Show your true colours!

Your EuroCALL open badge will shortly be issued to all those who participated and presented at EuroCALL 2019 in Louvain la Neuve, Belgium! The short tutorial above shows how to collect and display your badge and we look forward to spotting yours online. 

An open badge carries "baked in" information about how it was earned and to whom is was issued. You can even print off a paper copy which carries a QR code once you have added the badge to your Open Badge Passport. 

The Open Badge infrastructure was originally created by Mozilla. It provides a technical means for creating, issuing and collecting micro-credentials for both formal and informal learning. There are many examples of their use and some published research is curated on the badge wiki community here. 

If you already have an account on another badge platform such as Badgr, Credly or one of the many others listed you can import your badge to add to your collection directly from the issuing email. Look out for the email as often they are filtered out and end up in your spam folder. 

The full curation of tweets from #eurocall2019

Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development

This recording captures the virtual presentation of Monica Ward, Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development. 

Abstract:

(I)CALL is inherently complex endeavour.  It is multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary in nature).  Natural Language Processing (NLP) involves using tools and techniques from Computational Linguistics (CL) and NLP in the language learning process. Often these tools and techniques are designed for tasks and purposes other than language learning and this makes their adaption and use in the CALL domain difficult. It can be even more challenging for Less Resourced Languages (LRLs) as they may be very few resources available to CALL researchers to adapt or incorporate into CALL resources.  This paper reports on how two existing NLP resources for Irish were used to develop a MALL app for Irish.  The app, Irish Word Bricks (IWB) was built using an existing CALL app - Word Bricks (Mozgovoy & Efimov, 2013).  Without this ‘joining the blocks together’ approach, the development of the app would certainly have taken longer, may not have been as efficient or effective and may not even have been accomplished at all.

You said, we did!

Of recognition and professional development

Image CC0 from Gertalt on Pixabay

It is nice to have recognition for what we do. 

Participants (including virtual participants) and presenters at this year's conference will be recognised through the issue of a digital badge from EuroCALL. Look out for your email on Saturday (check your spam folder!) and you may wish to create a free account on Open Badge Passport  to curate and display your badges (other systems exist, this one is based in Finland and all systems are compatible with open badge standard 2). Once you have your badge you can share and show it off on your website, LinkedIn profile etc. You can even print it  . Let others know you are a member of the EuroCALL community!

Certified Membership of The Association for Learning Technology 

Practitioners who have technical skills are sometimes under appreciated. EuroCALL would like to help address this and we have prepared a very short survey to see how you feel about professional recognition. 

Please let us have your thoughts here. 

We value your input and we hope that you are proud to display your badge to others so that they can appreciate the merits of being part of the EuroCALL community. 

Who are we?

We are the innovators, the curious, the resilient, the researchers, the teachers, the mentors, the interpreters, the communicators, the explorers, the lovers (as opposed to the fighters!). Check out what we have been sharing on the first day of our conference. Expand your networks, find new friends, catch up with old friends, enjoy the opportunities to unwind and to learn. 

Here's some of today's twitter activity #eurocall2019

There has been lots of live tweeting - so much that my wakelet curation and the wifi are struggling to cope but don't let that stop you! You can remix the collection above to tell your own story of today. Get creative. 

Check out the twitter connections who are part of our story. 

The workshops started our day:

and we were warmly welcomed by our President Mirjam Hauck:

and so it begins, enjoy!

Are you ready?

The countdown is well and truly underway! The #eurocall hashtag activity seems to have acquired a comb over, I wonder who that reminds us of?

My twitter stream has been full of folk sharing their slides and presentations ready for next week:

Come and join us in the workshop 'What is an LMOOC? The what, the how and the best practice' #MOOC #LMOOC Wednesday 28 Aug. 9 am SOCR25 UCLouvain @Eurocall2019 @KBorthwick @APlutino

— emartinmonje (@emartinmonje) August 23, 2019

I finally finished my slides for my presentation @Eurocall2019 I’ll be presenting @ 16:45 on Wednesday 28th in room SOCR23. First time for #EuroCall and I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone. #eurocall2019 pic.twitter.com/DlMFAoBivY

— Bradley Irwin (@BradleyTeacher) August 22, 2019

I just finished preparing my slides for #eurocall2019 My session is on Wed 28 August, 3:15-3:45pm, Room SOCR25. Please join me there if you are interested in a study on #learnerautonomy & the types of #digitaltools #languagelearners choose to use and abandon #eurocall #cantwait pic.twitter.com/u555mzAtnv

— Louise Ohashi (@OhashiLou) August 19, 2019

and for those of you not travelling, sign up to join us through Virtually Connecting:

Join us online at #eurocall2019 through @VConnecting Find out more about it here: https://t.co/cvRlcMDOLP The sign up form is here: https://t.co/6F1vvIIBqr #edutech #edtech #eurocall #videochat pic.twitter.com/vMweWw3dP0

— Louise Ohashi (@OhashiLou) August 20, 2019

If you are coming onsite you can now download the conference app:

T-5 days to #EUROCALL2019: The mobile #eurocall conference guide is now available for download through the Guidebook app (Android/iOS)! https://t.co/01AJsJSApq
New features will appear in the coming days, so stay tuned!

— EUROCALL 2019 (@Eurocall2019) August 23, 2019

Warming up for EUROCALL 2019

As with any eagerly anticipated event, the conversations and excitement start way before the big day. Of course the planning for EUROCall 2019 has been underway for well over a year already. Team Belgium, who delivered such an exciting glimpse of the event in store while we were still enjoying the fantastic welcome and hospitality in Jyväskylä, Finland. 

The image above is a snapshot of the current interactions around #eurocall on twitter but you can join the conversation by tweeting and adding the hashtag, then watch the ball grow organically. Your twitter activity around the conversation will be reflected in the interactive visual. Any Instagram images which you tag #eurocall may also feature on our Wakelet posts during the conference.  You can find this year's conference team on twitter and of course follow the main Eurocall twitter account too!

Eurocall has an group on LinkedIn where you can extend your professional connections and keep in touch with those you have met at #eurocall conferences. You will also keep up to date with what this lively, international community are up to. We look forward to meeting you through twitter or on our other social media spaces, out in the open. 

Accessibility matters to your EUROCall exec, we are only a small group but we are working hard to help ensure that conferences and community activities are within reach even if you cannot be physically present in August. This Virtual Strand blog will post regular updates and provide opportunities for you to participate remotely with our community. Watch this space for news of our Virtually Connecting sessions where you will be able to meet our keynote speakers, organisers and participants live online to get a feel for this year's conference.