the working group on science learning for Luxembourg’s pre-primary, primary and lower secondary curricula planning.

Jean-Marie Nau

Luxembourgish language teacher in adult education, with interests in moral & spiritual education, and humour in language acquisition.

A current project: http://jmnau.wordpress.com/

Source of my inspiration:http://www.bahai.org/

Maria Perifanou

Maria Perifanou has been a lecturer in Italian since 1990 and a researcher in the field of Applied Linguistics since 2002 at the University of Athens. Currently, she works as an Italian lecturer at the European Institute of Vocational Training 'AKMI'' in Thessaloniki, (GR) and as a researcher at the European Research Institution of Education and Technology ‘Pontydysgu’, Wales, (UK). Her main practice and research concerns Web 2.0, CALL, TELL, MLearning, Collaborative Learning, Web2Quests, PLE and Blended Learning.

Maria presents her research work (PhD, projects) in many European research doctoral TEL summer/winter schools, workshops, seminars and international conferences and has published several papers. She is also an experienced e-learning trainer for language teachers and has worked as a co-editor and a reviewer with 3 TEL journals. She has taken part in organising, programme development and academic committees of international conferences and other international TEL events such as the PLE conference, the JTEL Summer schools and the 2011 MobileLearning conference.

She is a member of different European TEL research networks and communities and has also been awarded several international and national scholarships and fellowships for her research.

Links: http://www.pontydysgu.org/blogs/dialogos/
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ind/ijkl/2010/00000005/f0020003/art00006

Dina Savlovska

I am working at the University of Latvia (German and Romanian Languages Department). I teach French language. I also give lessons in Didactics, Methodology and Psycholinguistics to future specialists in Romance languages and participate in organization of workshops for French language teachers.

Involvement in R&D projects:

"Language Learning and Social Media: 6 key dialogues" project coordinator in Latvia, 2010 - 2012 g. (European Commission founding).
"French on-line" project coordinator in University of Latvia, 2008 - present.
"Campus Europae Moodle Server" project, French module developer, 2009- 2010.
"Language Acquisition Research Concours" project assistant, 2008 - 2009.

Geoff Sockett

Geoff Sockett is an associate professor of language didactics at the Université de Strasbourg in Eastern France. After working as a language teacher, he became interested in the strategies of language learners and wrote a PhD on this subject in 1997 at the CRAPEL (Université Nancy 2). His current research interests include computer assisted language learning, language learning in informal contexts, psycholinguistics and task based approaches. He served as director of the Department of Applied Linguistics of the Université de Strasbourg from 2007 to 2010 and is currently the director of a Master’s programme in multimedia design for language learning. A member of the LILPA research group, he has spoken at numerous conferences in the field of language learning and teaching and has contributed to journals such as ALSIC, les Langues Modernes and Asp.

Karen Woodman

Karen Woodman is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Master of Education (TESOL) and Master of Education (TEFL) in the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education at QUT. Former Chair of the Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) for the International TESOL organization, Karen was also co-editor of the TEIS Newsletter, and moderator of the list-serv. She is a member of many professional associations, and she is involved with the promotion and development of the fields of ESOL teacher education. Karen’s research interests also include a number of related issues in second language acquisition, including learning disabilities in ESL, online teaching and learning, neurolinguistic issues in SLA, gender and culture in the ESL classroom.

Karen has given numerous national and international invited conference papers, conference papers and workshops, and public lectures, and won national and international awards, grants and fellowships. Karen has held academic and leadership positions at educational institutions in Canada, USA and Australia. She also has extensive experience in educational consultancy and the ESL classroom, in both private and public sectors.

Websites: http://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/woodmank

Gudrun Ziegler

Prior to her appointment in September 2006 as Associate Professor to the University of Luxembourg, Dr. Gudrun Ziegler, worked as a lecturer (2004-2006) within the area of grammar-interaction-acquisition and teaching-learning of second/ foreign languages at the Universities of München and Neuchâtel.

She directs and co-manages a number of international research projects, publishes in international peer-reviewed journals, sustains several international co-operations (CODI-net, Précis du Plurilinguisme), functions as an expert on both a national as well as international level e.g. UNESCO (Multilingual Education) and engages in different international ventures relating to the developmental stages / conditions of young children and professional training (e.g. teachers) with regard to the emergent (linguistic) needs in a multicultural and multilingual setting. She is co-editor-in-chief of the double blind peer-reviewed journal ForumSprache (http://www.hueber.de/forum-sprache/)

Katerina Zourou

Katerina Zourou is a researcher in the field of computer supported collaborative language learning at the University of Luxembourg, DICA-lab research unit (http://www.dica-lab.org/). Her research topics involve the effects of computer mediation in foreign language education as well as telecollaborative practices online. Research publications are available in French and in English.

Katerina is the initiator and project manager of the EU-funded network "language learning and social media: 6 key dialogues" under the LLP of the European Commission (project coordinator: Prof. Charles Max). Within this network, she is very much engaged in the topic of web 2.0 language learning communities as niches of socialization and development of language competences through multimodal interaction.

Working in multicultural teams in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Greece, she provides consultation on educational issues to the European Commission in Brussels