2:00 - 5:00 PM
Registration and Tours of Skidmore Foreign Language Resource Center OR OptionalPre-Registered Workshop: Developing Multi Media Resources with X-Media Engine Templates.
David Herren, Middlebury College, and Cindy Evans, Skidmore College, will provide this hands on workshop. Learn the secrets of the "Mellon Grant Groups." Limited enrollment of 20 at $10.00 for first come first served.
5:00 - 6:30 PM
Opening Reception, hosted by Tandberg Educational
SATURDAY MARCH 7
8:00 - 8:45
Registration and Coffee
8:45 - 9:00 AM
NEALL and Skidmore Conference Welcoming RemarksCindy Evans, Conference Host and Robin Lawrason, Out-going NEALL President
9:00 - 9:45 AM Skidmore Mellon Foundation Projects
Cindy Evans et al, Skidmore CollegeWith the support of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, faculty at Skidmore are using the X-Media Engine templates to create multimedia lessons for language and literature courses. The Skidmore Mellon project aims to establish a bank of thematically cohe rent multimedia activities to share with other institutions. The faculty panel will present completed projects or works in progress and discuss the pedagogical issues they have faced while working in this medium. The panel will include: Professors John Anzalone (French), Mary-Beth O'Brien (German), Mao Chen (Chinese), Cindy Evans (FLRC Director), Charlene Grant (Spanish), Susan Hiner (French), Masako Inamoto Japanese), and Viviana Rangil (Spanish).
9:45 - 10:15 AM
Lafayette College and Ursinus College Mellon Foundation ProjectsRobin Clouser, Ursinus College
Mellon Foundation faculty at Lafayette and Ursinus, having completed the first year of their grant, will discuss their progress, problems, and new initiatives in developing language resources. The panel will include Robin Clouser presenting his Martin Luther "Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen;" Annette Lucas demonstrating a computer enhanced "Madame Bovary" Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger presenting a self-paced intermediate German program; and Maria Fischer displaying her program on Spanish culture. Jack Kayser from Lafayette College will assist with the technical support.
10:15 - 10:45 AM
Swarthmore College & Haverford College Foundation ProjectsMichael Jones, Swarthmore College; Kathy Lewis, Haverford College; Marc Boots Ebenfield and Janet Doner, Bryn Mawr College.
Setting the right tone for a collaborative Mellon Grant is vital to its ultimate success. A shared sense of purpose and direction must be fostered if language faculty on the three campuses are to feel ownership of the project. This presentation introduces the results of the survey which was used to assess faculty skills and needs as our grant began, and discusses the goals of a series of tri-college workshops we have conducted.
10:45 - 11:00 AM
11:00 - 11:45 AM
Evaluation MetricsNina Garrett and Lisa Frumkes, CTW Mellon Project at Connecticut College, Trinity College and Wesleyan University.
An important challenge in running projects to train language faculty to make use of new technologies in their teaching is the development of assessment instruments so as to be able to track faculty progress. This is particularly important when reports ne ed to be made to funding sources such as foundations, but in fact most of us need data on faculty involvement as a basis for arguing for ongoing budgets in our language centers to support faculty development. The CTW Mellon Project is heading into its la st semester of the original grant, but a one-year extension (more time, not more money) will probably be granted. Project coordinators need, therefore, both to report on the success of the faculty development effort to date and to establish a way to asses s the final accomplishments of the Project. To this end, coordinators have developed a set of evaluation metrics detailing levels of use of a wide variety of technologies. CTW language teachers will use these as the basis for a self-report this spring, indicating their levels of use before the Mellon grant began, their current levels of use, and what levels of use they would like to achieve by the end of the grant's extension. The audience will be given an opportunity critique them and make suggestions .
11:45 - 12:30 PM
A Multimedia and Web Project Class: Production for Students and CALL Training for FacultyJohn de Szendeffy, Boston University
This demonstration of an ESL class, Web Publishing and Other Computer Projects, will show how students are introduced to authoring multimedia programs. The students' first project is an evaluation of CALL materials, which they present in a ClarisWorks slide show to the class. The next project combines text, graphics, sound and questions using SuperMacLang, a multimedia-authoring program developed by Harvard and Dartmouth. The final project is a web page hosted for free by Tripod and available to anyone with web access, including their friends and family back home. The presentation will begin with a brief introduction to the environment for this class. It will include a discussion of the rationale for a production orientation, the syl labus and material used in teaching the class, and ways in which the material can be used by other faculty members for training and curriculum. All of the material is available on a web site and conference attendees can see it for themselves and use it as desired.
12:30 - 1:45 PM
1:45 - 2:30 PM
New Roles for Learning Lab Directors and Faculty in the Digital AgeWendy Baker Davis, Franklin & Marshall College, Robin Lawrason, Temple University and Mike Ledgerwood, SUNY, Stony Brook
As language study resources become available in new and easily accessible formats (CDS with textbooks, the Internet and web), roles are changing for learning resource staff, faculty and students. Changes in job duties have become necessary and recommende d for many of us in language learning support. Three "lab directors" discuss their changing roles, concerns and issues at various stages of their careers.
2:30 - 3:15 PM
Use of A Remote Collaboration Facility to Offer Introductory ItalianMary Beth Barth, Hamilton College and De Bao Xu, Hamilton College
Supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, De Bao Xu and Hong Gang Jin have been using Macromedia Director (6.0) to create multimedia Chinese language teaching materials since 1993. With one CD ROM, Chinese Breakthrough-Learning Chinese Language through TV and Newspapers, published in 1995, they are focusing on developing intermediate and beginning Chinese teaching materials. The intermediate Chinese is based on a textbook "Realities of Chinese Society and Culture", the beginning is based on "Chinese Primer", a textbook published by Princeton Univesity. De Bao Xu will demonstrate the multimedia, interactive features of their two on-going projects. Mary Beth Barth of Hamilton College will discuss the us of the Remot Collaboration and Videoconcerferencing Facilities (RCF) by Professor Ferlito of Colgate University to offer an Introductory Italian course to a group of seventeen Hamilton students. She will present the reasons for using the RCF (equipped with PictureTel Concorde Videocoferencing Systems) to offer a complete semester course; the preparations involved; the techno,logical and pedagogical issues addressed; student reaction, performance and evaluations; and faculty observations. Videoclips will be shown.
3:15 - 3:30 PM
3:30 - 4:15 PM
Using HyperCard for Self-Paced Instruction & Research into Language AcquisitionMark Knowles and John Sarkissian, Youngstown State University
A deep chasm often exists between students who have mastered language material and those who are still struggling with basic concepts. Instructors must deal with wide differences in the linguistic abilities of their students. This presentation will demo nstrate a HyperCard program currently being used in the teaching of Latin. As a first step, a series of tutorials were written in HyperCard Script Language to accompany the Oxford Latin. Professor John Sarkissian will report on how the programs are bein g used with classes. Student use of the programs was monitored both to determine the effectiveness of the tutorials and to garner information for future modifications. Mark Knowles, Director of a Language Learning and Resource Center, will then discuss how programs can be used to conduct research into second language acquisition. A series of experiments will be implemented that "shadow" the mouse clicks of students to predict if more successful students are focusing their attention to particular parts of the Latin sentence or to certain discursive properties of Latin. Results and feedback from this research agenda will assist with further development of the programs.
4:15 - 5:00 PM
Providing Technical Support For Faculty Using Digital Non-Roman TextRebecca Fisher, Union College
This presentation will detail three different projects using digital non-Roman scripts: creation of a Vietnamese language learning CD-ROM, production of Japanese web pages as class resources and material, and evaluation o f a Chinese software product. Language lab coordinators are often needed by Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese faculty to help create or evaluate web pages, multimedia presentations, or language learning software which uses modified Roman (Vietnamese), Kat akana, Hiragana (Japanese) and Han (Chinese). How these scripts are supported depends on the availability of L2 word processors and enhanced browsers with multilingual support, availability of the necessary fonts by end-users, and the display medium. No n-Roman languages require extensive preprocessing before they can be encoded and digitized. Word processing software for these languages is typically cumbersome since most keyboards use Roman characters that must be converted into Asian scripts. The prep rocessing and encoding procedures for these three projects will be discussed focusing on why certain solutions are more appropriate than others.
6:00 - 9:00 PM
9:00 - 10:00 AM
MULTILANG: A Software for Using Digitized Data Effectively for Language LearningDr. Vasu Renganathan, University of Pennsylvania
This presentation demonstrates how digitized movies and audio can be used effectively with a Windows based software developed for second language learning. MULTILANG is an effective tool for teachers since it can time mark the digitized data and also crea te language learning lessons integrated with other multimedia features. It is an efficient learning tool for students since they have the same flexibility to use and manipulate the digitized data and other multimedia features for making their own present ations. Sample lessons and exercises developed for the Tamil language will be demonstrated to show how this software can be used to create lessons and exercises for improving skills in the structural cultural, discourse and pragmatic aspects of language. One of the versions of this software is available for download at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/larrc/multlang.zip.
10:00 - 11:00 AM
Developing Listening Comprehension Skills Via the InternetKathryn K. McMahon, University of Pennsylvania
The Internet has been providing valuable access to authentic foreign language materials, but until recently it was not an effective source of audio materials. The time needed to download the audio was excessively long or the quality of audio was not acce ptable for use with learners. This presentation will report on efforts to incorporate listening practice via the Web into the language curriculum in French and Italian. Many radio stations are providing audio signals via RealAudio, in live broadcasts an d as archived material. To date the project has identified thirty radio stations broadcasting in French on the Internet. Since the audio signal is accessed from a home page, it is possible to build in synchronized graphic and textual help. Upon completi on of the lesson, students can submit their work directly to their instructor via e-mail, or can contribute their thoughts to a common chat room that all members of the group can read before coming to class to discuss the text. This project has also been used it as a vehicle to provide graduate students who are about to finish their Ph.D. with training in the use of technology and foreign language teaching.
11:00 - 12:00 Noon
NEALL Business MeetingMichael Jones, In-Coming NEALL President
12:00 Noon