A photo of Reed in the 1950s, featured on the website I created. Viewable at this link.
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.
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.
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.
Detrás Del Espejo (Behind the Mirrors) by Julio O. Ramos
Best for: Beginners
Genre: Action
Location: Peru
Watch for: an exciting short with a dramatic end
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).
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.
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.
Students in Peru use laptops from the OPLC Initiative. The initiative asserted its goal to revolutionize education in the developing world through the distribution of innovative software and educational devices. When Negroponte pitched the idea at a Tunis summit, a participant emphasized the greater urgency of facilitating the obtainment of “clean water and real schools.”
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the capacity of education technology to overcome the the national and global digital divide was already under debate. In late December of 2019, blogger Audrey Watters published a commentary highlighting ed tech’s exacerbation, appropriation, and oversight of the structural inequalities — including educational, racial, social, and economic inequities — that constitute the digital divide. Watters discussed the catastrophic failures of the self-serving projects of Ed-Tech philanthropists and initiatives, such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) Initiative.
I was recently asked what the best apps for learning Spanish were, and since I haven’t learned Spanish through apps in a while, I wasn’t sure. So, I dove back into the world of language-learning apps to see if anything had changed.
Andrei Tarkovsky is one of, if not the most famous Russian film director of all time. One of his most beloved films by Russian people, Зеркало (1975) is a semi-autobiographical sequence of clips playing with memory, war, and daily life in Moscow.
The film features stunning creative techniques, such as Tarkovsky’s famous long shots. The one above is considered not only one of his best shots, but one of the best in film history. Other techniques include color schemes and themes such as the mirror, time, and poetry, which is read by different characters and narrators throughout the film.
The plot is kind of tricky to explain. A dying poet is the narrator (something that isn’t revealed until the end), but the story is far from linear or clear. The scenes switch between different time periods, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with which one you’re actually in.
I’m no film buff, but this is definitely one of Tarkovsky’s most important works. He’s a hard director to understand no matter what, so you might as well start here! The Russian is fairly hard to understand, and I did need the help of subtitles to understand what was going on.
Transitioning from English-French dictionaries to French-only dictionaries is a big step towards fluency but it can be intimidating. Luckily, online resources exist to help make French dictionaries more accessible.
For intermediate to advanced French learners seeking to take their vocabulary and understanding to the next level, The Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL) is an invaluable online resource. It is a searchable compendium of French language dictionaries, most notably Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé and the 9th edition of the official Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. For those interested in French outside l’Hexagone, CNRTL also has a searchable “Francophone” dictionary.
As a pedagogical tool, CNRTL, particularly when set to the TLFi (Le Trésor), does an excellent job of breaking definitions down into more digestible parts while also clearly differentiating between different uses of the words (metaphoric, literal, etc). Rather than struggling through an entire entry, the website quickly draws your attention to short portions of the text that are most essential.
By clicking “options d’affichage” you can toggle the color-coding settings to highlight what you’re looking for. The default settings use yellow for definitions, green for the word as it is used in a phrase, and orange to specify a certain technical domain or context in which the word may be used. Most un-colored text consists of examples of the word used in a sentence.
Beyond dictionaries, the portal also offers additional tabs such as etymology, synonyms, and antonyms, for those interested in the relations between words. The synonym tab is particularly useful when it comes to spicing up your writing (for example, when you’ve used “aussi” far too many times in one paper). It can also be helpful when it comes to making connections between the literal and metaphorical senses of words.
Here we can see, for instance, that while “esprit” has many definitions and connotations, the most often invoked synonym in English is “intelligence”. Esprit can be difficult to parse in French, since it can mean both mind and spirit, whereas in English we tend to clearly differentiate between the two. The analysis of synonyms here suggests that, outside of religious contexts, it is far more common for esprit to signify ‘mind’.
