As it happens every year, the first weekend in September the ESSARP Conference takes place, the prime learning English speaking event in Latin America.
Working together with Hexacta, a leading software provider in Argentina, and IBM, The Learnerspace developed a web-based app that allowed participants to take notes during the conference, selecting each of the talks and jotting down their notes via the web interface.
Concurrently, speakers´ speech was decoded into text and, utilizing IBM Watson’s natural language processing engine, one of the world’s most advanced engines of its type, the system summarized, performed sentiment and personality analysis both for the speaker as well as the audience, comparing them in real-time.
At the end of the three morning sessions, we presented a summary of results, thus enhancing the process of audience interaction and performing a breakthrough instant feedback through AI, allowing participants to gain valuable insights in terms of what the speakers said and how the audience contextualized it to their own schools.
Within the concurrent sessions, we set up interactivities that allowed the audience to work with speakers on identifying real-world classroom strategies to put into place in each of their respective schools. Working from the ideal school, and gradually converging towards solutions and strategies, through their personal devices, participants were in constant interaction with the speakers, in what truly constituted an active learning experience.
On the final day, The Learnerspace provided a summary of all the conclusions from the concurrent sessions as a lead up to a keynote panel, where, once more, the audience was able to interact with the speakers through their personal devices.
All interactivities, reflections and exchanges were recorded on an ad hoc blog that we created, and that can be found at https://essarpconf2019.wordpress.com/
