Bye!

Thank you Sylvi, Linda, Becky and Rhonwen for organising a very good conference! Time to get back to our lives and wait for next year's conference. See you in Portugal in September!

The panel and the closing

Now streaming the panel, use the link on the right to join in!

Keynote 2: Roger Säljö

Roger Säljö's keynote has just started. Live streaming is http://web22.abiliteam.com/ability/show/xaimkwdlq/20120823_0830_eurocall_live/speed.asp

Day 3

Excellent conference dinner last night :-))) great food, great company!

Language learning mini games

If you are interested in language learning mini games, check out Frederik Cornillie's slides from his presentation on task-based and user-centred design in this context: https://www.kuleuven-kulak.be/~u0037921/pub/EuroCALL2012_GOBL_slides.pdf.

Facebook as a language learning tool in Japan

Am attending a session by Caleb Pritchard who is advocating the use of  FB as a language learning and teaching  tool, arguing that web communication technology skills can be improved using FB and that incidental learning does take place. Caleb reported on an action research study he carried out in an EFL class, provided some hints for teachers along with conclusions suggesting using  FB as a content management system, for skills based practice, online discussion forum etc. One of  the questions concerned the point of cultural differences in the acceptance of FB , and how to deal with students that refuse to engage with FB.

Thr AGM has started, so if you are still outside the main lecture theatre, please come in :-)

Vibes from the Symposium: Publishing in CALL. Quite many familiar faces :)

2nd Day

The second day of the conference is starting. The day starts with parallel sessions as there is no keynote today (Trude, we miss you here). Today's Annual General Meeting will be just before lunch and we will have many important issues to discuss with the Eurocall members. These include the direction of Eurocall and its conferences, the new website and the forms of activities we want to include, SIG guidelines etc. etc. We are hoping for a wide participation and a lively discussion in the meeting!

Social event tonight

The social event tonight will be in Building B at 20:00! You are invited to a west coast buffet and Swedish music and songs!

Enhancing communicative competence

Before lunch, I attended a parallel session where Kristi Jauregi reported on the NIFLAR project: http://cms.hum.uu.nl/niflar/, exploring the development of communicative competence in different contexts. Students were involved in discussions in Second Life, Adobe Connect and face-to-face in a regular classroom. In the online conditions, the students interacted in pairs with native speakers, and in the classroom, students worked in groups of four (all non-native speakers).

Through oral pre and post tests, it was shown that members in the online groups improved their communicative competence more than the those interacting face-to-face, and that they were involved in much more negotiation. The best results were achieved in the desktop video conferencing environment, where students often also relied upon non-verbal interaction. Furthermore, in Second Life, the environment gave rise to unexpected instances of negotiation.

One point of discussion after the presentation concerned the different potential causes of the patterns found, including whether or not there were native speakers involved, whether students interacted in pairs or in groups, as well as the affordances of the tools employed.

Poster awards

 

Best poster awards will be given in the postgradute and non-postgraduate categories. The selection is based on the votes from the delegates.

True collaboration?

One of the key questions in Ware's keynote concerns how to encourage true collaboration among students in online exchanges. Students tend to focus on information exchange and possibly comparison and analysis, but rarely move on to collaboration and product. She relates this to the way in which the affordances are set up, and whether they allow participants to truly collaborate. Can we guide our students by sanctioning certain ways of interaction?

Our first speaker, Paige D. Ware, is giving a keynote on From Telling To Collaborating: Examining How Adolescent Learners Use Collaboration.
Page is making the point that CALL research tends to be focused on post secondary education, as opposed to primary, on EFL rather than less widely taught languages  as well as being not evenly spread geographically.

During the opening ceremony Francoise Blin, the president of Eurocall paid tribute to Graham Davies, who sadly passed away in June - his presence, both physically and virtually, will be sadly missed.

The Opening Ceremony!

Dear Folks,

it is officially starting now! Here is the link for the live streaming of the event. This link is the same for all streamings during the conference. Sit back and enjoy!

Live Streaming from Eurocall2012

Looking forward to lots of people taking part in the virtual strand, both on site and off :-)