Hewlett Summer Projects

The MMLC and the Hewlett Fund Committee collaborate to fund and support instuctional technology projects each summer. Last summer five proposals were accepted. The five resulting projects cover a wide range of teaching purposes.

Xiaoxing Liu, a Program of African and Asian Languages lecturer, and intern jarva Chow created a website for students considering taking Chinese classes . "Let's Learn Chinese!" explains what is involved in learning the Chinese language.

"Francais à dire et à chanter" (Speaking and Singing in French) takes a novel approach to French phonetics - karaoke. Marie-Simone Pavlovich, senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian, and intern Molly Harnischfeger assembled French poems and songs in a web interface that helps sutdents mimic and learn correct phonetic pronunciation while speaking and singing.

Lecturer Anna Diakow of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese worke with Noah Young to combine the passion of flamenco with historical aspects of Spanish culture in the website, "El flamenco: Su historia y significado cultural."

Professor Mary Weismantel of the Department of Anthropology wanted to take her photographs of life in the Andes, artifacts and artwork from pre-Columbian socity and other scholoarly interests and make them available to students over the web. Intern Jess Aiken and the MMLC staff digitized hundreds of images to create a web archvie, which allows Weismantel to control access to the iamges.

"DiLL: the Digital Learning Lab," is a new software technology created by Zachary Schneirov and Matthew Taylor. MMLC Director Janine Spencer headed the project with consultation by Senior Lecutrer Li-Cheng Gu of the program of African and Asian Languages. One of the challenges of teaching tonal, or inflected, languages such as Chinese is helping studetns to realize that the same sound pronounced differently has a different meaning. Allowing instructors to listen to and correct sutdents as they are speaking can be critical to successful learning. DiLL allows real-time high-quality audio communication between sutdents and teachers working on computers running Mac OSX and its open-source Rendezvous netweorking technology. Dill has demonstrated proof of concept and is pending final development towards becoming a distributable application.