Practical Utopias: Language Learning in the Digital Future

Biographical Notes
Dr. Sue E. K. Otto is Director of the Language Media Center, Adjunct Associate Professor of Spanish, and Director of the Project for International Communication Studies (PICS) at the University of Iowa. She is Past Chair of the Executive Board of CALICO (The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) and Past President and Past Executive Director of the International Association for Learning Laboratories. Recently she has devoted her development efforts to creation of multimedia software. She teaches courses on foreign language instructional technology and has published articles and given papers and workshops on the use of media for language instruction.

Dr. James P. Pusack is Associate Professor of German at the University of Iowa, where he supervises language programs; teaches courses in foreign language pedagogy, the German media, and German culture; and conducts research in the areas of second language acquisition and foreign language multimedia. Pusack is currently the Chair of the Executive Board of CALICO and is Past Director of Iowa's Center for International and Comparative Studies (CICS) and for many years a Director of PICS. He is a also former chair of the Department of German. He has contributed numerous workshops, papers, workshops, and articles in the field of foreign language instructional technology.

Otto and Pusack have collaborated in a series of publications and major fund grant projects in the area of instructional technology, including: the LLAMA Consortium, a foreign language multimedia materials development project funded by IBM; "Building Cultural Fluency: A Multimedia Architecture," a federally-funded grant project with the primary objective of full-scale integration of multimedia in a culture-based curriculum for intermediate language study in French and German; and, most recently, the CIC Foreign Language Multimedia Consortium, which is devoted to web-based foreign language instruction based on exchange of materials across CIC institutions. They are also co-authors of Dasher, a multimedia authoring system for foreign language instruction. Their current project is devoted to the development of Java-based authoring applets for language teaching.

Abstract
Educational institutions are making enormous investments in instructional technology. Although new technological tools and resources promise to revolutionize what and how we teach foreign languages and cultures, both in traditional residential settings and in new virtual environments, difficult issues face us as we strive to exploit technology. In an era when everything is digital, how can we guarantee that our utopian expectations serve the realities of language learners and language teachers? The past fifty years of technological change clearly demonstrate that success in this venture will depend not so much on hardware as on the emerging dialog between technology and theory. What does technology offer acquisition and what can SLA theory tell technology?