Spring ’16 updates from CALICO president

For those of you who are interested in the activities of CALICO, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, we’re re-posting a recent update message to members from the group’s president, Phil Hubbard.

Happy 2016 CALICO members and friends! I thought I would take this opportunity to let you know what your Executive Board and some other CALICO groups have been up to since our conference in Boulder last May.

At the end of that conference, the Board approved creation of a new Graduate Student SIG, organized through the efforts of Annalisa Texeira and Nadia Jaramillo. They have already hosted organizational webinars, and are expanding as a community in support of graduate student interests. Nadia is continuing as chair: contact her for more information on getting involved (nadiaj@iastate.edu). Also, if you know any grad students in the field who are not CALICO members yet, we are continuing with the $20/year grad membership, which includes a subscription to the CALICO Journal.

Thanks to CALICO Journal Editors Mat Schulze and Bryan Smith and their editorial staff and board for another outstanding volume in 2015. If your institutional library does not receive the Journal yet, give them a nudge. The organization is continuing its relationship with Equinox to publish the Journal, and once the Board finalizes the contract, Equinox is also in line to take over the CALICO book series starting this year, which is now under the editorship of Greg Kessler.

We were able to get a new rubric in place for the CALICO 2016 proposal evaluations (kudos to Bonnie Youngs, Derek Roff, and Marta Gonzalez-Lloret), which we believe led to more consistent assessment of proposals and better representation of those that are more practice-oriented. I hope you’re all planning to attend the conference May 10-14 at Michigan State University: see https://calico.org/page.php?id=676 for details. As in several previous conferences we’ll be joined there by our colleagues from IALLT.

As many of you know, CALICO has maintained a Statement on Scholarly Activities (see https://calico.org/page.php?id=506) since it was ratified by the membership 15 years ago. The field has changed dramatically during that time, and we are revisiting that document accordingly. Following guidance from an advisory committee (thanks to Robert Blake, Dorothy Chun, Robert Fischer, and Barbara Lafford), Marta Gonzalez Lloret will be organizing this project update. The goal is to provide an effective document to guide institutional hiring, tenure, and promotion committees to understand the scholarly value of what we do so that it can be judged appropriately.

The Board has also been involved in working on some minor revisions to the Bylaws to bring them into line with changes that have occurred in recent years, such as the shift to Equinox publishing the Journal. Derek Roff has been instrumental in this process. Once we have completed revisions and had them approved at the Board level, we will be presenting them to the general membership for official approval.

The Social Media Task Force (Catherine Caws, Osman Solmaz, Enza Antenos, Esperanza Roman-Mendoza & Shannon Sauro) put together a social media survey to elicit feedback and information on how best to manage CALICO’s social media presence to meet the needs of its members. They received 145 responses and many good suggestions for how best to use the CALICO and CALICO Journal’s Twitter and Facebook pages as well as other directions to consider. This information will also be helpful in integrating social media use into the redesign of CALICO’s website. Stand by for more information on this in the new year.

Finally, we are working on designs for a new CALICO website. Several members of the Executive Board (Past President Scott Payne, Vice President Shannon Sauro, and Anna Oskoz) in consultation with CALICO Manager Esther Horn have been investigating options for plugins and other tools that need to be considered and integrated into the CALICO website redesign.

Along with Past President Scott Payne and Vice President Shannon Sauro, I wish you all the best in the coming months. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in May at the conference.

Cheers,

Phil Hubbard

CALICO President, 2015-16

Phone: 512-245-1417

Fax: 512-245-9089

Alt. Email: info@calico.org

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