Conference Report: Educational Technology in the Linguistics Classroom

The 2017 Annual Meetings of the International Linguistics Society in Utrecht were wholly devoted to a symposium on the topic of Educational Technology in the Linguistics Classroom.

Over 422 Linguistics educators attended the symposium, outstripping the previous attendance record of 12 by a wide margin. Indeed, participants reported that their respective institutions fairly fell over themselves with enthusiasm in providing funding for their participation, even if they did not submit papers.

The symposium organizers originally signed a contract with John Benjamouton, who agreed to publish the conference proceedings as a standalone volume, in electronic edition only, with a guarantee that online access would be kept to an affordable cost.

Unfortunately, only three participants actually submitted papers—the rest apparently expected to gain some insights for free, alongside three days of gorging themselves on stroopwafeln.

Furthermore, the collected insights of the three papers turned out not to warrant book-length treatment. Therefore, the organizers have decided to share these important findings here in the pages of Speculative Grammarian.

The findings are as follows:

1. Students appreciate the opportunities provided by Educational Technology for additional distractions from the course material.

Actually, that was the only finding. All three papers made this same point, in variously eloquent ways.

	That Tenured Man—Found among the papers of Dr. Theodor Geisel by Sheri Wells-Jensen
	Proper Phonetic Pedagogy: Field Notes from a Laboratory Science—Jacob Bartholomew Pine
	SpecGram Vol CLXXX, No 2 Contents