Mike Ledgerwood's blog

When I became Chair of World Languages and Cultures and Samford I realized I should become IALLT's affiliate representative to ADFL (The Association of Departments of Foreign Languages).  This is the US group for Chairs of Depts. of (Foreign) Languages.  At that time I was one of the very few IALLT members who was also a Lang. Dept Chair (now there are a few more, including our next President!).  As you can see in a previous blog entry, ADFL has an active listserv in which dept. Read more »

Since i care so passionately about IALLT, it is hard not to think about what I've done (or not done) as an IALLT member to help our organization.  I recently had a long talk with Stéphane Charritos, a UNC (Univ. of North Carolina) graduate school friend, who is now Language Center director at Columbia Univ. Read more »

It doesn't happen every day or even every month.  However, I do hear about Language Centers that are being threatened with being closed much too often.  The collapse of the world economy has brought more of these notices to me over the last year.  I always try to find out the details of the situation.  As IALLT President, I have written many letters of support for IALLT colleagues.  IALLT has worked on a new statement to the profession about the need for Language Centers.  IALLT is the major group in the world for Language Centers after all. Read more »

I can't even begin to tell you how amazing my trip to India was, representing IALLT as the first keynote speaker at this conference.  I received a great amount of support from my University for this trip, was so happy to be received so well in India once there.  Once again, I have lots of videos from this trip as IALLT President and will post them, soon.  India is such an old civilization and has jumped into the 21st Century so recently and so quickly that India is even more complex than ever.  As one of the main presenters at the conference has said on Facebook (now a f Read more »

Now that a bug has been worked out of the blog area of the program, I feel more confident that my blog entries will be available to the membership.

I'd like to talk more about the Japan conference in this entry and then talk about AsiaCALL in India in my next blog entry. Read more »

Once again I apologize for the amateurish quality of the video clips I am including with this blog entry.  I just wanted to give all of you some feel for this trip.

I'd like to start this entry by thanking the (Japan Association) for Language and Educational Technology (LET) for inviting three of us from IALLT to attend their 50th anniversary conference in August!  Both IALLT and LET have a long history and a long shared history.  Here is the congratulatory note I wrote for LET which was published in the conference program. Read more »