September 09, 2006

EUROCALL Conference 2006 in Grenada

This year's EUROCALL conference took place in beautiful Grenada. CALL stands for Computer Assisted Language Learning and is mostly about research, development and best practise in this field of language learning and technology with a very high level of academic output.

The three day conference program was made up of 190 presentations in up to 7 parallel presentation of 15 or 30min in length and a total of 350-400 participants were present. The conference was very well organised and left room for networking and social events such as a guided tour to the Alhambra, gala dinner and Flamenco show.

What especially interested me (a newbee to this conference) was the history of CALL, because at times, the depth of academic discourse left me wondering about the 'meaning making'.

Let me briefly describe to you a couple of the presentations I listened to. Keep in mind that I am keenly interested in language tuition that deploys synchronous communication technology and first of all, I had to learn a new set of glossary. What I knew to be Instant Messenging (=Chat) has been labelled: CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) and what I knew to be virtual classroom technology, has been called: Audio-graphic conferencing with multimodal capabilities.

There were three presentations by the Open University in the UK on language classes undertaken in Lyceum, a low-featured audio-graphic conferencing tool developed by the Open University inhouse. Lyceum does not support webcam, application sharing nor audio/video files functionalities. It basically consists of a whiteboard for lyceum specific graphical formats which does not allow upload on the fly on behalf of teachers nor students. Furthermore, there is a text and a voice chat functionality and the possibility to paste links to websites. Apparently Lyceum will be phased out by 2008 only to be replaced with an open-source virtual classroom technology that is in the making.

Fernando Rosell-Aguilar of the Open University related his experiences as the course designer and trainer of language teachers of Lyceum. Although Fernando is Spanish, he did not actually teach Spanish live online, but sat in to observe teachers and student responses. He related some funny incidences in the classroom and described the unheard laughter and the 'anything else but cold environment' of this medium.

Beatriz de los Arcos reported about research into emotions in virtual classrooms. 7 participants of a course were interviewed so as to assess their emotions and Beatriz spent more time explaining how difficult it is to research these emotions and what method she used to do so, rather than the outcome of the assessment. During her presentation, she used the word anxiety 15 times and when I asked, whether all of the 7 students who were part of her survey were frustrated students, she firmly declined that.

Last but not least, Hauck & Lewis on their Tridem approach to synchronous communication. Hauck is quoted often due to her extensive research in the use of audio conferencing for distance language learning.

The research of learning in Lyceum still seems fairly new and with very few number of students. There seems to be a discusssions on the pedagogical use of these virtual classrooms if I may quote Leslie's objections for reducing this new environment to a replica of the traditional classroom.

Additionally, there was also a presentation on a successful course designed to teach engineers presentation skills using Interwise in the framework of the POOL project.

Overall, I personally felt that the topic was underrepresented and that not even the strand CMC would do it justice, since CMC does not seem to include a multi-channel, multi-modal environment like that experienced by participants in a virtual classroom. So, I commented on a conference blog only to hear that I seem to have missed the very expert of telecollaboration: Robert O'Dowd, whose pre-conference workshop took place the day before the conference.

The chat conversations I had with EUROCALL founder Graham Davies, who could not be present in Grenada due to health reasons, were fascinating to say the least. Graham is reading and posting to the conference blog . These chats are possible due to Blobber, a tool on right hand side of the conference blog. This tool shows how many people are currently reading this site and how many are in the chat. This way I met Graham and Leslie and these spontaneous chat conversations were most valuable indeed and clarified most of my questions I had.

The CALL research community seems very fragmented. WorldCALL is the umbrella association for EUROCALL (European Assocation for Computer Assisted Language Learning, UK) , CALICO (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, USA), IALLT(International Association for Language Learning Technology, USA),
LET (formerly LLA, Japan Assocation for Language Education and Technology), CERCLES (Confederation Europeenne des Centres de Langues dans l'Enseignement Superieur), CCALL/CELAO (Canadian Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning) and ATELL (Australian Association for Technology Enhanced Language Learning). Co-existing too are
APACALL (Asia-Pacific Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning), which and PACCALL(Pacific Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning).

If you are interested in reading some of the history of EUROCALL, I recommend Graham's site keynote outline of last year. He also co-authors the following WebSite called ICT4LT which is a fabulous practical website for teachers, interested in deploying technology in class.

I personally look forward to learning more at the EUROCALL conference next year in Ulster, Ireland and hope to be able to host some of the locally delivered presentations live online, so that those who cannot travel may be able to be a part of this abundant know-how.

Posted on September 09, 2006 at 09:19 AM

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