Summary of my notes from other sessions I attended at WorldCALL and from software demos and poster sessions

One theme was that the CALL world does not have a robust definition of what constitutes good data, and such a thing would advance the quality of research in various ways. Also findings the utility of various kinds of technologies.

3D collaborative environments (virtual worlds) - nothing new under the sun

Long term sustainability of projects : just getting to where HCMC has been for a while on including in project aspects that immediate research objective doesn't really care about, but other users of data or researchers might

Sylvi Vigmo sylvi.vigmo@ped.gu.se Student languaging in social network sites
- social media allows student to adopt a persona they choose towards the other participants
- thus it exacerbates the problem of the persistent minority that will take a perverse stance
- i.e. 'ironic' or 'meta' participation aimed at impressing actual other participants rather than sincere interactions as a persona

Beatriz do los Arcos b.de-los-arcos@open.ac.uk "Suitability of MOOC for sustaining community of language teachers and learners"
- 5% of those who hit first module hit last module, so no formlized groups can feasibly be maintained
- likeliest approach is to treat a MOOC "like the web, but paced", but what MOOCs do and are good at is typically not what's needed for language teaching and learning

Diane Larsen-Freeman "Language as a complex, dynamic system and new technologies"
- complex : emrgent patterns of simpler, lower-level behaviours, e.t. flocking of birds vs pecking of birds
- dynamic : output of each iteration is (partial) input to next, recursive
- favours "embodied dynamism" (John Searle) over "computational" (Dan Dennett), but I didn't get distinction
- language is a system of just-in-time negotiating the world vs ever-more-elaborate modelling of the world

Jozef Colpaert jozefcolpaert.net "sustainability and research challenges in CALL"
Contextual Issues:
- academic evaluation : way off
- academic value : lack of dedicated research method
- myths/hype :
- public perception : underestimate complexity of language / overestimate ability of technology
Methodological
- research design : poor, largely anecdotal
- replication : necessary but hard
- slow research : hard to do in publish or perish environment
- transdisciplinarity : complicates research method issues
Epistemological
- open :
- psychological :
- smart : trend is embedded smartness rather than explicit expert systems
- sustainable : hard to be all things to all publishers/developers/users
Engineering approach
- a system to get the best change in uncertain situation within available resourcese, then iterate and test against hypothesis
- if you need advanced stats to prove a difference, the difference is not significant enough

Linda Fellag lfellag@msn.com Flipped Class
- each student writes draft, small groups collaborate to create group summary, submit to rest of class for reading, class then focuses on argumentation
- informal collaboration seems to work better online than in-class or face-to-face

Ciara Wigham ciara.wigham@univ-bpclermont.fr "LETEC data model and repository for research into multimodal interactions"
- hard to compare results or do meta-analysis because studies have idiosyncratic characterization of context, data, interactions, technology
- model for structure of research raw data already exists in other academic fields
- create an XML structure that captures all the possible interactions which occur in an online environment (screen sharing, chat, text, audio etc.)
- corpus serves as source data for any research publications, so reproducible

Mike Levy / Caroline Steel c.steel@uq.edu.au "Change in language student use of technology 2006 - 2011"
Top technologies used by language students in 2006
- online references
- chat
- email
- LMS
- translation services
- video
- music
- forums/blogs
Top technologies used by language students in 2011
- online references
- translation services
- youtube
- social network apps
- mobile apps
- conjugation software
- mp3/blogcasts
- language games / flashcards
Trends:
- more use of language-specific / topic-specific
- centrally provisioned services less dominant
- email, wikis, blogs, virtual worlds weaker
Language students wanted:
- more face to face time; less reliance on technology
- 80% would not take an online-only course; 50/50 on blended - all over the place on preferred technologies
Context
2003 - skype
2004 - Facebook
2005 - YouTube
2006 - Twitter
2007 - Apple SDK (mass creation of small apps feasible)
2010 - iPad