From the Co-Editor

With this second fully online issue of the IALLT Journal, it is a fitting time to remark on both the natural progression of the form of a journal dedicated to language learning technologies and on the challenges that significant change can present. Certainly, the inevitable direction of our communication and social and academic interactions are shaped by the tools available to us. Recent discussion among academics and technology professionals has begun considering cloud technologies that make available to users a very rich suite of tools for communicating, sharing, creating, and interacting without the user necessarily having to invest in hardware or even software purchase. The potential for using these tools to connect with others, to use and practice a foreign language, and to interact with authentic and current cultural information is easier than ever. And yet, teaching and research practices and administrative guidelines sometimes seem slow to adapt to the new social environment.

Each of the articles published in this issue — the feature article, the Lab Notes, and the first of a regular Column reviewing technologies — all address either directly or allude to the tension that instructors, technologists, and administrators encounter as they consider the implications of adopting new tools. While these tools facilitate access to information and active participation in dialogues inside and outside of the university gates, the openness they enable poses significant challenges for information technology specialists and administrators who are accountable for the security issues related to the use of technology in their institution.

As Barbara Sawhill discusses in her article, our continued conversation around these issues is urgently needed in order to help students, instructors, administrators, and technologists understand how we can take fullest advantage of new tools that hold great potential. We welcome David Kleinberg as a regular columnist to the journal who will be reviewing and examining the practical implementation of new technologies in the learning environment. In her Lab Notes article, Kay Yang provides a useful overview of how the adoption of technology occurred at one institution and what factors were particularly relevant in that transition.

A central process in the transition of the IALLT Journal from a print format to a fully online format is the programming work done by Martin Holmes at the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria. Martin is developing a customized xml encoding scheme specifically for the IALLT Journal that is based on the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines (TEI P5). The TEI Guidelines specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts. This encoding will allow the content of the journal to be displayed on the screen, rendered into .pdf, .html or .txt formats, and searched with ease. The journal benefits from the open-source TEI community through its use of the guidelines. The journal also contributes to the community by freely sharing the encoding developed for it. Nonetheless, the change in the paradigm of creating an academic journal, as with the change in the paradigm of the closed classroom, does not occur in one fell swoop. These changes and transformations are part of the iterative and incremental process of change that is occurring in many different areas of the academy.

As always, the editors of the IALLT Journal welcome and encourage participation in the conversation. We are eager to hear from university, community college, and K-12 instructors and instructional technology professionals about how you are using technology and how its use shapes your professional practice and experience.