The first part of this editorial is dedicated to the memory of Graham Davies who passed away on 20th June, 2012, after a courageous battle against cancer.
Graham was the Founding President of EUROCALL. He held this post from 1993 to 2000, when he decided to step down as President, and was then an elected member of the EUROCALL Executive Committee from 2000 to 2011. Graham also served as a member of ReCALL's Editorial Board, from its constitution in 1995. During all these years, he has played a key role in the international CALL community and has been instrumental in forging links between researchers, developers and teachers from Europe and from the rest of the world, between the material and the virtual world.
A pioneer and a visionary, he was quick at recognising what was coming down the line. From Fun with Texts to the virtual world of Second Life, he was always one of the first to explore emerging technologies for language learning and to share his experience and thoughts about the latest tool. Throughout his career, he generously gave his time and provided guidance to anybody who needed help, be they students, teachers, or institutions. Never losing sight of the challenges that language teachers from all educational sectors and from all over the world were facing, he created resources and guidelines, freely available to all via the ICT4LT.org site, which he continued to maintain until a couple of months ago. Whenever one of us needed his help for an event, or even for a class, he was always there, virtually or physically, to give a hand and share his expertise.
Graham's online presence was simply huge! He inhabited Second Life, Twitter, Facebook as well as many forums and discussion lists, navigating between them with ease, always contributing his wisdom in a timely fashion, as well as sharing happiness and sadness with us all. But meeting people in real life was what he enjoyed most. Exactly a year ago, on 5th July 2011, he wrote to the EUROCALL Executive Committee, which was discussing the pros and cons of holding virtual conferences instead of face-to face ones:
“Personally, I would miss taking part in face-2-face conferences. It's the craic in the bar and the gala dinner that I would miss most! Making your avatar dance in a disco in Second Life is fun the first few times, but then it gets boring and it's no substitute for the real thing.”
To many of us, to most of us in EUROCALL and beyond, Graham was much more than a colleague, much more than the first EUROCALL President. He was much more than the pioneer who led the way to better language teaching and learning, than the advisor who helped us setting up our new language labs and our training programmes, and more than the accomplished scholar who expertedly reviewed submissions for CALL conferences and journals. He was warm, compassionate, and funny. It did not matter to him who you were, what your professional status or title was, whether you were a graduate student struggling with your thesis or a fully fleshed academic, whether you worked in Higher or Secondary education. Graham would regal you with his stories, he would support you, and be there for you in good times as well as in bad times, in virtual life and in real life.
Thank you, Graham/Groovy Winkler/DaisyBundle for being such an inspiration to so many of us. We miss you terribly, and EUROCALL will never be the same without you.
Françoise Blin, EUROCALL President
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The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham was proud to host Eurocall 2011 on its award-winning Jubilee campus. The organising team were delighted to be able to welcome over 260 delegates representing institutions from more than 40 countries, bringing with them a wealth of CALL expertise as both researchers and practitioners.
For the first time in a number of years, workshops were organised as an integral part of the conference as well as being free of charge. This proved to be popular with delegates, as all workshops were well attended and in some cases, oversubscribed (including Graham's regular workshop on Second Life; sadly, Nottingham was to be the last EUROCALL conference he attended). A further change was the introduction of 30-minute papers alongside the traditional 45-minute presentations. Again, this was very well received, borne out by the fact that the submissions for paper presentations were evenly spread amongst both categories.
The theme for EUROCALL 2011 was The CALL triangle: Student, Teacher and Institution, covering such subthemes as Recent Developments in Mobile Learning, Challenges of e-learning: the Role of the Institution, The Use of New Technologies for Language Teaching in Schools, Courseware Design to Distance and Collaborative Learning and Corpora and Language Learning and many more.
The conference theme was chosen to focus on the need for discussion relating to the extent to which the three main agents in CALL, namely the student, the teacher and the institution, have embarked on the path to becoming an integrated and interrelated entity, evolving and working together in the design, the application and the learning outcomes of CALL.
The first paper in this issue, by Dooly and Randall, reports on a study on linking theory and practice in teacher education, integrating technology both as a tool and a subject as part of teacher training. Codreanu and Combe Celik continue with the theme of teacher training. Their article presents a study involving both trainee and established online teachers of French as a foreign language.
Sockett's article shifts the focus from the teacher to the student, exploring data produced by students in their reflective blogs on informal learning taking place online. The next two articles, the first by Wigham and Chanier, and the second by Caws, stay with the learner as the focus: while Wigham and Chanier present a study on a new methodological framework for the study of multimodal communication in the virtual world Second Life, Caws’ article is concerned with a design-based research based on user interaction with a specific web-based CALL tool.
Video-conferencing is the theme of two of the papers: while Canto's article reports on a study linked to a European project, NIFLAR, examining the effects of video-conferencing on students’ oral communication skills, Satar's article deals with the importance of gaze in video-conferencing to establish social presence.
The final article by Matsunuma discusses the affordances of using multimedia applications in EFL to enhance vocabulary learning skills in EFL.
All the articles above make a valuable contribution to the process of connecting the three agents involved in the CALL triangle.
Oranna Speicher, Organiser, EUROCALL 2011
