21 March 2024, Thursday
2:30 – 4:00 pm
AG312

Limited seats
Register NOW: https://polyu.hk/RUyDM

Workshop speaker

Dr Jenifer Ho, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

About the workshop

This workshop is designed to offer an in-depth understanding of the development of educational content for social media platforms. It builds on insights from a UGC-funded research project that explores the multimodal design of online English teaching videos. Participants will be introduced to practical strategies and tools that are fundamental to the creation of effective and engaging video-based language teaching content. The workshop will also facilitate interactive discussions on the potential advantages and limitations of incorporating GenAI tools into the video content creation process. The workshop presents an opportunity for participants to enhance their digital literacy skills and acquire an understanding of online video-based content production for academic and professional purposes.

Participants should bring their laptops or tablets when attending this workshop.

About the speaker

Dr Jenifer Ho is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research focuses on video-mediated communication for language teaching and learning on social media platforms. In her ongoing UGC-funded research project, she investigates how popular online English teachers draw on multiple linguistic and multimodal resources to create effective and engaging video content for a global audience. Furthermore, she conducts research on the incorporation of video content into language classrooms through digital multimodal composing.

This workshop will be carried out face-to-face. Undergraduate and postgraduate students are welcome.

Please click here to download the workshop material.

Date: 26 January 2024, Friday
Time: 12:30 – 2:00 pm
Venue: AG312, Core A, PolyU Campus

Workshop speaker

Dr Azar Tajabadi, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

About the workshop

This workshop is designed to enhance your presentation skills by focusing on the art of creating compelling slides. The primary aim is to improve students' abilities to communicate their ideas and information in an engaging and clear manner across various academic and professional contexts. The workshop will cover beyond the basics of slide creation, such as customizing design templates, adding SmartArt and Math Equations, working with media (inserting audio/video files and working with screen recording tools), and customizing slide shows. Similar tools such as Prezi, Visme, and Canva will be introduced as well. A special segment will be dedicated to the use of Generative AI in creating dynamic and engaging content. This technology can generate unique visuals, automate design processes, and even create personalized content, revolutionizing the way presentations are made. 

Date: 7 November 2023, Tuesday
Time: 6:30 – 7:30 pm
Online Via Zoom

Speaker:

Dr Patrick Rohrer, Radboud University, The Netherlands

About the seminar

As part of our Digital Literacies series we present this talk to students and researchers with an interest in multimodality and its analysis. The modality of choice for this talk is body movements, and specifically hand gestures.

Manual gesture annotation is a predominant method used in gesture research to collect data for analysis. However, unlike other fields such as speech prosody, the community has not broadly come together in support of a single annotation system. This results in different research groups creating individual annotation systems with very specific aims to address their own research objectives. This situation poses a challenge for the community, as it becomes difficult to make direct comparisons across studies and thus hinders the progression of the field. The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) annotation system (Rohrer et al., 2023) addresses this issue by offering an annotation system that (1) reconciles several views into a more widely agreed gesture classification system and that (2) is openly accessible, explicitly described, and offers material to facilitate the learning and its application to novel data. Specifically, M3D builds on currently available systems by explicitly proposing a tripartite dimensional system that allows for the assessment of gestural form (i.e., configuration and motion trajectory), gestural prosody (i.e., timing of movement), and gestural meaning (both referential and pragmatic) in a largely independent and non-mutually exclusive manner. Furthermore, it is the first labeling system to offer an interactive online training program for its application to a range of databases. 

The aim of this talk is to describe the M3D system and demonstrate how such a multidimensional approach to gesture annotation is beneficial and advances the field. Specifically we will explore how the M3D system is flexible and does not force researchers to adopt a completely new theoretical framework, but rather can be adapted according to individual research objectives and theoretical approaches. We will also explore some of the resources available for interested researchers to learn and apply M3D.

Rohrer, P. L., Vilà-Giménez, I., Florit-Pons, J., Gurrado, G., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren-Mitchell, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & Prieto, P. (2023). The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ANKDX

About the speaker

Patrick Louis Rohrer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Donders Center for Cognition [DCC], part of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in 2022 within the framework of an international joint cotutelle between Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Catalunya) and Nantes Université (Nantes, France). His main research interest lies in the relationship between gesture and prosody, their joint contribution to pragmatic meaning from a crosslinguistic perspective, and their effects on speech perception, cognition, and acquisition.

He is currently a member of the Speech Perception in Audiovisual Communication [SPEAC] research group, funded by the ERC Starting Grant ‘HearingHands’ [PI: Hans Rutger Bosker]. His project within this research grant continues the investigation of gesture-speech synchrony in a set of typologically diverse languages. The project also assesses the effects of this synchrony on audiovisual speech perception. Additionally, he is interested in how prosody and gesture is processed by native and non-native speakers, and their effects on comprehension, memorization, and acquisition using both behavioral and electrophysiological (i.e., EEG) techniques.

 

Date: 13 September 2023, Wednesday
Time: 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Venue: QR610 & Online via Zoom

Workshop speakers:

1. Dr Max Diaz, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
2. Dr Rickey Lu, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

About the workshop

New to PolyU? Want to know if PolyU allows the use of ChatGPT? Interested in learning what GenAI is and how to use it ethically? Find out in this workshop!

Target Audience: Undergraduate and Postgraduate ENGL students as well as interested ENGL teaching staff

Aim: The Digital Workshop on Generative AI aims to help students gain an understanding of the ethical implications of the usage of Generative AI tools in teaching/learning, focusing on the newest versions of GenAI.

By attending these workshops, students will become familiar with a range of AI tools,
construct prompts to develop useful content from AI, cite AI generated content and present it without plagiarizing, and know how to integrate AI generative tools into their studies and work in order to use them effectively.

About the speakers

Dr Max Diaz is a Teaching Fellow and the Undergraduate Programme Leader of the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr Diaz focuses on educational technology and the incorporation of technology in language learning environments from the perspective of the teacher. Recently, he has looked at how both language learners and educators can make better use of new innovations in technology, such as Generative AI, which is radically altering the types of learner and teacher motivation necessary to succeed in the classroom.

Dr Rickey Lu is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He teaches a variety of courses at the university, including general education courses and courses within the department’s undergraduate and postgraduate programs. His research interests lie in discourse analytical and experimental approaches to computer-mediated communication

Date: 23 June 2023, Friday
Time: 2:30 – 4 pm
Venue: BC404, 4/F, Core B

Workshop speakers:

1. Dr Anne Schluter, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
2. Miss Po Lam Cheung, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

About the workshop

This workshop will facilitate students’ critical examination of arguments by focusing on both key micro-level aspects (such as lexical components) as well as discourse-level aspects (such as logical organization) to persuade different audiences. With the aim of discouraging students from reflexively internalizing and sharing inflammatory media they consume, this workshop will focus in particular on fostering the skills to identify emotional arguments designed to resonate with a specific audience. In this way, students will develop the critical distance necessary to avoid manipulation through commonly used emotions.

Larger aims of this workshop include enhancing digital identity and wellbeing, as participants will become savvier in terms of identifying the biases that shape perceptions and consumption of media. It will address information data and media literacies as well as digital learning and development.

About the speakers

CHEUNG Po Lam is the debate coach of the newly established English Debate Club. Prior to her appointment, she was a student in the English Department at PolyU, where she learned to analyze communication at macro and micro-levels, informing her development as an effective communicator. During her university life, she was also a decorated member of the debate team, which allowed her to hone her abilities of persuasion. Since her graduation in 2020, she has served as an assistant to ENGL’s CAR subject dedicated to debate. In this capacity, she has provided students with debate tips that both capture the fun of debate and engage their logical thinking skills.

SCHLUTER Anne Ambler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at PolyU. Her research addresses language and communication in society, including the examination of different types of arguments and discourses that persuade given audiences. These dual foci foreground her approach to teaching the elective course, Aspects of European Public Discourse and the CAR subject, The Art of Debate. Together with CHEUNG Po Lam, Dr Schluter has developed modules that help students to discern bias and evaluate evidence, thereby enhancing their ability to consume media in informed ways.