Presented at the Queen Mary University of London Continuing Professional Development conference on April 8, 2016

1. Serendipitous Innovation
with Academic English Resources
Alannah Fitzgerald
https://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkpublic/3042791963

2. Serendipitous Innovation

3. FLAX Academic English Collections
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=library

4. Sharing EAP Materials Online
William Tweddle: Well, the PIM [BALEAP Professional
Issues Meeting] that we went to in Southampton where
we were presenting Academic English Online, and
Kathryn [Richardson, director of the QMUL Language
Centre] was saying how it was going to be available to
everybody. You know, that it’s now available on the
Internet instead of the intranet.
Alannah Fitzgerald: Yeah.
William Tweddle: And, there was a lot of sort of, “Well,
why would you do that?!” coming from the audience, you
know?
Alannah Fitzgerald: Hmmm, I remember that.
(Focus group discussion, April 2015).

5. Developing Raw Academic Articles into
ESAP Materials
Martin Barge: You know, I think the thing about open
educational resources, the question here, or part of the
question here, which we discovered in this project, for
example, is if you take a text, a raw text, which is not
adapted for teaching like an article, it has EAP potential
because it’s an academic article. Then the ability to use
that and to put it into materials, or adapt it, modify it, or
change it under the Creative Commons thing is the, the
revelation. Because we’ve all been doing it for years
anyway, from copying it from a book or something when
we’ve not supposed to have been adapting it, changing it,
or whatever.” (Focus group discussion, April 2015).

6. Serendipity in ESAP Materials Dev. I
Alannah Fitzgerald: You know, my next question: Could
you even have built the BLaRC without those open
government licenses on all of those documents in the
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute)?
Maria José Marín: No, that’s the thing, that’s the thing.
The amazing discovery was the BAILII [...] They have the
whole planet in there. It’s amazing how much stuff you
can find. So, to me it was a huge, huge discovery. That
was the best thing that could have happened to me.
That’s why I started my research on legal corpora. I mean
that was one of the reasons. (Interview, August 2015)

7. Serendipity in ESAP Materials Dev. II
Through an act of “serendipitous genius on Chris’ part”
(email to team QMUL, August 2015), micro PhD abstract
collections were developed to support pre-sessional
vocabulary learning.

8. EThOS PhD Abstracts Collections
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=PASS&if=flax

9. Dewey Decimal Classification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#Class_300_.E2.80.93_Social_sciences

10. Browse by Discipline

11. Wikification of Specialised Terminology
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=d&c=PASS&d=HASH29c3a6e8f235b56f62a551&dt=simple&p.a=b&p.s=ClassifierBrowse

12. Managed Open Access Initiatives
A formal request must be registered with the Oxford Text
Archive (OTA) to develop the BAWE (British Academic
Written English) corpus for non-commercial “research use
or educational purposes” (IT Services, University of
Oxford, OTA, 2015). Similarly, the abstract metadata of
400,000 PhD theses is available via the EThOS toolkit,
which offers guidance on employing EThOS metadata for
“reuse by third parties for not-for-profit purposes” (The
British Library, n.d.).

13. Research into EAP Materials Use
Saima Sherazi: I mean we can take students to the water
but we can’t make them drink it. There actually needs to
be a research project, probably, where we ascertain how
much of what we introduce to them - because this is all
that we are doing, we’re introducing them to WordSmith
or introducing them to FLAX - whether they actually use
any of them. (Focus group discussion, April 2015).

14. Thank You
FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/
The How-to eBook of FLAX: http://flax-
doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf
FLAX Game-based Apps for Android via Google Play Store (free):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en
Ian Witten (FLAX Project Lead): ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Shaoqun Wu (FLAX Research and Development): shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz
Alannah Fitzgerald (FLAX Open Language Research): a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca
TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
Twitter: @AlannahFitz