I Will Be Sharing About Steemit At An Education Conference

Today I received a bit of a good news. I have been given the go-ahead to share about how I use Steemit in language learning. What is amazing in my opinion was that the conference organizers actually said yes.

To give a bit of a background, I was given a partial paid trip to Suzhou, China to present a research that I was doing. The conference and accommodation fees were expensive. As such, I applied for a partial scholarship. However, one condition to getting a scholarship is that I have to run a workshop on language learning. I thought, won't it be cool to tell the many academicians about Steemit.

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During the conference, I plan to share on how I have used Steemit's payout to get students interested in writing essays. There have been countless articles on the use of blogs to teach students how to write. However, those blogs don't exactly pay and thus, with students being paid to study, I find that the results may be very different.

I asked the conference organizers. I was not sure whether they will approve or not and now that they are on board with this, I have started wondering if I did the right thing.

Potential Rewards

I was considering if I should present about Steemit in my conference. At best, I was hoping to get some of the institutions on board with trying Steemit to teach language learning. I believe that having a higher learning institution investigating the use of Steemit in the classroom may boost Steemit's use case in education.

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In addition, motivating students to write and engage in English is one of the toughest challenges that a second language teacher faces. One contributing factor is because students claim that there is really no point in doing so aside from passing exams. Steemit could mitigate this through payouts, allowing students to type in English while potentially getting rewarded.

Furthermore, the use of Steemit does not end at being merely an electronic piece of paper that students could write on. Steemit also requires students to engage with other native speakers of English. This allows the students to practice, engage and immerse in the language. This could eventually lead to the mastery and improvement of their language.

Potential Problems

Of course, there are problems. Off the top of my head, I can think of several things that may go wrong. You may be wondering why am I so pessimistic about this. That is because I am rather familiar with the crowd that I am speaking to. For one, they have likely not heard of blockchain or cryptocurrency. The audience are all professors and lecturers from universities, specializing in language learning.

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As such, I fear that they may dismiss Steemit as merely a gimmick or something that is irrelevant in language teaching. To add on, I do not have a large enough sample size to prove of Steemit's effectiveness. This may cause some of them to doubt Steemit's education potential. I may believe in it, but these are academicians after all, as such, they may be looking at some form of proof to indicate that Steemit can motivate students to participate and engage in writing.

Conclusion

Regardless, I will still be presenting about Steemit at this conference on computer assisted language teaching and learning. I believe that many of these teachers and lecturers could implement what I did with @steemit-esl in their classrooms.

Of course, if any of you reading this have presented a paper on Steemit at a conference, please let me know! I would love to hear how it went, as well as how you presented it.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://alvinauh.vornix.blog/2018/08/08/i-will-be-sharing-about-steemit-at-an-education-conference/

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