249 Online instructional environments for language teaching: Designing the conversation Carla Meskill State University of New York at Albany cmeskill@albany.edu As more and more language education activity moves to online venues, language educators are left with a great deal to consider in terms of their learners and their practices. Central to these considerations are two central questions that I address here. First is the critical ques- tion of our perceptions of online venues for language education. Do we see these venues as automated, that is pre-programmed and devoid of human contact or do we see these as what I call humanted, that is dominated by rich social interaction using the language and steered by the underlying culture that is the target of learning? Te second critical question addresses our expanding online lives as users of social media and the relevance of these practices to language education; partic- ularly implications for contemporary learners and online social connectivity. I take up these two central questions within the broader dis- cussion of what constitutes efective online language education and how we as educators might think about the design of efective online conversations for our students. Automated or humanated? Te question of whether efective online instructional practices are automated or whether they are orchestrated by profes- sional educators is a vital one, particu- larly in the feld of language education. Corporate and lay concepts of online learn- ing tend to see online language education as something that can be efciently and widely ‘delivered’ as a product; that is, pre- programmed instruction that provides software-driven lecture and practice activi- ties while tracking and grading learners’ the jaltcalljournal ISSN 1832-4215 Vol. 7, No.3 Pages 249–254 ©2011 JALT CALL SIG Keynote Paper