The Doctoral Conference

It was time to share our research work with the students from the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Here students presented their research studies, looking for feedback – suggestions, recommendations, and ideas on how to improve the research study – from peers. Sessions were held in classrooms, mostly in groups of three or four students, with 20 minutes each to present and answer questions. Faculty participated as members of the audience; room chairs (time keepers) were also students. Professors and students presented keynotes at the very beginning of the conference and throughout – one at the end of the first day and another at the end of the second.

The ILET students came from Europe (University of Barcelona, University of Denmark, and the University of London) and the United States (University of Virginia, Iowa State University, and the University of Florida). This year, most of the presenters from the ILET group included students from Virginia, Iowa, and Florida. In 2003, only one student from ISU presented at the conference.

I shared with the audience the presentation I worked with in UB. The time for questions and answers was rich: some wanted to know more about the web site I chose, some asked questions that made me think about the theoretical perspective I am using, others wanted to know more about how the body parts of the storylines I identified in the threads of the discussion forum fit the discourse analysis (Gee) I am using to analyze the data in my research. It was an enlighten conversation. I liked the question and answer session because it allowed me to talk about details that were not included in my presentation, probably suggesting I needed to reorganize and add more to it. At the end of my presentation I got several recommendations and some new ideas, things I had not thought about before. (Link to pdf file coming soon.)

The last keynote presented the work ILET has done, including a panel of students in which I participated. We talked about our experiences as ILET scholars. Some had been participating since 2002, when it all started. Others, like me, joined at a later time participating in one or more of the different events of the project: reading groups, summer institutes, and internships.

The five days in London went by very fast. It felt like a blink of an eye. Soon it was time to move on to Barcelona for the second part of the ILET Conference.