Calling all CALLers!

 

Screenshot of the EuroCALL 2023 website

At last we are able to prepare for the return of the face to face EuroCALL conference. How exciting! We are sure you can't wait to get together for the most wonderful in-person intercultural fellowship at the amazing University of Iceland. 

The call for papers has been launched, you can find it here on the conference website, along with all the details of the themes, organisers and venue. Please get the dates in your diary and join us in person this year. 

As ever we are starting the social activity immediately. The conference has an Instagram account  where you can start to explore the sights of this amazing setting and a Facebook page where you can meet each other. EuroCALL's usual social media accounts will also use the hashtag #eurocall2023 to aggregate and curate interactions as we go through the year. 

Conference presenters and participants will be issued with our EuroCALL digital badges and, coming soon - there will be further exciting news of EuroCALL must have items! 

Our exec team and conference organisers are working hard to ensure that this conference will be memorable for all, reviving past traditions and creating new ones together. 

We are calling all CALL-ers for our most inclusive conference yet. 

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Getting 2021 underway: EuroCALL AGM paves the way for this year's conference.

 

EuroCALL AGM in zoom January 22nd 2021

The invitation to attend our Annual General Meeting:

It was unusually joyful as formal meetings go, especially given we are still in the throes of a global pandemic! You can find all the documentation for the AGM on the EuroCALL website by logging in to the Member's Area.

 

Despite our regrets about missing our physical visit to Copenhagen, we reflected on the fellowship we had enjoyed at the Gathering in the summer where circumstances had led to many new experiences. Our first ever visualisation of our community on our Gathering map and our first ever You Tube channel. Our Treasurer delighted all with his media rich presentation which included a soundtrack and a reminder that EuroCALL has to be prepared whatever the weather:

And so, with this in mind we continue our preparations for the future. The Eurocall 2021 conference website is up and plans are quite advanced despite the many uncertainties. You can follow updates on twitter too. This year we will have a blended conference with some in person possibilities. See the website for details. 

As ever, there will be a rich, research-informed programme, many opportunities to network and learn from this wonderful community. Our Special Interest Groups will host workshops or symposia on the second day and these will be open to all comers online. The conference committee wish us to continue to build upon the wonderful fellowship we all enjoyed at the Gathering and we need your help to help ensure the future of this organisation through expanding our membership. 

Please spread the word, encourage friends and colleagues to join EuroCALL and we can all support each other in overcoming the challenge that is teaching and learning in a global pandemic. 

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. 

Making your work visible

An essential part of any academic community is the act of sharing our work through publications and personal connections. We are pleased to share good news about how our Gathering can support these activities.  

All those who have had a poster or paper accepted will be able to make it available online for the Gathering. And we are delighted to say that, thanks to the efforts of Research Publishing, we will be publishing an on-line volume of Short Papers later in the year. The papers accepted for EUROCALL this year are of high quality, so we look forward to having the opportunity to hear them in August and see them in print later in the autumn. Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity to share your work!

Thank you to all those who have already subscribed to EUROCALL. Please, if you have not yet done so, take out your EUROCALL membership and attend the Gathering event in August. Instructions on how to do so at the reduced 65 euro rate can be found below:

-Please visit the EUROCALL website to subscribe. You will find the membership join page here: https://www.eurocall-languages.org/site/subscribe_form.php

-Simply select the retired option at 65 euro. Complete the registration form and put an X in any of the boxes that are not applicable to you. The 65 euro button states that it is for ‘retired’ members but for the EUROCALL Gathering event in August we are opening this rate to all those who wish to subscribe. Please note - There is not a separate button to select for the Gathering rate.

-Follow the process through to payment.

Lastly, if you are joining us for the event in August we would like you to complete this form to show your whereabouts in the world. This will give us all a more visual picture of the location of our EUROCALL community.  

Future proof CALL: what does it mean?

The theme for this year's EuroCALL conference, as you may have gathered from the publicity was "future-proof CALL". I had not really questioned this choice of theme at all prior to arriving at the conference, my assumption had been that the focus would be on how we could sustain the development and embedding of computer-assisted language learning into the future. I had seen the theme as a call to arms which recognised the vulnerability of this activity - something which resonates with me having seen the effects of the austerity agenda on education in the UK. 

Our keynotes really unpacked this theme and demanded that we look more closely at exactly what it means. The turning point for me came with Claire Kramsch's insights shared through our virtually connecting session . The discussion drew on other English expressions using "proof" - water-proof, fire proof, etc. What did we really mean by future proof? Did we have a shared understanding of what we meant? 

Mark Brown returned to the theme in his keynote (above) and then in the closing panel where Phil Hubbard (3 mins 20) and Mark Brown (11 mins 15) return to it with what may seem to be opposite interpretations: 
-the need to make CALL obsolete and 
-the importance of sustaining a healthy community. 
Having reflected on these views I see them actually being part of one and the same thing. 

Firstly, on obsolescence. I have often told my employers that e-learning is not about the e, it is about learning. The "e" perhaps helps them in their budget/targets, but it is unhelpful to practitioners. It encourages some to believe that "e" is an aspect of teaching or learning that is not for them but only for the technophiles. The CALL label can have the same effect. Our gatherings tend to unite folk with the same tech-leanings, we are dismissed by others as "tech evangelists". This conference identified that we should do more to clarify the pedagogy (not a word I am fond of, so maybe I should say "the approach to learning") which we adopt. 

Secondly on healthy professional communities. This is very close to my heart as I self-identify firstly as a teacher. Unsurprisingly perhaps as I have worked as a language teacher for over 30 years. I am worried about the institutions we are employed in, they have a disregard for the health of our teaching communities. I say that having co-researched the policies of HEIs looking for commitments to sustainable teaching. The publication was based on evidence from Australia but I also looked (where possible) at policies in the UK (most are not publically available if they even exist) and the same issue holds true. There is no clear commitment to supporting healthy teaching communities to underpin sustainable teaching in the future. Healthy communities need interaction, sharing, inclusive, open discussion. The ecological metaphor is totally relevant to the EuroCALL community which has seen innovation and should embrace it. The teaching community needs to be a living, breathing, evolving community of practice. This works best through open educational practice, locking people inside institutional systems only serves to suffocate the community, we need the fresh air of open educational practice to thrive.

During the conference I was able to watch Shona Whyte's presentation of research into teacher understanding of open educational practice and this clarified to me that teachers themselves are not really appreciating why #OEP or indeed what is #OEP. More work to do there on facilitating a more nuanced discussion with practitioners. All the time being aware of the monsters we are warned about in Mark Brown's keynote.