Online Notes, 12/88 (129)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Mon, 20 Feb 89 18:48:24 EST
Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 628. Monday, 20 Feb 1989.
Date: Friday, 17 February 1989 1122-EST
From: JACKA@PENNDRLS
Subject:
ONLINE NOTES
DECEMBER, 1988
EDUCATIONAL WORKSHOPS IN COMPUTING
At the University of Pennsylvania there exist various
organizations that are responsible for educating the university
community in the use of computers. Most of the educational
programs are run by the Computer Resource Center (CRC) which
is supported by the central administration. Individual schools
and departments however do provide special programs for their
students and faculty. In the undergraduate school my office
continues to offer semester-long courses in various aspects of
computing. In addition, we will be providing special workshops to
our faculty this semester. Though we had done this in the past it
is only recently that we have returned to this form of educational
outreach because there appears to be a great need here to provide
help on some more sophisticated uses of computing. Below I have
listed planned workshops this semester. Some 20 percent of the
faculty in humanities will be attending one or more workshops.
BITNET and Electronic Mail
Concordance Packages
Desktop Publishing
Hypercard
Optical Scanning
Language Acquisition Projects
CCAT and its services
MS WINDOWS
Video Disk technology in instruction
The Next Computer
CD-ROM technology
VIDEO DISK SUB PROJECTS AT PENN
Work continues on expanding the use of video disk across the
humanities at Penn. Currently the following sub-projects have
been proposed and are in various stages of development:
Professor Language Sub-Project
Roger Allen Arabic Video-disk for Arabic in
conjunction with "Let's Learn Arabic."
This video disc is being pressed
by Technidisc, Inc.
Peter Conn English American Literature of 1930's
as depicted in film. This project
will begin in May and
concentrate on two movies,
Grapes of Wrath and The Wizard of Oz.
Bill Labov Black Using popular film in a course
English on Black English. Several movies
have been purchased including Street
Fighter, 48Hrs and Eddie Murphy Raw.
One question on the midterm will be
related to information tied to a
bar scene in 48Hrs.
Katie MacMahon French French films for teaching culture
and language to advanced students.
Subtitles and other information is
being prepared for the movie The
Last Metro.
Horst Daemmerich German German films for teaching culture
and language to advanced students.
Work continues on improving presentation
in Die Blechtrommel and Das Boot.
Readers who are familiar with on-going language projects using
Video disks-- or for that matter VCRs--, I hope, can detect a
different tactic for use of this technology than what is
normally done. If I were to characterize in my normal brash
manner, it would be that most designers inside and outside of
the Industrial-Defense Establishment believe languages can be
taught on video disk much in the same way one teaches fighter
pilots how to fly F-16's. Well, you can certainly teach some
language survival skills probably that way....Isn't language
much more than that?
The Online Notes is probably not the appropriate place to have
a full discussion of methods for instruction. I merely want to
point out that our use of video disk differs significantly from
that of West Point, the Naval Academy and others who are using
this functional technology for a different audience with a
distinctly different methodology.
WISC WARE
Many readers may or may not know of Wisc Ware, a depository
of academic software supported by IBM Corporation. Wisc Ware
is the distribution arm for software that was written with
support from IBM's Advanced Educational Projects (AEP).
Recently Wisc Ware has had a major increase in the number of
academic packages available (190 new packages) thanks to an IBM
Transfer grant to 19 institutions. My office sent two such
packages, one for introductory linguistics and one for
intermediate Spanish.
Here is how you can contact Wisc Ware:
Outside of Wisconsin: (800) 543-3201
In Wisconsin: (608) 262-8167
BITNET: WISCWARE @ WISCMACC
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