EUROCALL 2026 - Evidencing your contribution to our community.

 

This short clip shows our community welcoming new EUROCALL members to their first conference at Belfast this year. We value our members and enjoy meeting up face to face for fellowship and exchange of ideas. 

This year's annual conference was vibrant and well supported. The host location - Ulster University's Belfast campus - provided wonderful opportunities to explore the music and culture of the island of Ireland too. 

(left to right) Toni Patton (secretary) Ana Gimeno, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Kate Borthwick, Mirjam Hauck)

We trust that you enjoyed your conference but we want you to take a souvenir with you! We issue an open badge to every Presenter and Participant and these will come to you in the next few days. You should get an email from us through our Open Badge factory (check your spam folder) and that has details of how to pick up and display your badge. You can even print off a .pdf of your badge to use as evidence of your conference attendance. We have a playlist on our You Tube channel to help with an queries. Open Badge Passport has a useful mobile app you can download too. 

Here is an earlier post from this blog about how EUROCALL uses Open Badges:

All you need to know about using your Open Badge

Multilingual Tutorials are available on the Open Badge Factory You Tube channel so you can make the most of your badge by using it to connect with other badge holders or just to keep a record of your commitment to professional development. 

Keep the warm glow of conference with you all year round!

Italian warmth for EUROCALL annual conference 2025 in Milan

 

Eating out in Milan - Risotto alla Milanese.
Photo by Kate Borthwick    

Admittedly, those who travelled to Italy to participate in our annual conference did experience the odd shower but that didn't dampen the warmth of their experiences in this hugely welcoming venue. Participants travelled from 39 different countries beyond Europe coming from Algeria, Australia, Japan and  Jamaica to name but a few. We had over 300 participants. If you were unable to attend, look out for our recordings which will be shared on our You Tube channel. 

As we have done in past years, we are issuing digital badges to those who presented and to all who attended the conference in Milan. Your digital badge will arrive by email  (do check your spam folder just in case). It can be used to provide evidence of attendance by printing off a pdf. For your convenience here is further information regarding how to pick up, display and share your badge.

Collect your badge- here's a reminder of how to do this

Curate your badge/s using your own Open Badge Passport account (free) 

Print off a .pdf for your institution as evidence of participation using your Open Badge Passport account. You can download the app to use on your phone:

on Apple App store  or Android Play

Show and share your badge online!

Here are just a few of the many photos (nearly 300) shared during the conference in the Whova app. Thanks to all who connected and a special welcome to all our new members. 

Shared by Ana Bumber

Shared by Toni Patton

Shared by Vincenzo Damiazzi

An outstanding conference which will no doubt have created great memories of fellowship and friendship. You participated in academic exchange, sharing and building knowledge and you connected through food, dance and exercise - its the EUROCALL way!

Don't forget you can keep the conversations going through our EUROCALL social media channels. A short poll during the conference showed that many of you are active on LinkedIn:

Poll result from Whova app

Recognition of participation in EuroCALL 2022

 

This week we will be issuing an open badge to all those who attended, presented or otherwise participated in our recent annual conference, #eurocall2022. A moment to celebrate our community and its resilience in maintaining academic networking and information sharing throughout a global pandemic. 

The badges are a form of digital certification to enable our community to evidence their ongoing commitment to the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning and their active participation in professional development. The badge can be displayed on your website, social media channels or through your eportfolio and it is verifiable by others who see it. Many of you will now have several badges from EuroCALL as we started issuing in 2019.

Get active with your badges!

This year we will also encourage you to enhance your badge by adding evidence of the nature of your activity to your badge once you have added it to your personal Open Badge Passport account. This is easy to do and adds value to your badge. 

Simply follow these steps: 

• Look out for the email confirming the award of your badge and click on the link to accept your badge. Here's a reminder tutorial for this process.
• If you already have the Open Badge Passport app on your phone you can just accept the badge through the app. 
• Make your badge public by adjusting the settings, by default it is private.  This step is shown in the tutorial above. 
•  Now go to the settings tab on your badge and click Add new evidence.

You will now be able to add the URL of your presentation, recording or slides if you were a presenter. There are many easy ways to add your content to your badge:

The more you evidence your skills, the more compelling your badge becomes to others. Taking these steps could be helpful in building your professional presence online. Using the tools provided in your free Open Badge Passport you will make new connections and find tools for easy webpage creation. Make the most of your Open Badge today!

We look forward to celebrating your membership of EuroCALL online. Share using the #eurocall tag so that we can congratulate you. 

Recognition for #eurocallgathering participation.

 

Many of us at EuroCALL breathed a huge sigh of relief as we reached the end of the #euorcallgathering event last week. Not just because this was soon followed by a Zoom outage around the world shortly afterwards, but also because this was a new endeavour for us and we had no way of knowing how it would go. 

We are grateful to all of you for the fact that it went so well.

I am delighted to say that all went pretty much to plan and we all enjoyed fellowship - albeit virtual fellowship - with our community. Consequently our batteries were recharged by all the fabulous interactions we enjoyed. If you haven't yet had a chance to investigate the event, take a good look around our #eurocallgathering site. 

To those who contributed to this event, providing recorded presentations of their accepted papers, organising symposia and workshops online we want to acknowledge that work through digital badges. 

We do have a precedent for this, as those who came to Louvain La Neuve will remember. Badges will be issued to the email addresses of those who had accepted presentations, posters etc. We advise you to add these to your own Open Badge Passport account (it is free) and follow this tutorial in order to share your badge on your online accounts. If you would like to print off a paper certificate, follow the instructions here. 

Those of you who participated in the #eurocallgathering can also expect a badge to come your way. If you registered on the site we will issue your badge directly. However, if you engaged with the event and didn't register we are also providing a route for you to claim a Participant badge by providing some evidence of your engagement. 

These badges are issued through email and unfortunately they may be filtered by your email service so please check your spam/junk folders in the coming days to ensure that your contribution to #eurocallgathering is recognised by these portable, digital micro-credentials. 

We will be looking out for signs of these badges around the world. 

Thank you for playing an active role in our EuroCALL community. 

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. 

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.