Alastair Creelman works as an e-learning specialist at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, south-east Sweden. Originally from Dundee, Scotland, he has lived in Sweden and Finland since 1983. His main areas of interest are open education, the use of social media in education and widening participation in adult and higher using digital media. He is involved in several national and international organisations and projects: eg committee member in the Swedish network for IT in Higher Education (ITHU), EDEN NAP steering group, Nordic Network for Adult Education, member of ISO standardisation committee PC288/WG1. See LinkedIn https://se.linkedin.com/in/alastaircreelman

He blogs regularly on educational technology in English at http://acreelman.blogspot.se/ and in Swedish at http://flexspan.blogspot.se/

On Twitter he is @alacre where he tweets on educational technology in English, Swedish, Norwegian and sometimes other languages.

In this #LTHE chat we will be discussing how we can enable more linguistic diversity in education. Today’s technology enables adequate translation between languages so maybe it’s time to learn to live with a multilingual environment both in the classroom and on line. Allowing students to use their full linguistic ability can be empowering and with the help of tools and multilingual students everyone can express themselves and translation is always available. How can we give everyone a voice rather than letting the confident native English speakers dominate the discussion? Tonight’s chat will also be part of the #ALTC winter conference programme.

The storify available here.