Peaceful Anarchists

I am so jazzed! Amy et al.'s Medieval and Early Modern Studies minor, the new certificate in French, German, Russian (information forthcoming), and now a new colleague in French this fall (more information forthcoming). WOW!!!!

I also need to share the blog of a fourth semester student with you. I'm not sure of her background in German, and her German is not perfect, but it is understandable. What is really great is the way she combines pictures, links to video, print, and the visual, together with critical contemporary issues to her own blog, demonstrating passion, the relationship of word, thought, content, and issue. She links to some wonderful videos for excellent listening. This is the kind of blog I hope to push more students to do. I don't know what you think of it, but I just had to share it anyway. She calls herself "die ruhige Anarchistin," or "the peaceful anarchist!" I love it! I'm going to share some of the better blogs with all students on Wed. (they have access to each other's blogs anyway), to show them what can be done. Now, she is more tech savvy than most, so that is also a future goal -- help the students become more tech savvy so that they can do more connecting of word, issue, thought, visual, sound, video, etc., etc. I especially enjoyed her entry on guerilla gardening, with all its links to articles, videos, and pictures. The ironic, satirical post on vegans is also quite interesting.

This is the kind of connected, webbed world about which my colleague Pete Smith speaks. We live in a world of webbed connections, a sensory world that contains words and print, too! What better way than this to virtually transport our students into the language and culture they are studying! With the hope that they carry this activity and understanding forward when they leave us and when they leave German for a work environment that employs all sorts of people. Arlington, Texas, for example, has an independent school district that teaches students from 140 languages!!!

I hope you enjoy the blog.

May we all be peaceful anarchists!


Lana

Pushing my thinking on Valentine's Day

What I want to know is why I keep changing, why I always have new preps, or if not new ones, I constantly do more than tweak those I've taught before. Why don't I just hone what I've done in the past, as some do? Well, I guess I know the answer. I'm always learning something, always rethinking the situation, always excited about new possibilities, always evolving or trying to evolve. Just like with this idea of connectivism on the web that my colleague Pete Smith has been talking about -- how to have students make it a practice in the classes to do this connectiivism thing – take a topic, a sentence, a text, and mine it for words and phrases that one can plug into an English or German search engine, a web map with photos and youtube links, an image search engine, a youtube search engine, with the goal of getting them so accustomed to it that they might -- they just might -- continue when they leave us! At least give them some tools to use in the future. If we do that in some of the first and second year courses, then have them do a translation certificate, well, they would certainly have some good tools to use in the future -- plus an understanding of the interesting complexity of languaculture. Indeed, my next goal is to spend a week or two having students research a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE and see if they can apply principles they've been learning in German to accessing ideas in a completely new language.

I'm also thinking that I want to expand on this culture sentence thing -- maybe refine it, make students more active in pursuing the underlying history, images, words connected to a sentence or thought. I'm seriously considering a wiki for fall -- maybe all classes I teach contributing to it. We'll see.

Anyway, have a great Valentine's Day!