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Whitman College Spanish
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Clark Colahan Desktop Communication Date Awarded: April, 1999 Other Participants DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT One initial objective was to conduct multi-media e-mail exchanges between Whitman students of Spanish and Mexican students of English, using the RTA (Remote Technical Assistance) program developed at UC Davis by Dick Walters. A second objective was desktop videoconferencing exchanges between Whitman’s beginning Spanish students, and students of English in Spain, using desktop to desktop videoconferencing software. The pedagogical conviction underlying the project is that learning is enhanced by real communication, preferably with a native speaker, in the target language. 2. Process: With NWLC grant money for travel expenses, I met with English faculty at the University of the Yucatan, in Merida, Mexico in the summer of 1999 and got their agreement to organize a cooperative venture between their classes and my beginning Spanish class during the fall semester of 1999. Gary Esarey enlisted the support of Dick Walters of UC Davis for use of his RTA software for communication. Building on a personal contact with Reyes Carreras, the principal of the Language School of Mieres, I arranged for desktop videoconferencing exchanges between Whitman’s beginning Spanish students, and students of English in Spain. For this connection, Microsoft’s NetMeeting, and later CuseeMe Pro 4.0 software was used. 3. Outcomes: The connection was used during the Spanish 105 class of Fall, 1999. Students communicated with one another as a class on several occasions as part of the regular curriculum. 4. Critical Evaluation: There were problems with both the Mexican and the Spanish collaboration efforts. The problems were technical, logistical and cross-cultural. The principal technical difficulty was the unreliability and poor quality of the audio and video signal. Organizing lessons on three countries, between different educational systems, also produced communication problems. The best results were between more advanced American students of Spanish and their English-learning counterparts. More advanced speakers were better able to deal with imperfect messages. |
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