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Sylvia Maciaszczyk
on the same screen or give a dictation to students (ibid.: 31). PLATO did allow for, albeit limited, communication between learners and the tutor (and among learners) and it included tracking facilities allowing tutors to see their students’ progress (Delcloque 2000: 85). Being a mainframe, PLATO could deliver learning to many students sitting at the same time in the laboratory. From a vast array of technologies which have been developed since the mainframe, a few are indeed revolutionary on a large scale. The microcomputer, invented in 1973 and known later as the Personal Computer (PC), brought about the possibility for students to work with technologies from home (Levy 1997: 22). The CD-ROM allowed for skills integration, as it could deliver sound, text and graphics at the same time. The Internet and the World Wide Web eventually allowed learners to collaborate in online networks. First the e-mail and then the e-learning platform made this collaboration relatively easy. Not surprisingly, research into networkbased language teaching, i.e. NBLT (Warschauer 1997) which was initiated in the 1990s, in 2009 is still very valid and growing. More recently, mobile phones and Virtual Worlds (such as Second Life) have also become the focus in CALL. Since their beginning, Internet technologies have been constantly changing. In 2003, Godwin-Jones made a distinction between what he called the First Generation Web tools (e-mail or discussion forums) and the Second Generation Web tools (blogs or Wikis). A similar, and betterknown, distinction is that of Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 tools, which was first used by Tim O’Reilly in 2004. Although there is no single definition, there is general understanding that Web 2.0 signifies a very democratic use of the Web, in which an average user contributes to Web resources and functions in Web-based communities or social networking sites. In other words, Web 2.0 is about ‘collaboration, sharing and interaction’ (Walker et al. 2007). Wikipedia is a typical example of such collaborative endeavour on the Web.
2. Historical accounts of pedagogical trends in CALL Warschauer (1996, 2000), Warschauer and Healey (1998), and Kern and Warschauer (2000) came up with one of the most frequently quoted attempts at analysing pedagogical trends and approaches within Computer Assisted