Officers' Reports

Bryn Holmes/Coordinator
Paul Lewis/ Publications Chair    
Paul Daniels/Telecommunications Chair
Nina Padden and
David Dycus /Newsletter Co-editors 
Larry Davies/Program Co-chair
Michael Geffon/Membership Chair
Patricia Thornton/Program Co-chair
Marie Cosgrove/Japanese Language Co-coordinator <
Tomoko Arai /Japanese Language Co-coordinator
Elin Melchior/Member-At-Large
Neal Jost/Treasurer

Bryn Holmes/Coordinator   

Dear CALL SIG Member,

It is usual CALL SIG practice to hold an annual meeting at the JALT Conference every year and we often have a second at the annual CALL conference. This year, however, due to the un-expectedly large scale of the conference—and thus the need for SIG officers to volunteer behind the scenes for most of the conference—we have decided to forgo a meeting this time.

I thought instead to make this message the CALL semi-annual meeting (the message is the meeting?) and would like to both report what we have been doing and to ask you for feedback.

I was very lucky to be able to take over as coordinator when the CALL SIG had so much activity last year. One of the best things the SIG has done was our autumn publication: Teachers, Learners, and Computers, a.k.a. TLC. We

were able to give all of last year's members a copy. This, as I am sure you can imagine, brought our budget to zero (and indeed a little to the other side of zero). Oddly enough, we have decided to try and do the same thing this year, but now, instead of one book, to offer members a choice of two. More on that later.

I was also lucky to inherit a conference team and venue. Kyoto is simply one of the best conference destinations going, and our team has worked hard to organise, publicize, program, and generally prepare Kyoto for your arrival and vice versa.

• Expand the SIG
We hoped to build both membership and volunteer officers in 1999. We do have more officers than ever and after CALLing ASIA we expect to bring a number of new members to the SIG, especially those from different cultures and language groups.

 
• Increase communication among officers
We now have our own Web site with email accounts and listserver systems. Better communication among officers will translate into more service for members.

• Expand the services we can offer members

• Increase communication with SIG members
Michael Geffon (CALL 99 Membership Officer), has created a Members' List to allow officers to contact SIG members with important announcements and upcoming events.

CALLing Asia—the CALL SIG's Largest and Most Dynamic Conference
For those of you who missed our conference, you can still check out the abstracts of the papers on our Web page.

Web Page Work http://jaltcall.org/
The SIG is increasingly turning to electronic forms of communication to promote CALL matters. I hope this year to expand our Web page and, thanks to the hard work of Paul Daniels (CALL 99 Telecommunications Chair), we are increasingly adding information and links to our new site. Expect more changes after we have recovered from the conference.

Elin Melchior, CALL 99 Member-At-Large, has incorporated a Web Board discussion group on the home page to allow all our members—even those unable to attend CALLing Asia—to take part in conference-related discussions.

Jobs and Conference Information Services
We hope to increase information provided to members and thereby seek to expand our officer group to include new duties.

Publications
We hope to be able to fund a post-conference publication, edited by a team headed by Paul Lewis (CALL99 Publications Officer), and offer it to those who attend the conference at a substantial discount. Plus, we are planning a book of Internet-related activities—see Paul Lewis' message in the newsletter for more details on how to be part of the CALL SIG's new publication.

Future Plans: Documenting This Year's Work
We have been documenting this year's work and saving information on Officer Web Pages to allow us to build on what we have done. As an example, next year's conference, CALL2000, will be bigger and better because of the hard work of officers such as Ross Penner (CALL 99 Public Relations Officer) and Larry Davies & Patricia Thornton (Program Co-chairs), especially in terms of developing cgi scripts, and program databases.

Your Ideas?
We would really like to hear your ideas of where to head next and what to do with our increasingly sophisticated Officer team. Let us know and—even better—email in to volunteer! We will need editors to work with Paul Lewis and writers to contribute to the book Kevin is producing, and a whole lot more.

Best wishes for the summer, and I look forward to seeing you at CALLing Asia or JALT99.

Bryn Holmes

Paul Lewis/ Publications Chair    
This year is already looking good for publications—we want to build on last year's successes with more and better publications of all kinds. The first change is that our newsletter is back in printed form, and we should be issuing at least a couple more this year.

If you pick this newsletter up at our conference, CALLing Asia, you should also have a copy of another publication, the conference handbook... in your hand. We are very grateful to (ex newsletter editor) Elin Melchior for putting this together so professionally.

Kevin Ryan's project for the SIG, "Recipes for Wired Teachers", continues apace, and if you are reading this at the conference, make sure you find him and pass on your contribution for the book. There will also be some sessions devoted to this and other projects, so check the schedule for these. If you receive this newsletter after the conference, don't worry as there's still time to get your idea to Kevin—send him an email for details at .

Dear CALL SIG Members,

I've just recently returned from a two-month teaching position in the South Pacific and would like to thank the other officers who have helped to keep our website up to date during my absence. The C@LLING ASIA web pages will be updated frequently before the conference. Please visit our '99 conference site at http://jaltcall.org/cjo/10_98/calling_asia99.htm. The conference pre-registration form and program handbook should be up on the site by the time you receive this newsletter.

This year we accepted presentation submissions online and had much success with this process. Visitors to our site were able to submit names of possible presenters using the online form at http://krgewdt3.tmit.ac.jp/cjo/presenters.htm. We also posted an online form for updating members' email addresses at http://jaltcall.org/forms/. (Note: Please use this form only if you are a CALL SIG member.)

The online forms were created using Microsoft FrontPage and processed using Microsoft's FrontPage server extensions. These two programs work together seamlessly to create interactive web forms which require no programming knowledge. The results of the forms can be saved as a .txt or a .html file, can be emailed to several people, or can be automatically entered into a database. Larry Davies later created a cgi script to handle the online submissions while I was away using a simple scripting language. Creating your own script can be useful for those who want to avoid the high cost of purchasing Microsoft software.

Nina Padden and
David Dycus /Newsletter Co-editors 

If you're a presenter at CALLing Asia, please look for us during the conference; we're hoping to include conference reports in an upcoming issue of C@lling Japan. We're also hoping to chat with SIG members about your impressions of the newsletter so far this year and your ideas or requests for future issues.

To all readers: Please consider writing an article or review this year! Your contributions are valued.

We hope to see you at the conference or hear from you by email.

Nina and David