technology supported learning

I found the above advertising postcard in a book I borrowed from the library (as all neo-nomad qui se respecte must do, plug into libraries and share resources)… I was reading a 1972 edition of Chambre d’Hôtel by Colette, so I am guessing the advertising for the products of linguaphone (a hundred year-old company) dates from the seventies. Anyway, this image triggered quite a lot of thoughts… First, that learning another language becomes more important with the meeting of other cultures, i.e. there would not be any language courses if there weren’t any travel. Second, I always wondered how Marco Polo communicated with Gengis. As a architect I never had any problem, if I could not speak I could draw… (Now… if you cannot draw, you can always use Point It, the Travellers’ Language Kit) which leads us to the beginnings of writings and cuneiform scripts in Sumer… pictograms were they, illustrating an object/place/activity, different from ideograms, representing ideas. Third, the thought of a universal language… Or four, at least an alphabet like the Morse code and the NATO alphabet, the international radiotelephony alphabet that was developed to ensure the intelligibility of voice signals over radio even to a non-English native speaker… The link between language, technology and travel is here obvious. Which brings us exactly to what started my tirade, the vinyl as a technology that supports teaching/learning… as maybe an ancestor to the CD or CD-Rom or the podcast… Wikipedia offers a history of virtual learning environment, history that dates before the 1940’s. Here is an article on Computer Enhanced Language Learning; and a book chapter on technology to support learning…