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CALICO 2010: Great conference, or the greatest conference?

Posted by Betsy on June 16, 2010 in InstructionalDesign, Language, Web2.0 |

View of Amherst College from my dorm room at CALICO 2010.

The Computer Assisted Language Learning Consortium Conference 2010 was in Amherst, MA, June 10 – 12. I summed up my feelings about it in this tweet:

Goodbye, #calico2010! It was awesome, in terms of presentations, people, planning, place…

Presentations

I learned so much from the sessions! This was the first conference I’ve attended where I have gone to a presentation during every session – despite being tired, I did not want to miss a minute! Everything will be online soon (at the CALICO site), I believe, and I will look forward to seeing the ones I missed.

Here are some of the (free) resources that I gathered.

  • revMedia: Free application for developing web apps in a simplified programming language. This looks promising! However, viewing the apps requires a plugin that doesn’t seem to work on Firefox.
  • LORO: From the Open University, a collection of online language materials: French, Spanish, German, ESL, Chinese, and even Welsh!
  • XENOS: A virtual island where with games to learn English, Spanish, or Chinese. Currently, it’s in alpha testing, and I can’t seem to try it myself yet. The demos were impressive!
  • Façade: A bizarre interactive drama, where you try to help (or hinder) a couple that is going through marital difficulties. Fascinating idea!
  • The REALIA Project: An archive of images that are free to use for educational purposes. Many of them include suggestions for using them in the language classroom, such as this Japanese lunch special that can be used to practice terms for counting.
  • Voxopop: Audio discussion board.
  • Forvo: Crowdsourced pronunciations of words in an incredible number of languages.
  • FLAn: An editor for creating annotated texts. The exercises you can create using it are useful for learners, especially in combination with quizzes made in Hot Potatoes.

People

What a friendly group! I met so many incredibly nice, intelligent, informed, helpful people at the conference, not to mention the ones I knew already. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, I’m looking forward to keeping in touch with many of them. And keeping in touch is important since we have the Adult Beverage Special Interest Group to plan for next year!

Planning

Everything went so smoothly – which means that endless hours were spent behind the scenes so that I could simply enjoy. Thank you, CALICO organizers!

Place

Amherst College is a beautiful setting and just a short walk from downtown Amherst, with its locally owned shops and restaurants. The dorm room I stayed in was nicer than my apartment, and it was right next to the buildings where the sessions were held. Perfect!

And so…

I can’t wait for CALICO 2011: May 17-21 at the University of Victoria. See you there?

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