The SIG team hopes that you all had a good summer and that now that Ramadan and Eid Al Fitr are over, you are ready to really start working hard. The new team has grown with the addition of Douglas Thompson, of CNAQ, Qatar, as our editor. Those from Abu Dhabi will remember him as the energetic Chapter rep. We have opened a second Moodle site which we are going to open primarily to students on BEd courses, in order to give them a place to experiment with online activities.

The news so far
SIG co-chairs Phil Cozens and Jeff Knowling were lucky enough to take part in this year's Asia TEFL conference in Bangkok. Amr has been looking at schools in Ajman and Sharjah where we hope to hold our first event in early November. A week later, we intend to hold another event in Abu Dhabi, but with students doing the presenting. Plans for next year have us visiting Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah before finishing the year with another Research Morning in Abu Dhabi. So, if you or your students wish to present on anything to do with learning autonomy or independence, use our email address to contact us.

TESOL Arabia Conference 2010
The Learner Independence SIG are pleased to have Flavia Vieira as our Speaker for the conference. Sheis Associate Professor at the University of Minho (Portugal), at the Institute of Education and Psychology. She works in the areas of language education for learner autonomy, reflective teacher education, and pedagogy in higher education. Since 1997, she has coordinated a community of schooteachers and academic researchers/ teacher educators whose goal is to explore and investigate pedagogy for autonomy in schools, along with teacher development for learner autonomy.

This issue

In this issue, we have an interview with Jack Rigg coordinator of the ILC at CNAQ in Doha, Qatar. We also ask for your comments on what a DL course should be like. This relates to an on-going discussion on the DL List