We would like to take this moment to thank the enormous number of people who have done so much to ensure that
IALLT continues to be such a successful organization.
We would like to thank first our intrepid Board and Council members for their work and their support of this organization.
IALLT is supported entirely by volunteers, volunteers who already work extraordinary hours for their professions and yet find the time to give to this group as well. To each of you on the Board and Council...thank you!
As we begin to look forward and see what the future holds for
IALLT, we first would like to look back and thank those who made our
IALLT 07 conference at
Tufts University this past June such a success. Special thanks need to be extended to our local coordinator and host, Ed Dente as well as the
NERALLT members who were instrumental in making this event happen. We are grateful to the conference staff at
Tufts for their tremendous support during our event, and to the folks at
UMass-Boston for allowing us to use their facilities overlooking Boston Harbor and hosting our annual general meeting / banquet.
Praise and thanks need to be extended to the
IALLT 07 Program Committee for their work, which included taming recalcitrant planning software, ultimately with the end result of producing a great program. Special thanks are due
Mary Morrisard-Larkin who toiled long hours to produce the printed program and to our web master
Bruno Browning for making our online conference presence shine.
With this first edition of the online
IALLT Journal, we are being offered a glimpse into some wonderful new changes for
IALLT, its future directions, as well as new opportunities and possibilities for our membership. The
IALLT Journal's evolution from print to digital has been a long time in coming, but it simply could not have happened without the expert stewardship of
Douglas Canfield and
Heather McCullough as they worked with
Martin Holmes of the
University of Victoria (
BC) to make this happen. To all three of them we extend our heartiest thanks!
Continuing to look into the future, we must remind you that
IALLT's our very first
joined meeting with
CALICO will take place March 20-23 in
San Francisco, California. (
https://www.calico.org/conference/index.php) Please check the
IALLT website (
http://iallt.org) for news about upcoming meetings of our regional groups.
Our Summer Leadership Meeting (
SLM) will take place June 3-5 at
Georgia State in
Atlanta, Georgia. (
http://iallt.org/conferences/index.html) This is our Annual General Meeting and a time for us to come together as an organization and take stock of where we are and plan for where we would like to be in the future. It is also a time for us to plan for
IALLT 2009 in
Atlanta. This will be the
first IALLT Annual Conference in the
Southeastern United States, and just like with
IALLT 07 at
Tufts, we need our members' help and support to make it a success.
IALLT is a wonderful organization that relies upon the spunk and the drive and the energy to its members to continue to make great things happen in the area of language learning and technology. We hope you enjoy this issue of the
IALLT Journal and consider writing something for an upcoming volume. We encourage you to come to a regional meeting in the spring and to the
SLM in the summer. Please contact either one of us if you have a talent to share or an interest you would like to develop. We would love to hear from you!
In the meantime.... happy reading!