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 Tuesdays 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? 😉

The full CALRG2017 conference programme and details of keynote speakers are now available.

Please see the main conference page for details of the programme and keynote abstracts and biographies.

For the first time this year, we are asking people to register if they are intending to come along, so we will have an idea of numbers, particularly for catering. For Weds/Thurs, there is a registration form. For the Friday (FLAN day), you will need to email Michelle Stannard directly. See the conference page for full details and hope to see lots of you there!

The 38th annual CALRG conference will be held on the 14th – 16th June 2017 in the Open University’s Jennie Lee Building.

CALRG’s annual conference provides a forum for CALRG members, including staff and research students at the Open University, to present and discuss their research and projects.

This year, the third and final day of the conference will be a FutureLearn Academic Network (FLAN) Day, focussing on MOOCs and research resulting from the FutureLearn platform. More information about the FLAN day and how to present at it will be distributed by Tuesday 4th April 2017.

For more information, see the Call for Papers. The deadline for submitting to the conference is now midnight on Friday 7th April. All submissions should be made through the Easychair website.

Please address all correspondence and enquiries about the CALRG 2017 conference to calrg@open.ac.uk

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #CALRG2017

For the first event of the year will feature Regius Professor of Open Education Eileen Scanlon. The event will be talking about CALRG, its history and where it is going.

Where: the Ambient Lab

When: 11 am – Noon on Thursday the 6th of October 2016

This event is being hosted by the CALRG organising committee

CALRG invites submissions for its 37th annual conference, to be held on 6-8 June 2016 in the Open University’s Jennie Lee Building. This year, the first day of the conference, 6th June, will be a FutureLearn Academic Network (FLAN) Day, with the main conference being held on 7/8 June, consisting of academic presentations and posters.

Please see the ‘Conference’ tab for our Call for Papers and more information about attending the conference.

UPDATE: Deadline for submissions extended to Friday, April 15th

We’re nearly at the end of 2015 and just want to wish all CALRG members a happy festive period and hope you all have a lovely break. We’ve had an exciting few months since our re-launch and had some fantastic external speakers and discussions. We have attracted many new Twitter followers and hope to build on all these recent successes with an even bigger and better portfolio of activity next year.

With this in mind, we re-convene on Thurs 7th Jan 2016 with a seminar from Tim Coughlan, all about ‘Co-creating technologies to structure interpretation with museum and gallery collections’.

Hope to see you all there!

Best wishes from
Liz, Rebecca, Jenna, Janesh and Tina
CALRG organising committee

Many thanks to Sheila MacNeill, who joined CALRG from Glasgow last week to discuss her experiences as an ‘open’ researcher. Sheila has kindly written a blog post about her time at the Open University, which you can find here.

If you missed CALRG last week, you can find the recorded version of Sheila’s talk below.

Sheila MacNeill’s CALRG talk

We celebrate the start of the new CALRG season with a welcome session on 8 October 2015, 11am-12pm in Meeting Room 1, Jennie Lee Building.

This session will introduce all those new to CALRG (including our new PhD and MRes students) what CALRG is, its history, its activities – including the summer conference – and what people will get out of being part of the CALRG community.

The event is being hosted by the CALRG organising committee and will also feature a presentation by Regius Prof. Eileen Scanlon about the 35-year history of CALRG.

Welcome to the new CALRG website. We moved over to WordPress from our old Drupal-hosted site in the summer of 2015 and look forward to sharing a much more interactive and updated site with you than before.