Instructor: Allen Hockley, Art History; Mayumi Ishida, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures

Overview: The Hood Museum of Art possesses a collection of Japanese prints, which Hockley uses on a regular basis in courses he teaches every academic year. The Hood makes every effort to accommodate classes for viewing and study sessions, but access is limited in several ways. Hockley and Ishida would like to produce a website that would circumvent the limitations of the study-storage facility and thereby increase student access to the Hood Museum’s print collection. The website will be designed to meet specific pedagogical needs. In particular, its interactive and self-study components will offer students learning experiences that are impossible to replicate in the classroom.

The website will have four components, each of which will feature material and activities that will enhance users understanding of various aspects of the Japanese print tradition. The components include: (1) Print production, to acquaint the students with the process of Japanese woodblock print; (2) The Tokaido Highway, offering students a way to ‘navigate’ the highway and examine the ways print artists conceptualized its famous places and spectacular views; (3) materials to assist the study of the Kabuki version of Chushingura: The Tale of The Forty-Seven Ronin; (4) annotated versions of illustrations of the interior of a kabuki theater.

Courses in which this material will be used include: Art History 16: Special Topics in Art History or the senior seminar Art History 83; Art History 60: The Arts of Japan; Art History 3: Monuments of Asian Art; intermediate Japanese language courses (31-32-33 sequence or the 41-42-43 sequence).

Instructional Designer: Barbara Knauff

Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ukiyoe/

Instructor: Karen Gocsik, Director of Composition and Chair of English 2-3

Overview: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is often taught at Dartmouth. In English 2-3, the program which I chair, three out of six professors use the book to teach our first-year students reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. One first-year seminar (ENG 7) teaches the book as its primary text, and several courses in the Russian department list it as required reading. We have long felt that we would like to create a Web site in which we could consolidate existing materials and develop new ones that will assist our students in their writing and research. We also plan this site to be an evolving teaching tool. Students taking courses in which the Brothers Karamazov is required reading would have the opportunity to assist in developing materials for the site. We envision a Web site that would grow to be the definitive site on the novel, linking to other relevant sites, providing a bibliography, and excerpting and annotating sections of the text, both in Russian and in English (akin to what Tom Luxon has done on his Milton Web site). Finally — and perhaps most important to meeting Venture Fund requirements — is that we will attach to the site a MOO that professors and students can use to enhance their understanding of the novel.

Instructional Designer: Barbara Knauff

Instructors: Ioana Chitoran and Lindsay Whaley, Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Overview: Any student of linguistics can attest to the gulf that separates an understanding of linguistic theory and the ability to undertake one’s own analysis of language data. For this reason, the stronger linguistics programs around the world include significant hands on experience in carrying out linguistic analysis for their students.

To date, most of these opportunities have come in the form of doing problem sets in various classes. While these exercises are valuable, they are impractical to create for some sub-fields of linguistics (e.g. acoustic phonetics), and even when they can be created, they are extremely artificial. The solution to these shortcomings is for students to be doing their own linguistic fieldwork and dealing with data that they themselves collect from native speakers, in its ‘raw’ state. We want to be able to assign class projects which employ computer-based tools, and make the tools available to all of the students who take these classes, rather than just the self-selected few who choose an independent study or an Honors Thesis. Support from the Computing Technology Venture Fund permits us to increase our laboratory capabilities, which in turn enables us to take these next steps.

Instructor: Mayumi Ishida, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures

Overview: The Japanese language utilizes three writing systems. Two are phonetic alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, and a third known as Kanji. Dartmouth students are introduced to all three writing systems in the introductory language sequence (Japanese 1, 2, and 3). Students are required to learn to read and write both phonetic alphabets and 375 Kanji by the end of Japanese 3. In general, they master the phonetic alphabets quickly – usually by the sixth week of Japanese 1. Kanji, on the other hand, are more complicated and, therefore, more difficult to acquire. Introducing Kanji is the responsibility of the drill instructors. The students are required to practice them on their own. Typically, students make flash cards. This method helps them recognize Kanji, but it is not an efficient way to learn to write them. It is also important for students to learn how to pronounce Kanji.

The purpose of this project is to provide students with a better tool with which they can learn to read, write and pronounce Kanji more efficiently and effectively. “Kanji Practice” will be a web-based Kanji character practice tool designed to meet the needs of Dartmouth’s introductory language sequence. “Kanji Practice” will contain QuickTime movies which show stroke orders of Kanji. By viewing the movies several times, students will learn how many strokes the Kanji has and how it is written. This will also help them remember the kanji for reading purposes. Audio accompaniment will help students master the two pronunciations used for each Kanji.

Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~kanji/

Instructor: Karen Gocsik, Director of Composition and Chair of English 2-3

Overview: This past year, I had the opportunity to write a screenplay with a young director and Dartmouth graduate, Serguei Bassine ’94. Together we produced his short film, Because of Mama (18 minutes). The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and continues to be accepted into festivals worldwide. Working in the film medium taught me many things about writing. Especially interesting were the lessons I learned concerning editing and revision. So powerful were these lessons that it occurred to me that perhaps I could use my experiences in the film-making process to teach the writing process in new ways.

I began to envision a Web site that would serve not only my own writing classes, but that would offer useful exercises to students taking courses in screen writing and film production. In talking with members of the film department, I have discovered a common enthusiasm for the possibilities of such a site. Students can be given opportunities to edit and revise a “real” screenplay and “real” film footage. The final product would also be available to students via video streaming. Along with the film are the actual publicity materials–graphic and written text–that we produced for Sundance. All of these materials together present interesting writing challenges (both creative and critical) and are very instructive for students interested in producing and later marketing their work.

Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~shortflm/