View Content #18790

This week's CASLS Spotlight is on InterCom itself! We started InterCom in 2003, a year before Facebook was founded. Participation in specialized listservs for language teachers was growing, and so was the number of useful resources on the Internet, but how could a person sort through all of the good and bad, relevant and irrelevant, to find information that he or she could use? How, especially, could a busy teacher find the time to keep up on professional opportunities, follow discussions of methods, find ideas for the classroom, and stay up-to-date in the field of language teaching and learning? We created InterCom to address this need by assigning a real human being the task of following listservs and monitoring websites to find gems worth passing along to language professionals. Thanks to customizable subscription preferences, our subscribers receive only content of interest to them: based on language, level taught, area of interest, and even state of residence.

Over the last thirteen years, online exchange of useful information has dramatically increased, and InterCom has made modest changes to keep pace with the changes in how people communicate with each other online. In addition to listservs, we follow quite a few blogs and many websites that are often good sources of information. We monitor state, regional, and national language organizations. We are constantly in awe of the collective wisdom of language professionals and are glad to help disseminate helpful information. We have also built up quite a large collection of articles, all tagged for convenient browsing. You can search our over 18,000 archived articles at http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/content/searchContent.

This year we moved beyond dissemination of existing resources to creating original content to send to our subscribers. Each month we choose a theme that we feel is important in the field of language teaching and learning. Each week we share an original feature article exploring the month's topic in more depth, an activity that exemplifies the theme, and a spotlight on an activity that CASLS is involved in.

We hope that you continue to enjoy your InterCom subscription. If you ever find yourself forwarding InterCom articles to colleagues, we hope that you'll encourage them to subscribe as well. Ours is a free service (although sponsoring organizations can have specific content that only their members receive), and anyone can learn more and subscribe at http://caslsintercom.uoregon.edu/site/index.