NEALL News

---

• Message From the President
  
• IALL Summer Leadership Meeting

Message From the President

Mary Beth Barth, Hamilton College

Another busy fall semester is already behind us, (not to mention a century!). and we're busy planning NEALL 2001. We're very pleased that Mike Ledgerwood at the State University of New York at Stony Brook will host the conference in his lovely Language Learning and Research Center. Our thanks to Kathy Lewis and Mark Boots-Ebenfield who co-hosted last spring's wonderful conference at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. In addition, our thanks to Mike Jones, Lisa Frumkes and Daniel Beeby , also of the Tri-College Mellon Language Project, for all of their hard work in making the confence such a successful event and to the Mellon Foundation for sponsoring our two roundtable discussions.

Special thanks to our out-going president, Mike Jones, for his invaluable contributions of time and talent to NEALL the past two years, most notably his initiative and efforts in obtaining non-profit, tax-exempt status for NEALL and for creating and maintaining our NEALL website. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Cindy Evans who as Secretary/Treasurer patiently, thoroughly, and graciously undertook the multitudinous responsibilities associated with the position.

I look forward to seeing you at NEALL 2001 and to the opportunity to share our experiences, ideas, and stategies at all levels of technology application to the teaching and learning of foreign languages.as well as our visions of the directions which technology and foreign language teaching are taking. As we have all heard said, change is often the only constant when dealing with technology. Our challenge is not only one of keeping up with a never-static learning curve, but one of asking what the most important changes are while not forgetting what continues to work well. See you in March!

IALL Summer Leadership Meeting

From May 21-23 members of the IALL Board and Council met at Rice University for the IALL Summer Leadership Meeting. IALL President, Read Gilgen did an excellent job of keep us on schedule and focused on a very extensive and well organized agenda. The General Business Meeting was followed by two hour small group working sessions where concrete proposals and implementation plans were developed and then reported to the group as a whole for feedback and discussion. The working groups returned for additional discussion in preparation for final reports, recommendations and proposals to be voted on the following morning. This format enabled us to spend more time discussing and aresolving a broad range of concrete issues. The working session topics included Electronic Publications, Member Benefits, Legal/Official Documents and New Initiatives. It was an excellent and productive meeting and many of the initiatives proposed at the SLM are in the process of being implemented. If you would like more information, the minutes of the Summer Leadership Meeting (SLM 2000) are posted at: http://iall.net/boardmin.html.

In addition to discussion of IALL and future directions, details for the IALL 2001 conference were discussed. It promises to be a great conference. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Houston and to Rice University and we couldn't ask for better hosts than Claire Bartlett and her wonderful staff. Plan to attend!