Current Officers
Paul Aoki and Bridget Yaden, Co-Regional Leaders
Newsletter Editor
Bridget Yaden
Number of newsletters published last year: 1
Meetings held in the past year:
|
|
Meeting 1 |
Meeting 2 |
|
Location |
WAFLT conference in Spokane Washington. |
University of Washington (Seattle) |
|
Theme |
Roundtable discussion on technology followed by general business meeting. |
Discussion of current technology issues and concerns, and a general business meeting dealing mainly with the future of NWALL. |
|
Date(s) |
October 9, 1999 |
April 8, 2000 |
|
Attendance |
8 |
3 |
Describe the health of your organization. Include any initiatives undertaken, issues of concern, or other things you think the Board should be aware of.
Our membership is very low - only 10 paid members last year. We're trying to build our membership in several ways. We've been hosting roundtable discussions on technology at local language conferences. We tried to host a technology workshop in January but only had 1 person sign up (aside from the 2 presenters). One of our concerns is that the Northwest encompasses a large area, and it is difficult for members to travel far for a "local" meeting. Also, with so many organizations that our (prospective) members can be involved in, such as local language organizations (WAFLT, COFLT, etc.) and specific language organizations (ACTFL, AATG, etc.) in conjunction with dwindling travel budgets and time, makes it hard to build membership.
Things the region wishes IALL would address.
Any suggestions on how to piggy-back off of local/regional conferences and get more attendance. It seems that there is the possibility of getting more NWALL/IALL members from the K-14 realm because many teachers are using computers and some even installing small LANs. They need to know both lab/infrastructure issues as well as learning how to install, train, and use the software. Several states, mostly notably Washington and Oregon, have voted significant tax limitations which has caused the public institutions in the Northwest to have their travel budgets greatly reduced in the last decade and it is difficult for people to travel to NWALL events especially if we are competing with other conferences such as MLA, ACTFL, CALICO and other computer conferences.
Issue of maintaining legacy technologies. Some universities are pushing to go digital. Can IALL help provide information, e.g., in the form of a (sub-)Lab Design/Conversion Manual, to help those institutions that are trying to migrate from analog to digital with very limited resources. On the one hand, many deans are questioning whether they should invest money to install a new/replacement analog lab. On the other hand, there is a mine field in converting to a computer lab, i.e. turf issues with central computing and the libraries. Assistance in the form of dealing with deans, central computing czars, etc. would be helpful for language learning centers/labs that need to maintain autonomy or at least not be re-purposed as a general computing facility. With limited resources, it is difficult to continue to maintain dying analog equipment and have existing staff take on new technologies and responsibilities.