NERALLT Newsletter Fall 2006

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Website: http://www.nerallt.unh.edu	IALLT website: http://iallt.org/	Published 4 times yearly
Debra Mandel, Pres. NERALLT Northeastern University Libraries 360 Huntington Ave. 200 SL Boston, MA 02115 email: d.mandel@neu.edu

The Prez Says

n October 26th and 27th, we will be assembling at Harvard University for NERALLT's fall meeting, "Virtually Anything: New Modes of Communication." Jeremy Bennett, Cindy Bravo, Marisa Castagno, Emily Wentworth, and host Thomas Hammond have produced a very unique program, which showcases multi-faceted and even three-dimensional applications of new language learning technologies. These presentations describe and demonstrate a range of creative tools available to both match and challenge the boundless energy of today's millennial student, who is always one step ahead of us. Faculty, language technology specialists, and renowned scholars from around the country will discuss their best practices and experiences, as applied to the study of language and culture. Barbara Sawhill heads up the Thursday workshop with a review and discussion of "Language Lab Unleashed," a cutting edge virtual language technology learning experience for practitioners. Todd Bryant will teach us about 3-D environments and gaming, and we'll have an opportunity to play with these tools. Friday's program,

from Karen Price's keynote to a tour of Harvard's language lab facility includes six diverse topics and additional hands-on practice. And don't forget about the wine and cheese reception, wonderful Harvard cuisine, and other meal outings, yet to be arranged.

Many thanks to the Fall Program Committee for coordinating the speakers and logistics and to the presenters for sharing your vision and expertise.

Thank you David Kanig, for serving as Interim Newsletter Editor, and

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Contents

The Prez Says ------------------ 1

NERRALT Summer Advisory
Board Meeting ------------------ 2

IALLT Summer
Leadership Meeting ------------ 3

What Are You Reading? ------- 3

Fall Meeting Schedule ---------- 4

And Finally ----------------------- 7

NERALLT President: Debra Mandel
Interim Newsletter Ed: David Kanig

Dick House, for keeping the website updated.

I look forward to seeing many of you soon. And if you canﾕt attend this meeting, weﾕll see you at Tufts in June at IALLT 2007.

Debra Mandel
Northeastern University

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The NERALLT
Summer Advisory
Board Meeting

n Friday July 14, Thom Hammond graciously hosted NERALLT's Summer Advisory Board Meeting at Harvard. We held court from 9:00 a.m. ﾐ 3:00 p.m. in the comfortable meeting lounge of the exquisite new Center for Government & International Studies Building. Thom also generously arranged a wonderful breakfast and lunch. Joining Thom and me were: two Harvard students who offered their millennial perspectives; Jeremy Bennett and Emily Wentworth from Yale; Cindy Bravo from Boston College; Ed Dente from Tufts; Mary Morrisard-Larkin from Holy Cross; Yuan Li from Bentley; and Ruth Trometer from MIT.

The day's agenda was quite full.

Our very productive fall planning session yielded preliminary program ideas and a long to-do list. Jeremy called Barbara Sawhill via Skype and invited her to present the October 26th workshop. Alessandro Vaccaro of Harvard's Media Services staff gave an in-depth demonstration of the magnificent Belfer Case Study Room, and Thom took us to the lovely Forum Room in Lamont Library, where we mapped out event set-ups.

During the NERALLT business meeting we discussed ways to expand our membership. Until we elect a new membership chair, Ruth Trometer has volunteered to create a list of institutions and language professionals to contact. We agreed that NERALLT needs to work on a communications and marketing strategy.

Due to the IALLT (International Association for Language Learning Technology) conference at Tufts in June 2007, the Summer Advisory Board voted to nix a separate NERALLT spring meeting in 2007. NERALLT members will have an opportunity to participate in the IALLT conference, which will have a number of excellent sessions and social events. We also discussed possibly planning a joint meeting with NEALLT down the road. Discussions are underway.

NERALLT Governance: During the summer, Mary Morrisard-Larkin, David Kanig, and I revised descriptions of the NERALLT Board positions that were approved by the membership at our spring meeting, and drafted new bylaws. These documents, distributed in a separate NERALLT bulletin, will be voted on at the business session of our fall meeting. Please send me your comments and concerns.

IALLT Planning: At the meeting, Ed conferenced with some IALLT members via Skype, and formed an IALLT Local Arrangements Committee to assist with logistics and events planning: Cindy Bravo, Mary Simone, Ruth Trometer, Mary Morrisard-Larkin, and myself.

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The IALLT Summer
Leadership Meeting

by Ed Dente

he Summer Leadership Meeting of the International Association for Language Learning Technology was held this past June at Tufts University.

We reviewed our year since FLEAT 5 and began preparation for IALLT '07 at Tufts. Be sure to put IALLT '07 on your calendar: 18 - 23 June 2007. IALLT '07, whose theme is: The Next Revolution in Language Learning Technology, will feature pre-conference workshops, sessions, exciting and comprehensive exhibitors showcasing the latest technology, and fun events: cruising with music on Boston Harbor, dining in the beautiful new U. Mass-Boston banquet center overlooking the harbor, sampling all the historic, contemporary and cultural aspects of Boston, sharing pints in the best Irish pubs in the US, and greeting colleagues and friends from around the world as we meet in the spirit of Jumbo on the beautiful Tufts campus. We will discuss IALLT '07 at our fall NERALLT meeting, and I will bring a sign-up sheet for those who might like to help us put together the biggest and best IALLT Conference yet.

Review photos from the 2006 meeting: http://ase.tufts.edu/iallt/iallt06Photos.asp

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What Are
You Reading?

s there a book, journal, Web site, or organization that you would recommend as a technical, padagogical or linguistic resource? Please send your favorites to: dkanig@brown.edu.

Here are a few starters:

Stevens, Richard, The Protocols (TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1), Addison-Wesley, 1994. A guide and reference on how computers communicate with one another.

Taylor, Dave, Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, O'Reilly, 2005. A starting look at the architecture of the Mac operating system, and the basic Unix commands you can use to explore it.

http://languagelabunleashed.com is a portal to many useful resources in our field. Take a look in advance at the site that will be presented by Barbara Sawhill at the next NERALLT meeting.

http://www.macenterprise.org is a collaborative project on deploying Mac clients and servers in a multi-platform environment. It contains useful information for managing labs.

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/news/rssfaq.html introduces Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the Web technology by which you can view periodically aggregated blurbs on newly published Web materials without having to visit each site you're interested in.

http://www.macdevcenter.com is a site run by O'Reilly, publisher of technical resources, presenting articles on such issues as: e-mail clients, synchronizing data among multiple devices, running Windows on the new Intel-based Macs...

http://secondlife.com/ is a 3-D virtual world built by its 800,000 residents from around the globe.

http://earth.google.com/ offers satellite photos of virtually the entire planet. You can zoom, tilt, and coast from place to place. Tour the streets of cities (several of which are offered in 3D), see the topographies that have shaped history, and look into your neighbor's yard.

NERALLT Fall 2006 Meeting
Virtually Anything: New Modes of Communication
Harvard University, October 26-27, 2006

Registration: http://lrcnt.fas.harvard.edu/nerallt/registration-3.html

Lodging: http://lrcnt.fas.harvard.edu/nerallt/accommodations.html

Thursday, October 26th
Afternoon Sessions, 2:00 p.m. ﾐ 6:00 p.m.
Lamont Library, Harvard Yard
Lamont Forum Room, 5th Floor

2:00	Welcome Debra Mandel, President of NERALLT
2:10	*Language Lab Unleashed!* Barbara Sawhill, Director of the Cooper International Learning Center, Oberlin College, and IALLT President-Elect, presents "Language Lab Unleashed," and her use of podcasting to keep the language technologist plugged in and connected.
2:55	Humanizing Computer-Assisted Language Learning: The Use of Pedagogical Agents as Language Tutors Roberto Perez-Galluccio, Ph.D. Candidate, Florida State University, presents an overview of current research on the use of animated pedagogical agents in computer-assisted language learning, with examples of applications and products, and a discussion of design, development, and implementation issues.
3:35	Break
3:45	An Introduction to 3D Environments and Gaming Todd Bryant, Language Program Administrator and Technologist, Library and Information Services, Dickinson College, will explain the different types of 3D games and simulations including an explanation of single-user games, network games, and MMORPGs, along with examples currently on the market - including Sims, Virtual Madrid, and World of Warcraft.
4:15	Workshop at the Language Resource Center, 6th Floor: 3D Environments and GamingﾑA Hands-on Experience and Discussion In this Workshop, facilitated by Todd Bryant, participants will experience and interact with the games themselves and discuss when, if, and how the games could be used for language learning as part of a class or for individual self-practice.
5:00	Lamont Forum Room, 5th Floor: Wine and Cheese Reception (A dinner outing at 6:00 in Harvard Square will be arranged.)

Friday, October 27th
Morning Sessions, 8:00 a.m. ﾐ 12:00 p.m.
Center for Government and International Studies, 1730 Cambridge Street Belfer Case Study Room

8:00	Registration Table Open(Continental breakfast available)
9:00	Keynote: Virtually Anything: Emerging Technologies and Possibilities for Language Learning Karen Price, Director of Anne Dow Associates, Cambridge, MA, will survey some of the new communication and information tools developed in fields seemingly unrelated to language learning and language teaching (e.g. medicine, transportation, customer relations, rapid prototyping, home entertainment, toys), and speculate about the desirability and possible transfer of some of these technologies to the more traditional language classroom or distance learning paradigms.
9:30	Q and A
9:40	Presentation of "Jules et Jim Interactif" Dr. Pierre Capretz, Director of the Yale Language Development Studio, presents "Jules et Jim Interactif", a DVD-ROM Program that engages students through an interactive multimedia approach to learning from an authentic linguistic corpus, in this case, François Truffaut's classic film. Dr. Capretz will demonstrate how the learner can work with the film as a whole, or in segments, or with individual utterances, as well as from abundant cultural notes and lexical, grammatical, and speaking exercises, all of which are directly hyperlinked to the film.
10:10	Using Podcasting for an Online Pronunciation Guide Carole Bergin, Preceptor in French at Harvard University, presents a French pronunciation guide, in the form of six podcasts, with songs, poems, and rhymes recorded by native speakers. An instructor can recommend different parts of these readily downloadable, "anytime/anywhere" podcasts to individual students, according to their needs.
10:30	In the Belfer Case Study Room and adjacent Lounge: Stretch Break and Concurrent Breakout Sessions for a hands-on trial of "Jules et Jim Interactif" and French Podcasting
11:00	In the Belfer Case Study Room: Creating a Live, Interactive Distance Learning Environment: Spanish for Healthcare Professionals Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, Director of the Penn Language Center and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, will present a distance language course targeted at heal thcare providers, which enables them to become more familiar with the basic linguistic and cultural skills necessary to serve an increasingly diverse patient population. General implications for developing a distance model for the teaching of foreign languages, in particular the less commonly taught languages, will also be discussed.
11:30	Using Games and Other 3D Environments to Create Environments of Virtual Language Immersion and Instances of Task-Based Learning Todd Bryant will discuss how games, such as World of Warcraft, can be used to create a task-based environment that stresses communication and collaboration in the target language with other students or with native speakers not involved in the class.

Friday, October 27th
Afternoon Sessions, 12:30 p.m. - 4:25 p.m.
Lamont Library, Harvard Yard Lamont Forum Room, 5th Floor

12:30	Lunch
1:45	NERALLT Business Meeting NERALLT organizational updates, amended bylaws vote, and next steps for governance and IALLT 2007 at Tufts.
2:45	Connecting the Japanese Language Classroom with Japan through Skype and Mixi Akiko Meguro, Visiting Instructor in Japanese, Dickinson College, will discuss the implementation of language exchanges via the Internet utilizing Mixi, a Japanese social networking service, and Skype, a telephony software. Questions will be fielded by both Akiko Meguro and Todd Bryant (responsible for technical implementation).
3:15	Break
3:25	Broadband and a Chicken Bus: Computer-Mediated Language Tutoring in a Flat World Dr. Kevin Gaugler, Associate Professor of Spanish, Marist College, and Peter Spevacek, President of Interlangua, present the pedagogical, social, and economic benefits of their model of instruction and demonstrate how Marist integrates real-time video and voice tutoring sessions with native Spanish speakers into its curriculum using Interlangua's distributed computing environment.
4:10	Wrap-Up
4:25	Language Resource Center, 6th Floor: Optional tour of Harvard's LRC

And Finally . . . .

Summer Advisory Board attendees, counterclockwise from the left: Ed Dente (Tufts), Thom Hammond (Harvard), Ruth Trometer (MIT), Cindy Bravo (Boston College), Yuan Li (Bentley), Mary Morrisard-Larkin (Holy Cross), and Jeremy Bennett (Yale). Not shown: Emily Wentworth (Yale).