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Audience: This blog post is most likely to be of interest to those involved in (or considering becoming involved in) activity theory and language learning research.

Today I presented my work at the OU's Open Languages Research Forum.

It was quite an experience. I was quite nervous for the first 40 minutes (!). I took an hour, quite a priviledge that we don't have very often. It's true that I run on a bit, as I was expected to talk for only 45 minutes. But the convenor was kind and allowed me to continue for an extra 15 minutes.

Here are the lessons learnt from the experience:

• Keeping to the time limit is still a challenge for me at presentations. I must do better next time. This is often an issue too in class, when I teach.
• Anything that might slow down the presentation must be avoided. For instance, in this case the title clips that introduced the videos appeared for 20-30 seconds. Too long.
• From the technical perspective, it was great that everything worked seemlessly. I learnt to use Camtasia properly to subtitle in preparation for this presentation, so that was great. I must say that having a dedicated technician in the room also helped.
• A professor asked me why activity theory, why not another theory. I replied that the power of activity theory resides in breaking boundaries, for instance those established when defining a community of practice. I also said that the most powerful tool is not activity theory, but the theory of expansive learning, and the Change Laboratory methodology. I should have said that activity theory allows a broad focus with no preconceived ideas about the importance of one aspect or element over another one, something other theories can't achieve.
• A coordinator said that it's not only the case that a learner who can't perform a simple operation online (such as accessing a website) is turning that operation into a fully-fledged, labour intensive action, but also that she's using a routine picked up from another online space, Facebook in this case. Great observation.
• It was interesting to see that a lot of OU staff are struggling with similar issues as I am when they design their courses.
• I feel a bit more confident now that the research path I'm taking is the right one. I managed to present five disturbances to a critical audience without having the theory, the metodology or the analysis questioned.
• I just feel that when the whole analysis has been completed I'll have even more solid ground in my research on which to base my interpretations.
• We spent some time discussing whether we should make tasks even simpler, by trying to imitate Facebook, YouTube, etc or not. For the first time I argued that we should complicate things, not facilitate them, in the sense of complicating the mental operations required to complete the task, not the layout or the instructions given to students. I mean engaging students with ever-increasing intellectual difficulty in their learning tasks.