Instructor: Mikhail Gronas, Russian

Overview: Students of “less commonly taught” languages (such as Russian, Arabic, Asian Languages) have fewer opportunities to practice outside the classroom than their peers in more popular languages. The main idea behind Russian Linguo-Chat is to address this problem by introducing a new venue for language practice both within Dartmouth and among those who study Russian at other universities. Russian Linguo-Chat will enable students of various levels of Russian to communicate with each other outside the classroom, to connect with their peers on the same proficiency level at other participating colleges, and, finally, to practice with native-speakers. This project proposes to use a new type of language exercise: a chat-room assignment. Periodically, students will be asked to engage in a chat-room conversation in 2 a controlled environment with one of their own (or with a parallel student at another school, or with a “guest” native speaker), and then to submit the log of the chat session to the instructor.

Instructor: Adrian Randolph, Art History

Overview: This proposal aims to furnish students participating in the 2005 Art History Foreign Study Program with the opportunity to study Roman art and architecture in a manner that heightens their visual awareness of the objects they examine, while simultaneously prompting them to reflect critically on the manner in which they present the results of their examinations. Digital video as a medium can help me achieve these pedagogic goals.

Working in groups, students will produce short videos addressing major monuments and/or themes. Their projects will require that they pursue supervised research on the subject at hand, plan out their campaign of ‘filming’ in concert with the development of a voice-over, and then edit their work into a short video for presentation to the entire class. This form of directed research matches the study of visual culture with a medium that emphasizes visual attentiveness. For in planning out their camera angles and sequences, and in contending with the vagaries of weather and light, students confront fundamental issues at stake in all interpretation of visual materials. Demanding that students spend time on-site, grappling with the physical circumstances and context of the object they are examining, they are compelled to ponder the contingent and diachronic nature of spectatorship. What is more, in grafting their own explanatory texts onto a visual stream, students are made acutely aware of the dynamic relation between word and image.

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

Overview: With the advent of technology, both the process and the products of undergraduate scholarship are changing.

Our students are now faced, while composing, with a plethora of research challenges, and so need to develop information literacy skills that enable them to identify their information needs; to locate information sources; to assess the credibility of information; and to use information for their own academic interests and purposes.

Furthermore, student scholarship is no longer limited to composing “papers.” Increasingly, faculty have been asking students to produce multi-media scholarship that incorporates images, audio, and video, or that uses advanced applications in the sciences.

Because the scholarly challenges put to our students have become increasingly demanding and complex, our students require a more ambitious and comprehensive student support service. Accordingly, the Composition Center, the Library, and Academic Computing have collaborated to create RWIT: the Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. RWIT is a centralized service that integrates writing, research, and IT tutoring to produce a complete and systematic support effort for Dartmouth students. Such a service is the first of its kind, thereby establishing Dartmouth as a leader in what is sure to be a trend in multi-media composition and integrated student support services.

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

Instructor: Steven Swayne, Music

Overview: While music is fundamentally an aural art, much of the sound and history of any particular piece is inextricably linked to the time and place of the piece’s creation. One can distinguish various pieces of classical music by recalling the features of a map and remembering the music associated with various places on a map. What Swayne hoped to explore in this Venture Fund project is how to link the sounds of music more closely to the locales of its production. He wanted his students to be able to look at a map of the world and instantly think of the sounds associated with the places they see. Call it a musicalized map.

His project began rather simply, as students created websites about musicians, technologies, histories and philosophies that interested them. In these websites, students made links to visual and audio files that help illustrate their chosen topic. In addition, students were encouraged to “locate” their topic, that is, their website would take into account that their musician lived somewhere (or several somewheres), their technology was developed somewhere, and so forth. Parallel to the development of these student websites was the development of interactive maps that direct a user to this information about music. For example, a user who clicks on Paris would find text and audiovisuals about the composers who were active in Paris at various times. Indeed, the maps are designed to be time-sensitive; borders and music information change based on the century (or decade) chosen.

Given that the history of music covers a great span of time and that the world is a big place, Swayne has limited his attention to nineteenth-century Europe. There is the desire, however, to encompass more locales and more history over time, with the concept of the musicalized map being one more gateway for students to master the history of music.