Today, I came across one of Google’s search engine: Google Book Search. What so wonderful about this facility is not only the search facility, but also the ability of it to display some pages of the book! Some books are available for previewing some pages only, and some even provide full book preview. It is just awesome for me! With Microsoft Office OneNote, I can always do a screen clipping of the pages for later reading and it will be a tremendous help for my research.

Round applause for Google, please!

WorldCALL 2008 (Fukuoka, Japan; 5-9 August)

I’ve been shortlisted to become the recipient of a scholarship to attend this conference. It will be super duper exciting as there are some possibilities to meet interesting CALL practitioners to make a network and to learn what has been going on in different continents. I might meet my former professors and some of my old classmates as this is the ‘Olympic’ of CALL. I’ve sent my abstracts too and I hope that they can be accepted to be presented.

GloCALL 2008 (Jakarta & Yogyakarta, Indonesia; November)

This year, Indonesia becomes the host for GloCALL conference. As one of few CALL practitioners in Indonesia, I serve as a committee member. I’m still not sure what will my responsibilities be, but from what I discussed with Indra Charismiadji of Higher Learning, it seems that I will deal with PR-ing especially among the universities. I still don’t know whether I will submit abstracts or not (since the call for paper is not circulated yet), but well, I can always pull something at the very last minute (so typical of me!).

Projects to do:

Yacapaca.com

The website provides a service for teachers if they want to do online assessments through tests or portfolios. A week ago, the director sent me an email, asking if my students and I will be interested in developing the ‘Indonesian skin’ for the website. Basically, the skin will be a version of yacapaca in Indonesian. There is no money involved in this project, but nevertheless I’m so excited because it will give my students some experiences in translating. We will receive full credits of the translation (another reason: simply narcissistic of me!) and I manage to secure my students reference letters for their future employment.

Fun English with YSKI students

YSKI is a private Christian school in Semarang and they develop a cooperation with my faculty to improve the quality of the English teachers and to provide a fun English learning club for their students. As the words ‘fun’ and ‘technology’ are dubbed by the school, the faculty turned into the one and only Neny whose reputation of being fun lover and technogeek is widely known (ha!). So, I created a blog site, which will be used along the semester and hope the students will like it. Along with me, Andrew and Rudi are going to teach too, so let’s see how it goes next week when it starts.

*long-ignored* sustainable CALL project with Van Deventer Maas Stichting

Hmmm, I still don’t know what to do with this and thus, I have not had the guts to email the director. Need to send him email!!!!

Publications to spread:

July 2008 has been decided by IGI Global as the time for launching the “Handbook of Research on E-Learning Methodologies for Language Acquisition” and one of the chapters in the book about Interaction Modifications in Internet Chatting was contributed by yours truly. I’m so excited to get my hands on the book!