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.