NERALLT
New England Regional Association for Language Learning Technology       Fall 2007 Newsletter

President's Message
Greetings from as yet still sunny Durham, New Hampshire. As I look around at the trees already beginning to change color, I am reminded that we'll be in Vermont just at the tail end of the Fall Foliage Season. Whether or not there's still a lot of color left on the trees, I'm anticipating a meeting full of variety!

Dick House & Debra Mandel plotting the NERALLT Order of Succession.

As Audrey Sartiaux's "Intro 101" article on Web 2.0 suggests, there's a lot to consider in this "new" use of by now "older" technologies.

Technologies or no, our organization is getting "newer" all the time. We now have a full NERALLT Board, something which has made my job exceed-ingly easy to perform. I can't imagine a NERALLT with only a President and no other officers. How did Debra, Mary, Cindy, Bruce and all the others on back 25+ years pull it off? In fact, the structure of the Board gives us not one, but THREE Presidents: the current one, the president-elect, and the past president! When I factor in Mary as Treasurer, who is a past-past president, that makes four of us!
 

My point in all this is that I'm very heartened by the way in which we've found it possible to work to-gether and share the workload of the organization. This makes me think that we may be in for an era of expanding somewhat the scope of what NERALLT does. The discussion which we hope will come out of the Friday Roundtable on Web 2.0 may help move us in that direction, since the use of blogs and the like might allow us to be more dynamic (in the sense of changing - we've ALWAYS had energy!) in our interactions.

And, as of this issue of the newsletter we have a new editor in the person of Barbara Lindsey. Barbara will tell you a bit about her plans in this issue of the Newsletter, but one thing we might think about is the purpose and nature of a NERALLT newsletter in this brave new "Web 2.0" world. That, too, might be an instrument of change. Beginning with our October meeting date, Dan Soneson will begin to serve as our new Webmaster. Ruth Trometer has agreed to serve as our Membership Coordinator. Ruth has already spent some time helping Debra with the membership database