PRESIDENT’S LETTER – FEBRUARY 26, 2018

IALLT presidents letter #2

Dear fellow IALLTers!

The board has been busy on a number of initiatives and I wanted to take a moment and send you some updates on all things IALLT. This email is also a call for volunteers for some new 2018 initiatives that I feel strongly about.

The dates for the IALLT Summit at the University of Oregon have been set: August 3-4, 2018. More information can be found here: https://iallt.org/iallt-2019/2018-summit/

The meeting is open to all members, and is a great opportunity to network with fellow IALLTers and develop leadership in our field. When I was new to the organization, I attended the meeting (called Summer Leadership Meeting, or SLM, back then) as a relatively new IALLT member and it was at that meeting  that I really became a part of IALLT. So whether you are new to the organization and/or the profession, or you have been with IALLT for a while, please consider joining us in Oregon, either physically or virtually.

During the fall semester the board has finished appointing the new council members, and I am excited to work with all of them. We have a good mix of new IALLT members and seasoned veterans. Our volunteers and members are the core of our organization, which is in a great position to move forward. The next call for new council appointments will go out 3 months before the 2019 conference at the University of Oregon.

Some other things that the board is working on include updating our Policy and Procedures Manual (PPM), safeguarding important information and passwords through a password manager, rethinking our publicity process, and getting the journal indexed. Please remember that the (approved) board meeting minutes are publicly available on our web site ( https://iallt.org/about/meeting-minutes/ ). If anything is unclear, please don’t hesitate to seek clarifications from me.

I wanted to share some strategic initiatives for 2018 that I think will move IALLT forward and strengthen our organization. If you are interested in any of these, please send me an email to president@iallt.org. I will add you to the respective lists and present them to the board, which will then make a decision on who to appoint.

1. Graduate student initiative: This continues efforts of the previous board to reach out more to graduate students, to support them, to include them, and to be more useful to them. I am hoping we could form an exploratory committee which would work with the graduate student representatives to come up with a roadmap and vision for continuing our work with and for graduate students.
2. Publicity and advocacy initiative: I believe publicity and advocacy are areas that we should strengthen even more in the coming years. Much has been done already, but I think we could strengthen this even more. Our programs director, Betsy Lavolette, is working with a publicity committee on a roadmap.
3. Professional responsibilities statement initiative: IALLT published the “ IALLT Statement of Professional Responsibilities” in 2002, which “outlines the key roles and responsibilities of language technology professionals.  It is intended as a guide for staff and administration attempting to define responsibilities for the purposes of contract, salary, or other career-related negotiations.” ( https://iallt.org/about/  ) The document has been important for many of you, and it continues to influence how our positions are written, hiring criteria, and how high our salaries are. This statement needs to be updated, and I already have a few volunteers for this project. But I hope that we can have a few more to rewrite the document. The document could also then be added to the IALLT Language Center Evaluation Toolkit.
4. Membership benefits initiative: What motivates people to join IALLT? What makes people renew their memberships? These are important questions for any organization, and they have come up in pretty much every IALLT board or council meeting I attended. What are the benefits of being a member? What do we make openly available (e.g. currently the listserv, the journal, the live webinars, …), for what do we require membership (e.g. currently webinar recordings, electronic versions of older publications, the facebook group, …)? I would like a task force, which would work with the membership coordinator, to come up with recommendations regarding these issues and present them to the board. I would also like the publicity committee to present these benefits for members and non-members in an easily accessible format.
5. Wikipedia initiative: IALLT is not in Wikipedia. The Language Center wikipedia page is not about our type of language centers, but about the region in the brain (undoubtedly also quite useful…). The Language Lab page needs quite a lot of work. I’d like IALLT to take charge of these pages and not miss out on sharing our combined knowledge about these areas, and to also add this to our publicity efforts.

Several board members have already indicated their interest in working on some of these. But I think it’s crucial to include our members in these efforts – new ones and seasoned veterans alike. I am fully aware that this is all rather ambitious. Not all these initiatives might happen right away, although I sincerely hope they do. By issuing this call for volunteers, I hope that we will gauge the level of interest within the organization.

To reiterate, if you are interested in any of these, please email me at president@iallt.org . I will add you to the respective lists and present them to the board, which will then make a decision on whom to appoint.

I wish you a great spring semester! And I look forward to hearing from you.

Best

Felix

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Felix Kronenberg

President, International Association for Language Learning Technology