Instructor: Joan Campbell, German Department

Overview: Concurrently, foreign language pedagogy has stressed the importance of cultural materials and the World Wide Web has allowed immediate access to these materials. Students are no longer limited to information that their instructors provide or authors of their texts choose to include. All sorts of cultural documents are instantly available and student interest in the particular technology is high. By developing Internet exercises which take a functional approach, directly addressing pedagogical issues in foreign language instruction, faculty at Dartmouth can transcend the physical limits of the classroom and provide their students with direct exposure to the culture they are studying. This project will develop World Wide Web exercises for German I, II, and III courses at Dartmouth. While the context for these exercises is German, the models developed are easily applicable to other foreign languages taught at Dartmouth. By making pages available as part of a larger German language teaching database via the German Department home page, the project will provide an important service to German students and the German language teaching profession.

Instructor: Zsuzsanna-Lynda Bathory, Hopkins Center

Overview: This project will introduce students interested in design and production in the performing arts to computer aided drafting and design technology as it is currently being used in the field. The project provides accessible CADD workstations in the Hopkins Center and trains students in the use of the workstations. The student training will focus on CADD areas that are unique to the performing arts such as Technical Production, Scenic Design, and Lighting Design.

Instructor: Alan Gaylord, English Department

Overview: The first part of the project, the Origins of Language, will produce an HTML document that explores the current state of research in the field and includes an annotated bibliography, maps, pictures, and diagrams. The second part of the project will record and mark for Annotext two kinds of Old English and produce an HTML document on the cultural matrix of Anglo-Saxon including pictures and maps, lexical discussion, and linguistic analysis of samples of Old English. Finally, the project will record and mark for Annotext several examples of Middle English and Early Modern English. An HTML document produced in conjunction with this part will explore English dialects from Chaucer to the present in this country and in England. Annotext is a multimedia authoring tool, developed at Dartmouth College, for combining texts with annotations, graphics, audio feedback, and video interaction.

Instructor: Joy Kenseth, Art History Department

Overview: Faculty members spend a considerable amount of time explaining art history terms to students by drawing diagrams and searching for appropriate illustrations in the art historical literature. Even though glossaries can be found in textbooks, they are often less helpful, because terms are poorly defined or there are no accompanying illustrations. A far more helpful and efficient way of making this information available would be to have an on-line glossary. That is what this project will create. All entries will have a verbal explanation (including phonetic pronunciation, etymology, definition) and visual examples. The glossary will benefit students in the Art History survey courses as well as in upper lever courses.

Instructor: Jeremy Rutter, Classics Department

Overview: The Department of Classics is using its grant from the Computing Technology Venture Fund to create a series of visual image sets (maps, artifacts, scenes drawn from ancient works for art) which, by being accessible through DCIS, would enable students to undertake more challenging and rewarding coursework. Initially, these images will be employed most frequently in ancient history (Greek and Roman Studies [GRS] 20,22) and archaeology(GRS 6, 50-56) courses, but they should also be of use in courses on Greco-Roman mythology and religion (GRS 4,12) and on various aspects of Greco-Roman culture such as linguistics, economics, athletics, and warfare (GRS 11). At least four members of the departmental faculty (Rutter, Stewart, Ulrich, Whaley) are already committed to making use of these images in their courses. The initial phase of the project will make available via DCIS images of roughly 150 Greek coins for student analysis in term papers. Some twenty maps of Greece, Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, Sicily, Spain, France, Britain, and the Mediterranean basin will be made available on the PUBLIC file server. Student assignments with these maps will include illustrating the course of historical events (such as the growth of the Roman Empire, stages in the progress of a particular military campaign), illustrating the spatial distribution of a particular artifact type, or illustrating dialect differences in both grammar and orthography as part of a paper exploring the reasons for specific kinds of linguistic change.