About Ryoko Yoshida Keaton

Ryoko Yoshida Keaton is the President of Transpacific Business Resources, Incorporated (TBR). TBR is a full service organization of bilingual people with associates in Japan and in the United States, providing a variety of services to help global businesses as well as language/culture educators. Since 1990, TBR has offered business consultation, international marketing, translation, interpreting and instruction. To respond to the demands in computer assisted language learning (CALL), TBR started offering educational materials development in 1996. The field of computer assisted language learning has been growing rapidly, and she feels privileged to be a part of it as an instructional technologist.

Her career started out as an instructor of computer immediately after graduating from college. She taught business people how to use computer software, such as word processing programs and data management programs. She also developed teaching materials and curriculums for computer classes. During that time, she learned how to setup computer hardware as well as software.

This is why she is very fluent using and teaching computer technology. Currently she has six computers in her office, including Macintosh and various versions of Windows, two laser printers and two scanners. She uses a Japanese version of Windows for heavy typing of Japanese fonts and for quality assurance of her work. She uses another version of Windows for multimedia production, such as digitizing photos, voice and video clips. She has leaned to use various kinds of software for multimedia production, such as Goldwave Digital Audio Editor, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw, and Macromedia Dreamweaver, just to name a few. The newest addition to her office is a notebook computer with Windows 2000. She uses it to surf the Internet and to send/receive e-mail in Japanese as well as in English. She likes using it since it's very quiet and fast. Thanks to her own technological skills and knowledge, all of her Pentium computers are networked by LAN (Local Area Network).

As a computer marketing specialist in Japan, she gathered and disseminated pertinent information to sales forces, edited a newsletter to be distributed to clients, and attended various conferences to promote computers both in the business arena and in the educational arena. She has fundamental business knowledge and skills from these experiences and they are now strengthened with her MBA education.

She has been teaching Japanese for business communities in Colorado Springs for over a decade. Most of her students are engineers and administrators in high-tech corporations who need to communicate with Japanese counterparts. Prior to moving to Colorado, she taught Japanese at the University of Oregon as a Graduate Teaching Fellow while taking Japanese pedagogy courses and Japanese linguistics courses.

Current projects include web-based interactive courseware development. Last year she had the opportunities to co-present "AZLA Technology & Courseware Production Workshop" at Arizona State University and "HTML-based courseware production" at Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) with Professor Guajardo. This year she co-presented "Technology-Based Courseware and Language Maintenance: Processes and Outcomes" at the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) and at the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALL). She showed one of the best examples of collaboration between a classroom instructor and an instructional technologist: an excellent instructor with basic HTML knowledge and a technologist with pedagogical background. This combination has made it possible to develop many pedagogically sound technology-based lessons within a short time period. She carefully examines which technology is best suited for her required tasks. She firmly believes that technology without pedagogy does not improve foreign language instruction although foreign language educators are still surrounded by technology hype.

She is excited about being able to bring all of her expertise to CJLEA as a Co-President and a Public Relations officer. She knows what members' needs are because she is an instructor of Japanese language. She knows how to promote Japanese language and culture because she is a businesswoman and know what CJLEA members are trying to promote. She knows how to use technology in order to improve the quality of Japanese language instruction as well as member communication because she has been actively involved in the computer field since 1984.

To help CJLEA improve communication among members and other Japanese language/area studies professionals, she has started an electronic newsletter with Kaoru Slotsve. She has also restarted the CJLEA Listserv that had been outdated. She is sure that these tools will help CJLEA members communicate more effectively. After talking to individual members, she has discovered that CJLEA is a pool of tremendous talents and experiences. She feels honored to represent such an elite group of professionals.

She earned her MBA from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a BA from Kwansei-Gakuin University in Japan. She has also done graduate studies in Japanese pedagogy and linguistics at the University of Oregon.

Her e-mail address is ryoko.keaton@tbr-inc.com