Angèle, a Belgian pop singer, and absolute sensation in France, has been releasing boppy Francophone music since 2016. After a number of hit singles, she’s become a frequent player on France’s top charts. A recent collab even featured Dua Lipa (famous worldwide). Angèle’s music has a distinct sound and clearly enunciated songs, making them great for students learning French.
Continue reading “France’s Dua Lipa? C’est Vrai!”Artist Reccomendation: Silvio Rodríguez
60s/70s Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez was a household name while I was growing up. My parents used to tell me stories about the one time they went to his concert, and one of their friends kept requesting “Ojalá!” (one of his most popular songs) by yelling the title constantly from the audience. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I actually listened to his music and fell in love with it.
Continue reading “El espíritu revolucionario a través de la música”
Interested in improving your Japanese and watching reality tv at the same time? Terrace House has you covered. Beginning in 2012, the Terrace House series quickly gained international attention for its ‘calm and relaxed atmosphere’–uncommon on most reality tv show franchises. It’s even been described as a “reality show for people who hate reality shows”.
Continue reading “Terrace House: Your Next Binge”
Today’s blog post brings a music and television recommendation all in one.
Luis Miguel: La Serie is a Netflix drama series that follows the life of legendary Mexican singer Luis Miguel throughout his early life and rise to superstardom. This show intimately explores Luis Miguel’s private life, focusing on the challenges he went through to balance his public image with his relationships with friends and family. With beautiful camerawork, fun 80s aesthetics, and a heavy dose of LuisMi’s most popular songs, this series keeps you hooked from beginning to end. It’s no surprise that it has become a favorite in the Spanish-speaking world.
Luis Miguel is currently available on Netflix. Keep an eye out for the third season, coming out today (October 28th)!
Or, if you’re just looking for something to listen to, here are some of my favorite Luis Miguel songs:
Last year, I embarked on a semester-long project to create a website using the Omeka software. Omeka, if you are unfamiliar, is a web-publishing platform designed to showcase large archives.
I set my focus on the Reed College Archives. Although already accessible to Reed students through a searchable website, the archives themselves were very large and not sorted into accessible categories for casual viewing. My first step was securing the rights to use photographs from the Reed Archives. Since my project was internal to Reed College, the archives had no problem with me using their photographs.
Continue reading “Creating a Photo Archive Website Through Omeka”One thing I’ve learned in my year learning Russian is that the Russian-speaking world is very much massive. With speakers of the language spanning across the entirety of the Post-Soviet Union and its allies, it’s almost impossible to find Russian language books, shows, movies, and music without finding some that are decidedly not of Russian origin. So for your consideration, dear reader, I have compiled a list of some singers and bands from outside of Russia that you can add to your Russian language playlist. Keep in mind that while none of these songs are obscene by any means, you may want to find translated lyrics before playing them in public.
Continue reading “Non-Russian Russian Music for Your Consideration”Headed into the break but still want to practice your Spanish? Check out these six Spanish short films for quick and easy immersion! Each film is directed and filmed for and by native Spanish speakers, and they come from a wide range of countries. Many of the shorts are also favorites at film festivals around the world! Make sure to check out Uno by Javier Marco. For more Spanish shorts, check out Short of the Week, and sort by country to find more foreign language short films.
Best for: Beginners Genre: Action Location: Peru Watch for: an exciting short with a dramatic endContinue reading “Six Spanish Shorts to Watch Over Winter Break”
Pre-COVID, I would’ve never considered taking notes digitally—I’ve been told, time and time again, that physically taking notes helps you remember your content better. However, Zoom classes led to a change of heart. I realized, like many others, the advantage of having notes up on your computer while on a Zoom call. I’ve come to realize many other advantages to online note-taking: easier organization (and reorganization), more layout and design freedom, and—my favorite— command F capabilities.
The software one uses for note-taking is also essential. I started out using the built-in Apple Notes app but quickly realized the limited capability. The only variability in text allowed is a pre-set list of five options: title, heading, subheading, body, and monospaced. Users can also bold, italicize, or underline. Past that, there are no further options.
So, I went in search of a better alternative. My favorite: Microsoft OneNote (free for college students with the Microsoft Office Interface).
Continue reading “Microsoft OneNote: An Answer to Online Note-taking Woes”For a semester project here in the language lab, I chose to investigate narrative levels and how they interact and change in stories. To do this, I attempted to replicate a project published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics, a journal focusing on the intersection of data and human action. The project aimed to understand how narrative levels work, as well as how uniformly standard definitions of them could be identified by different scholars in different places. The project lays out three main types of narrative that deviate from the main speaker, narrator, or story:
Uninterrupted narrative: this is just a narrative by itself. It has the same speaker, the same time period, and the same point of view.
Embedded narrative: A story within the original narrative. The original narrative will always signal a reason for an embedded narrative. These typically take place in dialogue, when a character is prompted to tell a story.
Interruptive narrative: a structural separate narrative in the midst of the original narrative. It is usually signaled by some sort of stopping point in the original narrative, such as a chapter end or a section break, and often changes narrator or time period. Unlike the embedded narrative, there is nothing within the original narrative that prompts an interruptive narrative.
Continue reading “Investigating Narrative Levels in the Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”
Speculating on how COVID-19 will shape the future of higher education, Mousumi Mukherjee, an Associate Professor and Deputy Director for the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building, asks, “When we have failed to build respectful and inclusive on-campus teaching and learning environments to build societies, how can we do it online?”
The challenges educational institutions are currently forced to grapple with illuminate existing difficulties that arise from stark disparities. Consequently, Mukherjee emphasizes that solely relying on digital alternatives to resolve the current educational crisis is inadequate. However, educators and scholars speculate on whether the recent turn to ed-tech platforms represents a “watershed moment,” foreshadowing a long-term educational innovation, or whether it functions as an unsustainable stopgap to long unaddressed issues.
Regardless of what the future holds, institutions and schools struggle to find suitable and equitable solutions to manage the present crisis. Below, I provide an overview of crowdsourced resources that educational technology platforms, strategies, and resources that higher education institutions have adopted in the transition to online education and distance learning.
Continue reading “Crowdsourcing Ed-Tech Resources for Higher Education”