EUROCALL 2009 - after the conference

EUROCALL 2009 in Spain was fantastic: perfect location, great food, super social events and excellent presentations. I ran a workshop on Second Life for newbies, assisted by my wife Sally, who acted as a fashion consultant to the ladies. We had 14 people in a state-of-the art lab equipped with computers with excellent graphics cards and big high-resolution display screens. The workshop ran without a hitch for three hours and then I gave a plenary presentation on a big screen to 50 local teachers, with a contribution from Randall Sadler speaking to us from the USA.

Randall Sadler (representing CALICO) and I (representing EUROCALL) have set up a joint Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group (VW SIG) for CALICO and EUROCALL members. 20 people were present at the launch meeting at EUROCALL 2009. I presented the EUROCALL HQ to the meeting and Randall was there "virtually" to give us a tour of the CALICO facilities next door, including his fabulous new castle holodeck. Further information on the new SIG will be announced at the EUROCALL website:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/sigs/index.html

I also played a role running the Virtual Strand. We set up a blog (using Blogger) with embedded CoveritLive events managed by Penny Coutas. Penny was able to feed Twitter tweets and PowerPoint slides into CoveritLive, as well as typing a running commentary on selected presentations. You can replay the CoveritLive events via the blog at:
http://virtualeurocall09.blogspot.com
and our Twitter feeds are still live at @EuroCALLVirtual:
http://twitter.com

The plenaries were videorecorded and will be made available via a Web page (to be announced later). I particularly enjoyed the presentations by Steven Thorne and Gavin Dudeney, both of which focused on using games in language learning and teaching.

CoveritLive is really handy. We will certainly consider using it again for future conferences: http://www.coveritlive.com

Graham Davies