Supporting the connections across continents

Link up for greatest impact!

When people get together great things can happen. We can learn together, support each other and things that may have seemed impossible become do-able. As chair of the EuroCALL CMC SIG I am delighted to be involved in several initiatives recently which focus upon increasing the connections between the European activity and our colleagues in both the USA and Japan. 

Firstly here's a message from Sahar Matar of the EuroCALL Grad students SIG:

We, the board of the Eurocall Grad Students SIG, are starting a new method to connect members of the SIG and to help them to get to know about the activities of the conference in case they could not make it. We are inviting volunteering grad students to play the role of the SIG ambassadors this year. This role entails that they share on Twitter or any other preferred social media, updates on the conference sessions and information picked up in the various sessions they may go to during the conference using the conference hashtag #eurocall2018. 

This hopefully will give members more opportunities to have access to the projects presented at the conference and to get to know people with similar interests on social media. This is part of a collaborative work with our sister association, CALICO. We have implemented this method with the CALICO Grad Students SIG at CALICO2018 in Urbana-Champaign, IL (May 29 - June 2) and that was awesome. We are planning to do the same here to connect the members of both associations. If you are going to Eurocall2018 and you see yourself interested in being our ambassador, please email Sahar at saharmatar2@gmail.com

The conference twitter account is @eurocall2018

Secondly, thanks to @virtuallyconnecting we joined folk at the 25th anniversary of the  #JALTCALL2018 conference in Japan. This was such a joyous conversation with participants from several timezones chatting face to face, connecting practitioners, keynote speakers, researchers and enabling participation where costs of travel or other restrictions would often be a problem. You can watch the recording of the session here. 

Whenever we organise a physical conference many may come but many more are unable to do so. With travel bans, domestic responsibilities, financial limitations all playing a part in making physical mobility more challenging and with the technologies for connecting abundant and increasingly easy to use there is no excuse for not including such "open door" activities as part of your conference's arrangements. The opportunities we increase by using social media - new contacts, new networks, new collaborations - are too good to miss. I am delighted to support Sahar in her plan to find social media champions. I will never forget the way such an approach helped Parisa Mehran during @eurocall2017 

Here's a flavour of the social media conversations from #JALTCALL2018 (you will see Parisa here!) :

Living in the wild

'There are better ways to think of languages than as rules-based systems': a torrent of language & ideas from @stevenlthorne at #Eurocall17 pic.twitter.com/q7olusAOD8

— Paul Kaye (@PaulKayeEUlangs) August 25, 2017

Tomorrow is the final day of the #eurocall2017 conference. Time for a few reflections. The conference has had a packed schedule as usual and there are a few things I have noticed this time which indicate a greater level of technical engagement from participants. Clearly the focus of this conference is technology enhanced language learning but the shift is towards greater use of "wild" technologies. It may just be my impression but I think there has been a mood of determination that what we do is important. I think Graham Davies would have been proud. There was:

• lots of interest in social media and web tools
• a dynamic group of MALL (mobile assisted language learning) CMC (telecollaboration etc)  VW (virtual worlds) users and lots of PhD students too
• a real interest in open practice as we are all keen to continue to connect and collaborate despite travel bans, brexit and other threats to mobility
• great examples in the keynotes of how the web has transformed learning

I have two further sessions tomorrow. 

A session on CMC in the open

A Virtually Connecting session to reflect on the event before we all bring this year's event to a close. 

I have a feeling that the connections will continue through social media in the coming year too...watch this space!

Working in the open

🦋🌸🌼 #dandelion #dandelionblow #field #nature #scenery #pretty #sky #plants #pretty

A post shared by Becky Skrine (@beckyskrinee) on Jun 13, 2017 at 12:47pm PDT

Currently I'm at the #eurocall2017 conference and wanted to put together a couple of posts around my experiences there. Firstly, like the video image above I spent yesterday afternoon as a virtually connecting onsite buddie and it was very gratifying to be able to provide the means for those who couldn't attend the conference to speak first hand to our first keynote speaker Steve Thorne who was generous with his time and engaged passionately with the network, providing additional insights into his presentation. You can view this session here.

If you are not aware of the virtually connecting network take a look at their blog. Co-directors Maha Bali and Autumn Caines set up the organisation as a way to help those who don't enjoy the freedom to attend conferences for whatever reason, most of which will affect all of us at some point: family commitments, financial or visa restrictions for example to get a flavour of the conference proceedings and get up close and personal with keynote speakers. Everything is managed on a voluntary basis through Slack channels and the resultant recordings shared openly through YouTube.

We had a great session and there is another on saturday with Shannon Sauro and Kate Borthwick sharing their reflections on the conference so join us!