Bridging Design and Language Interaction and Reuse in Livemocha’s Culture Section

Abstract

Gaining more and more importance in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) studies, as reflected through special issues of journals and edited volumes (Demaizière and Zourou, 2012; Guth and Helm, 2010; Lomicka and Lord, 2009; Thomas, 2009; Thomas, Reinders and Warschauer, 2012), the social web is a sociotechnical reality with fallout in the field of language learning and should not be ignored by experts, practitioners and researchers in the field. However, there is still some ambiguity regarding the terminology that best embraces this set of emerging technologies (Web 2.0, social web, social media, social software and so on. For a discussion, see the Introduction to this volume, as well as Zourou [2012]). In this chapter we share the viewpoint of Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61), who make a distinction between Web 2.0 and social media, the former being the technological and ideological platform allowing the latter — that is web applications enabling the creation and exchange of User Generated Content — to evolve. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.