This presentation will address two issues in the use of media in CALL: the need for sound pedagogy in the design of CALL programs, both on-line and stand-alone; and the importance of developing learners' learning strategies, particularly on the metalinguistic and metacognitive side, to assist them in maximising their use of self-access or on-line CALL programs.
From a pedagogical perspective in the field of CALL, teacher-authors are faced with great heterogeneity among their learners, and in the teaching contexts in which they will find themselves at any one point in time, and during their careers. Within these contexts of variable platforms, environments and learners, teachers must implement the best possible programs, while operating under curriculum, institutional, financial, time, technical, and skill constraints. Teachers using CALL or planning to use some form of on-line provision of language learning materials, therefore need to be able to find, evaluate, and use whatever authoring tools and programs are available. In order to be able to do this, however, they require an understanding of effective language pedagogy in addition to skills in learning to use the programs, and integrating these into their teaching. To illustrate some of the issues here, I will present the results from a semester-long study of two different cohorts of teachers from various L1 backgrounds who teach several different foreign languages, including EFL, as they learn technical skills and techniques for using technology in their teaching.

As we move towards offering an increasing range and variety of on-line and self-access language learning materials, it is important to remember and consider the needs of learners in actually utilising these materials. In particular, learners' awareness of their own learning styles and strategies and how appropriately they can apply them are critical to their success in using CALL materials for language learning. Examples from 2 cohorts of introductory second language learners using both web-based and lab-based will be presented to illustrate the importance of analysing learners' needs and providing them with increased awareness of how most appropriately to use the styles and strategies they have available to them.

Although CALL is a discipline still in search of academic identity, its potential in assimilating, linking to, and working with other academic fields is clearly evident. This attribute must not be underestimated in an age where the walls between disciplines fall and scholars call for the need to fight the "narcissism of minor differences", as Marjorie Garber, Professor of English at Harvard, once put it. This presentation argues that the nature of CALL reflection allows us to view it as a platform or instrument for building bridges and creating links between academic disciplines, research areas, and the different stakeholders in learning and teaching: learners and teachers, academics and technicians. Much has recently been said about computer technology as a factor creating divides and underscoring differences between the genders, those who can see and those who cannot, between the rich and the poor. In contrast, in the present paper, a series of community building projects will be analysed to demonstrate how CALL initiatives can function as mechanisms cementing human enterprise in an academic setting and as catalysts for interdisciplinary teaching and research. Projects utilising Virtual Reality, for example, can help implement a synthesis between the linguistic, literature, and cultural studies components of a language course. They can also function as an arena of constructionist learning for a community of foreign language, ESL, CALL, and computer science students and their teachers.