The Making of MOBILLE a Year Later

Over a year has passed since the 2019 MOBILLE International Conference took place at the Lycée Français de New York [...]

. All these papers underwent two rounds of peer review before getting accepted for publication.
Regardless of the format, the MOBILLE sessions sparked engagement and interaction, so much so that time allocated never seemed enough and the exchanges kept burgeoning before and after sessions among participants from all sorts of professional backgrounds: students, teachers, lecturers, researchers, professors, administrators, counsellors, engineers, technicians and technology officers. MOBILLE gave voice to those who were keen on sharing their work whatever stage of development it was at. It is hard to find a common denominator among such a constellation of geographical, cultural and professional backgrounds. What seemed to be recurring was a shared interest in technological innovation and the learning opportunities it promotes, an interest that is also shared by the eight papers below.
I would like to start with a paper on how social media can contribute to the revitalization of an endangered language. To that end, Deschene (2019) created digital resources for Coptic language learning and posted them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Social media is increasingly being utilized as a pedagogical tool. Rosell-Aguilar (2019) reports on the benefits of Twitter for language learning in a study with 370 participants. Llopis-Garcia (2019) argues for the use of Twitter to foster student analyses of the Spanish linguistic landscapes in New York City. Li (2019) illustrates a multimedia project to promote the development of Chinese-English bi-cultural awareness via WeChat. Whatsapp was utilized for an English summer course in Spain (Andria 2019), for teacher education in Brazil (Braga 2019) and for out-of-class communication among beginner students of Spanish (González-Gómez and Asención-Delaney 2019).
Online courses are growing increasingly popular. The most popular of them are convenient, flexible and interactive. Eisenstein Ebsworth et al. (2019) review an online course about the United Nations for English language learners in a US high school. Karttunen and Juusola (2019) discuss how to maintain quality in higher education online language courses for immigrants in Finland. Hobgood and Lindsey (2019) offer a range of strategies to build stronger teacher-student connections in online language learning environments.
YouTube's audiovisual capabilities open multimodal pathways to language learning. Ho (2019) suggests that YouTube videos teaching interview job skills create a comprehensive learning experience that goes beyond the learning of English to embrace semiotics. Audiovisuals have always been an asset in the language classroom and current technological sophistication has increased their potential. Maroto (2019) presents digital oral video material to improve engineering undergraduates' oral skills in Spain. Daccord (2019)  The language classroom tends to favor communicative activities that encourage students to speak. Most of the MOBILLE sessions focused on the development of oral skills, but a couple of presentations dealt with the development of writing. Technological advancements add a multimedia dimension to language tasks, whether oral or written. Lehtonen (2019) illustrates a compare/contrast writing assignment about campus spaces that he designed for his ESL composition courses at a US university. Hadingham and Rappeneker (2019) show how Web 2.0 software like Adobe Spark Page and Microsoft Sway can be utilized to spur English learners' creativity and critical thinking in e-journal writing.
This overview culminates with a paper on the importance of an ethics-based computer science, an issue that arose in several places in the conference. In a world where technology is ubiquitous and pervasive, Dershowitz (2019) calls for an ethical focus in teaching children how to use technology and underscores the challenges and opportunities of such teaching in bilingual multicultural schools. She also strongly advocates for more student voice in technology education.
In this overview, I have tried to weave a conceptual thread among a conference that was a maze of topics and themes. Besides the already stated shared interest in technological innovation and the learning opportunities it promotes, what these contributions seem to have in common is a redefinition of what language learning is about, a perennial issue that is as old as ancient times. As technological progress reshapes the what, how, when, where and why, all these papers, in one way or another, are concerned with how teaching and learning get enhanced while teachers and learners get empowered. As mobile technology goes from anytime-anywhere to everytime-everywhere, mobility becomes a here and now experience that never stops getting better. At the heart of MOBILLE lies mobility, which can be defined by constantly evolving learning experiences that cutting-edge technology optimizes.
Funding: MOBILLE International Conference was funded by the Lycée Français de New York.

Conflicts of Interest:
The author declares no conflict of interest.