CALRG has a great line-up scheduled for November. Please join us for the following sessions:

– 7th: Nashwa Ismail will tells us about her experiences in Thailand in ‘Tricky Topics: Removing the Stumbling Blocks in Learning and Teaching’
– 14th: Our monthly informal event. This time CALRG will be hosting research themed speed chatting.
– 21st: In our regular ‘you heard it hear first’ series Irina Rets will present her research on the accessibility of OERs to non-native English speakers
– 28th: Agnes Kukulska-Hulme finishes the month with a presentation on intelligent assisstants like Alexa and Google Home and their potential for language learners

Join us tomorrow as Jo Buxton conducts the first workshop of the academic year on ‘Designing for inclusivity: making tutorials and group work accessible for students with sight and/or hearing impairments’.

Our 2019 Autumn term CALRG programme starts on the 10th October when we kick off with an informal get together – particularly for our new students to get to meet other CALRG members. So a big welcome back to all CALRG members and a particular welcome to our new research students.
More information about CALRG can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/CALRG/

The official schedule for the CALRG 2019 Conference has now been released. It can be download using the follow link:CALRG 2019 Conference proceedings.

There is still time to register for the conference via Eventbrite.

As we head towards the end of 2018, CALRG aims to finish the year on a high with a month devoted to IET’s Professional and Digital Learning group. November kicked off yesterday with a seminar detailing four projects that the group are involved: how energy companies learn following incidents, strategies employed by finance professionals to learn during times of uncertainty, tensions arising in large-scale changes of higher educational institutes, and the use of social media by medical students as a way of learning.

The schedule is slightly changed from the normal CALRG format this month to avoid clashes with other events. But be sure to come along and take part in the rest of the PDL CALRG month:

• 8th November – Cake week: This time the theme will be balloon debates
• 15th November – Workshop: PDL will present various ideas on upcoming bids for people to discuss and get involved in
• 29th November – Panel discussion: We invite academics from various backgrounds within the learning sciences to discuss a question central to the PDL group – ‘what is learning’

Looking forward to seeing you all then.
Doug, Wayne, Vicky, Jake – your CALRG organising committee

As one of the UK’s leading and longest running research groups in this area, we are looking forward to celebrating our 40th year with an event at the Open University on 19th October 2018 at which we will be welcoming back former members and friends. We have planned an exciting day of talks looking back at the group’s history, tracing the trends in our research over the years to help us look forward to the future of learning with computers.

Tickets are available on EventBrite. We have sold out of tickets to attend in person, but you can still register for the livestream, and we have had the odd cancellation, so it’s worth a look.

We are also working on a book to mark the event – look out for more information!

We are excited to announce the start of the new programme for 2018-2019! This year we will be aiming on delivering a mixture of informative updates from around the university, practical workshops, interactive panels, and of course cake.

Last year the CALRG team invited a huge range of speakers to spread fresh ideas and approaches to research. The team this year aims to continue and build on that theme, with a focus on varying the format of the weekly sessions.

In October you can look forward to:

• Thursday 11th – Kick-off and seminar from visiting PhD student Laura Thomas: Beginning teachers’ professional support: A mixed methods social network study
• Friday 19th – CALRG 40th anniversary conference
• Thursday 25th – Cake drop featuring some getting-to-know-you-and-your-research games facilitated by Doug Clow

Looking forward to an engaging year,
Doug, Wayne, Vicky, Jake – your new CALRG organising committee

In preparation for the upcoming CALRG 2018 conference, the PDF of the conference programme and proceedings and details of the keynote speakers are now available.

Full details of the conference can be found on the official conference website. Please direct any queries regarding the conference to calrg@open.ac.uk.

We are delighted to announce this year’s Call for Papers for the OU’s annual CALRG conference.

The 39th Annual Conference of the Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) will be held on 18th-19th June 2018 in the Open University’s Jennie Lee Building, Milton Keynes, UK. CALRG is one of the UK‘s leading research groups in the use of technologies in education. CALRG’s annual conference provides a forum for members, as well as other researchers and practitioners at the OU, to present their work. We particularly encourage research students to contribute submissions and attend to discuss their project.

The conference will consist of two days of presentations and interactive sessions across a broad range of relevant topics, including:

• Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)
• Accessible online learning
• Mobile learning
• Effective designing for learning and learner experiences
• Citizen science and public engagement
• Learning analytics
• Openness in education
• Game-based learning
• Professional learning
• Widening access and participation in education with technology

Submission Types
Contributions are invited in the following forms:
(1) Full presentations
(2) Lightning presentations
(3) Posters

For full information, see the Call for Papers. The deadline for submitting to the conference is now midnight on Friday 11th May 2018. All submissions should be made through the Easychair website.

Please address all correspondence and enquiries about the CALRG 2018 conference to calrg@open.ac.uk

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #CALRG2018

All of us in CALRG HQ are currently busy putting together the schedule for the new academic year and we are very excited! 😀

We are changing things slightly so that our second Thursdays will now be about ‘Communicating research’ more broadly (rather than just a reading/discussion group). Our third Thursdays will now focus on ‘sharing engaged research’, talking about our own research experiences and giving advice about how engagement with various stakeholders happens before, during and after the research process.

We will also be hearing from some fantastic external and internal speakers on the first Thursday of every month, and enjoying a chance for a hot drink and catch-up over FREE CAKE on the fourth Thursday of every month.

2018 is our 40th anniversary year of CALRG, and we will be celebrating this with a special event in Autumn 2018 (more details to follow in due course). Oh, and did we mention the free cake? 😉