Future-proof CALL

Getting ready for this year's conference.

Just about 2 weeks to go before EuroCALL's 2018 conference opens in Jyväskylä, Finland and the virtual strand is busy connecting and sharing. Every year it gets harder to find the funding support to travel to conferences, many face even more demanding pressures in order to join a physical event as we saw last year when presenter Parisa Mehran was denied a visa 3 times to attend the conference in Southampton. Fortunately she will be able to join us in Finland but the problem of travel and physical attendance doesn't go away, even if it is simply a result of not having the time or resources to travel. 

With these realities in mind we are continuing the long held tradition of EuroCALL to open our doors to the conference through an online blog, the EuroCALL virtual strand. You can see posts from 2011-2017 here. Keynotes will be recorded and made available on the conference site as usual. The social media hashtag is #eurocall2018. 

However, this year we are going even further. Building on the success of last year's collaboration with Virtually Connecting conversations, there will be 3 sessions this year on each of the conference days. These informal conversations are a lovely opportunity to find out more and get a taste for the EuroCALL discussions. Fill in the form to join the conversation (places limited) or watch the livestream or the recording when it suits you. 

Our social media champions will be busy at work too, thanks to the leadership of @saharcloud who has stepped forward to offer her support in connecting the conversations online. We are hoping to continue to connect across continents.

You can see some of the activity on this tagboard which will continue to aggregate public posts which use the #eurocall2018 hashtag from twitter, instagram, facebook, G+ and flickr.

No doubt the tweets will come in thick and fast once the conference starts, here's just a few curated on Wakelet. So no one needs to feel left out. This blog will share our virtual activity so that you can be part of the conversations and we can future-proof CALL together.