317 Chapter 11 Afterword: Future Directions for Technology-Mediated Tasks Gary Motteram and Michael Thomas [A] The future and the past Trying to predict the future is a rather dangerous pastime. This has always been true where the future of technology is concerned. In 1943 the chairman of IBM predicted that it was unlikely that the world market could sustain more than five computers. Three decades later in 1977, the CEO of a prominent digital technology company predicted that it was unlikely that anyone would ever need a computer in their own home. Being unable to predict the future, even when major transformations are only a short time away, is equally true of language education, where methodologies rarely seem to fulfil their potential or live up to their advocates’ ambitions in precisely the ways they once envisaged. TBLT is currently being advocated as the replacement for communicative language teaching. As the chapters in this book indicate, however, advocates must be careful not to overestimate its potential and adopt a flexible rather than exclusive approach that is open to other research traditions – one that in emphasising the negotiation of meaning does not exclude linguistic input, or in emphasising authentic tasks does not neglect the way ICTs are reshaping patterns of communicative activity. In considering the future of technology-mediated tasks, previous research on TBLT and CALL appears to have been rather limited. At first glance, this seems rather anomalous, as there is an obvious link between learning technologies and the use of tasks. Indeed, Levy and Stockwell (2006) identified ‘task’ as the seventh most